
U.S. reverses Obama-era move to phase out private prisons - finid
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-prisons-idUSKBN1622NN
======
ghouse
When private companies profit from the state imprisoning its citizens, those
companies will lobby (successfully) for more business in the form of mandatory
sentencing and other crime fear-mongering.

Just like Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, we should
do the same for the prison industrial complex.

~~~
adventured
Care then to explain how almost all of the _extreme_ prison population boom
occurred during a time in which private prisons had a very small market share?

1980 to 2000 - which spans over 3/4 of the boom in incarceration - private
prisons were a single digit percentage share of the market. US incarceration
from 1980 went from about 550,000 to 2.1 million by the end of Clinton's
second term. Almost all of that went to government prisons and jails.

Turns out there is vast profit in government prisons. It goes into the pockets
of _millions_ of government employees and private contractors that benefit
from the huge government prison complex. Those employees and their reps then
spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more government prisons for their
own benefit, along with lobbying against laws that would reduce incarceration.

Politicians love to build government prisons to employ people in their
districts, to lure tax dollars, it has been an easy vote generator for decades
for them.

Further, the extreme expansion of the government prison complex the last three
decades, has increased the total power and size of government, another thing
politicians go wild for.

~~~
jacquesm
Supply and demand. It's a two sided market. Without the demand what's the
point in creating a supply?

But now that the demand has created the supply the supply becomes self-
protecting and self-perpetrating.

------
kafkaesq
Guess which industry stands to profit quite obscenely from this move. And
which not-so-coincidentally donated very handsomely to his campaign:

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/priva...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/private-
prisons-back-trump-and-could-see-big-payoffs-new-policies/98300394/)

------
zo7
Today the White House also indicated that they may enforce federal laws
against recreational marijuana more heavily soon as well [1]. They _want_ to
incarcerate _more_ people, and this is preparing for it.

[1]: [http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/02/23/516945294/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/02/23/516945294/white-house-spokesman-predicts-more-federal-action-
against-marijuana)

------
jacquesm
It looks suspiciously as if they're trying real hard to make sure Obama will
not be remembered for anything positive. If they could bring Bin Laden back
from the dead they just might.

~~~
awqrre
it doesn't make it any less positive because it has been reversed...

~~~
Volundr
But it does make it less remembered.

------
Benjamin_Dobell
> _In a memo made public on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the
> Obama policy impaired the government 's ability to meet the future needs of
> the federal prison system._

> _The Obama administration said in August 2016 it planned a gradual phase-out
> of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a
> level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population._

Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing
incarceration growth.

~~~
adventured
> Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing
> incarceration growth.

You mean Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush were foreseeing
incarceration growth when their policies helped to put millions into
_government_ prisons over decades?

Was Bill Clinton plotting dictatorship when the active US incarceration number
went from 1.3 million to 2+ million in just his eight years?

Do me a favor and post the total number of people that have gone into
government prisons vs private prisons, since the incarceration boom began 36
years ago.

Here's a hint: nearly the entire incarceration boom was centered around
government prisons until the last ten years, a time in which both the US
prison and US jail population has declined.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
What point are you trying to make?

Are you suggesting that if there were less Government run prisons and more
private prisons, there'd be less people in Government run prisons? Cause,
ah... yeah.

~~~
adventured
I'm pointing out the extraordinary hypocrisy that is almost universal in
threads when it comes to people that are afraid of and upset about private
prisons - meanwhile over 90% of all those millions of people that were put
into prison from 1980 forward, the boom years, went into government prisons -
yet where's the fear?

Just look at how my facts based challenge to the private prison hysteria is
being downvoted, because nobody wants to discuss this: the government prison
complex was and is drastically worse than anything the private prison industry
has done, yet where's the protest? Where's the anger and fear about the
government prison complex? (which is still radically larger than the private
prison industry)

Know who benefited the most from the war on drugs incarceration boom? Millions
of government employees, who derived hundreds of billions of dollars in total
pay over decades, from the vast expansion of arrests and government
incarceration, from 1980 to ~2000.

~~~
Benjamin_Dobell
The issue is your argument doesn't make any sense, that's why you're being
down-voted.

You're making a huge assumption that people's dislike (or "fear" as you've
called it) of private prisons is somehow related to the distribution of
prisoners between Government and private prisons. What gives you that
impression?

~~~
adventured
There is no argument. The government prison complex is and has been radically
worse than the private prison industry, and that fact is always aggressively
ignored here.

I'm not making any assumptions, I've read dozens of threads on HN about this
for example, spanning years. The fear is almost universally directed at
private prisons, while the posters strictly ignore that almost all of the
people went into government prisons during the incarceration boom.

Where's the fear and hysteria for the government prison complex that has
always dwarfed the private prison industry? And prior to the last ten years,
dwarfed was extremely understating the situation.

~~~
0134340
I think a lot of people are arguing for accountability. Society tends to
source important roles to government because it is 'for and by the people',
there's direct relation and accountability there. To me, private prisons are
like Linux depending on 3rd party modules for something as important and
ubiquitous as ext3 support.

I'm all for cutting the needless cruft off of government and keeping the
kernel from getting bloated, so to speak, but prisons and other major roles of
society where accountability and direct communication with the people is of
utmost importance, this is something that should reside within government.
Like the Linux kernel, I think all important functions should stay within
direct reach and have direct interoperability.

At the cost of resorting to slippery slope and being light-hearted here,
what's next, a McDonald's-sponsored drive-thru DMV? On second thought, DMV
could learn a few things from McDonald's there but I'd be very leery of
McDonald's handling my important tasks and the direct power of the people
would get watered down with every government function relegated to
corporations.

------
tn13
Prison and putting people in jail for minor things has become huge industry.
It might be time to add some competition and let prisoners chose prisons they
want to go to and the prisons must be incentivized if the prisoner finds
gainful employment and does not turn repeat offender after release.

I can totally see private prisons doing a better job of identifying normal
people incarcerated incorrectly and offer them a better life than getting
raped in a gruesome prison.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I've been in both federal and private prisons, and in the federal ones, there
is always an officer in the unit with the inmates, and in the private ones,
the inmates are alone most of the time.

And in all of the prisons I was in during my length time of incarceration, no
one ever was raped. No one wants to become a sex offender while in prison
nowadays. DNA evidence... The feds collect _everyone's_ DNA when they go to
prison.

------
I_am_neo
In this time, where populace can be moved with a tweet and a like, instantly
en mass globally in micro seconds. On platforms that are all fully capable of
being handed over to the care of the autistic like abilities of neural
networks, many platforms already are and publicly announce this "feature" like
it is the coming messiah. In this light the idea of publicly owned prisons
doesn't make sense to sovereign free citizens. Prisons for profit are bad for
society, rehabilitation centers are better for them

