Perhaps one of the worst public policy mistakes that is currently plaguing America is privatization of prisons that has led to the rise of the Prison Industrial Complex. How our society has fallen into this pitfall is easy to see: it merely has been viewed like any other contract that governments give out to the private sector. There are very troubling issues that lie in the incentives for the Prison Industrial Complex - now an extremely powerful lobby - though. If we think about it, when a person is convicted of a crime, there is an ideal time which that person should serve, which of course is debatable. However, parties should not have interests in seeing people put away for longer than is merited and provides for the most desired outcomes for society. The PIC has incentives to see tough sentencing and longer stays because more people in prison for longer periods of time means more and more money for that industry. Society, however, ideally uses utility and justice as it measuring stick for prison sentences.
But there is a free market remedy that can have great benefits on business, prisoners, and most importantly society. State governments should move to give contracts for prison to companies using recidivism rates as the comparative measure. Currently, it is in the Prison Industrial Complex's best interest for prisoners who are release to commit crimes again, so that they will come right back for more revenue. However, if having comparatively lower rates of recidivism were necessary to their business model, recitivism rates would necessarily come down, which would mean less tax-payer dollars spent on prosecuting and incarcerating repeat offenders. More importantly, it would mean that far fewer people would become victims. Prisoners who were in prisons with strong performance at recidivism would have higher chances of leading productive lives when they left which would benefit themselves, their families, and their communities.
Lowering costs by steering contracts to the private sector has created bad incentives. It also has given a false sense of cost-saving. In fact, costs may very well be artificially higher because of the Prison Industrial Complex's incentive for more criminal acts and longer stays. This can be fixed though. Governments owe it to citizens, to tax-payers, to former-victims, to not-yet-victims, to prisoners to demand more of the private sector.
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To be more specific, you would have the states build and own the prisons (not sure if they currently own). The prison companies would have an operating lease for which you would give them monetary incentive (bonuses)to reform the prisoners. I believe that's better than awarding a contract on past performance since there probably aren't (reached around for this guess) that may companies doing this (less competition). Also, I think you want them to have forward-looking, constant incentives for each prison as opposed to the contact award being at fixed periods and there being costs of switching providers (which allows the incumbent roomto underperform)
So what do you do with the (incredibly powerful, wealthy) prison guard union? Particularly in California, they are a force to be reckoned with. Also, cute how you called me back to congratulate me on my first day, punk.
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