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How To Privatize Private Prisons

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Something is rotten in U.S.: at the very least in the realm of economics (and perhaps even politics). It appears that there is an ongoing successful drive to privatization of everything: schools, roads, prisons; programs such as Social Security, and Medicare. What motivates this drive is a belief foisted on the public that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. This belief grows out of the notion that the quest for profit is a regulating factor: efficiency reduces costs. The public sector, on the other hand, is motivated by a completely different objective—to increase the general welfare. Example, when there is a flu outbreak, the private sector has no incentive to find a vaccine, absent the prospect of profits. The public …show more content…

An institution whose existence is to house criminal (a rehabilitate them) when privatized wants to see more criminal activities and would fill their prisons. Proponents of privatization of prisons maintain private prisons will save state money with budgetary problems. However, the research narrative suggests that the market is not quite the savior of education advocates argue. An early study by the Federal Bureau of Prisons indicates problems with “adequately trained and experienced staff” and . . . critical lapses in appropriate security practices” perhaps leading to riots, escapes and deaths. There other complications related to private prisons: poor health care and early deaths. (See piece entitled Private Prisons for Profit out of Control. The people who tout the virtues of the private sector might not have heard of caveat emptor as it relates to commerce. They forget that it was the loosely regulated bankers that crashed the economy in 2008; bankers who were happy to accept government bailout money even as they foreclosed on hapless homeowners. The banks have since been making out like bandits: the public pays on average $4.52 to use an ATM that is out of network; banks borrow cheap money and charge usurious rates on lending it—you take a cash advance on your credit card and you might pay 20 percent …show more content…

He appears to have put profits ahead of mine safety and health in violation of Federal mine standards. Mr. Blankenship could go to prison for 31 years. (See NBC News) CEO Stewart Parnell of Peanut Corporation of America was sentenced to 28 years in prison in connection with a 2008 salmonella outbreak that killed nine people and sickened 714 others across the U.S. Bernard Madoff is serving 150 years jail time for engaging in a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme that claimed many celebrity victims. Even former Fed chairman Ben Bernanke had some reservations about prosecutions for the 2008 Great Recession. Individuals were responsible for that debacle not abstract firms. He was quoted as saying, “But it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm." (See Huffington

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