what's wrong with private prisons: check out "kids for cash".

it's a license for corruption all the way from the police, to the prosecutor, to the judge, to the justice system, to the governor's office that approves it, to the members of the state congress that proposes it and to the contractors and business that profit from actually building the prison.

not to mention that public safety wouldn't be the no.1 concern but maximizing profit.

imagine a world were you throw an empty can of coke on the street, and instead of a fine or a warning from a cop, you're booked and ordered to appear before a judge.

once there, hoping at worst community service, you get 2 months in a private prison. but you don't do 2 months. you end up doing 5 because the people responsible for releasing you are private employees who'll don't do squat until the corporate board orders it.

why, because the state pays the private prison to incarcerate you. the longer you're a guest, the more they collect.

you complain to your lawyer and your lawyer files a motion to the court to release you. months go by because the judge ignores its, why you wonder nobody seems interested in your plight, it's because he's corrupt and was paid to convict you and keep you locked up.

you're finally released, for littering after 5 long months of forced labour and incarceration, not because you broke a law, but because you were a way to make a buck.

this isn't fiction. its happening right now. spitting or talking back to a cop, could get you 12 months incarceration.

Originally posted by Kali74

While private prison companies may try to present themselves as just meeting existing ‚demand‛ for prison beds and responding to current ‚market‛ conditions, in fact they have worked hard over the past decade to create markets for their product. As revenues of private prison companies have grown over the past decade, the companies have had more resources with which to build political power, and they have used this power to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration.

The other problem is, that you have states like Texas, where the doctrine of revenge, including both maximum security incarceration and the death penalty, are an entrenched part of the already existing historical culture. The attitude of "Kill them all, and let God sort them out," is an integral part of Texas' heritage. I don't know whether it is still true now, but for several years Texas had the highest rate of capital punishment deaths in the country.

How do private firms make it cheaper? Better management skills? Why not just hire the guys who work for the private systems to run the state systems. Same should go for energy, utilities, telecom, etc. Lets exchange the profit in these industries and return it to the workers and consumers and reward innovative discoveries in these fields with one time payments.

Originally posted by sligtlyskeptical
How do private firms make it cheaper? Better management skills? Why not just hire the guys who work for the private systems to run the state systems. Same should go for energy, utilities, telecom, etc. Lets exchange the profit in these industries and return it to the workers and consumers and reward innovative discoveries in these fields with one time payments.

Naa, creates too many long term problems(with psychopaths constantly conniving to gain leadership positions).

We just need to reform Corporate, Non Profit and Small Business law's.

Corporations should have limited liability, but high taxation. Treat any crime commited by an agent of the corporation(employee) as if the corporation was an accessory to the crime. Resulting in either the entire Corporation(Corporate Assets) being seized, or the particular assets used for that particular crime(think using Civil Asset Siezure against Corporations).

Non-Profit Corporations: Should have similar limited liability, but ultra low taxation with the main condition being they have to honor the 30-1 pay scale, and for every year they violate the 30-1, they have to pay double the for profit corporate tax rate.

Small Businesses: Unlimited liability, but they should pay no income tax at all. Only property, FUTA/SUTA taxes, as well as other minor taxes.

The problem is, for profit corporations have been given benefits they where never meant to have(the original trade off was no liability in exchange for much, much higher taxes).

it has been documented that judges have been paid money by big business private prisons to give longer sentances to inmates so the prisons profit more!!!
i watched a show on this,and a few judges were caught,and removed.
thats the harm!!!

It's a fundamentally stupid idea to incentivize incarceration within a judicial system.

This is what having 'for profit' prisons do.

As others have said it allows corruption, as the case of the two judges getting kick backs for issuing heavy custodial sentences proves.

Wouldn't letting free most the featherweight-criminals in the american prison system free up money?

like a lot of good ideas it can be exploited, some of these private prisons base their stock market price on the number of inmates incarcerated, the more prisoners the more money and this is where the corruption begins.

If more communities were willing to move beyond the draconian law enforcement paradox and towards actual treatment of disorders, we then would not be whining loud about the cost on our tax bill.

You see, Americans want justice when they want it and they almost always want either jail or the death penalty. Americans want to be able to declare someone guilty immediately, hence the reliance upon media to skew trial outcomes, etc.

You can't have it all when you want it.

There is no need to privatize prisons when you can decriminalize the offensive element, treat those who are addicted and tax/regulate the hell out of that element.

Who needs prisons?

This country just keeps finding new ways to disappoint.

Originally posted by Kali74
It can be legitimately argued that privatizing prisons is cost effective,

No it can't. Since when has business ever existed to save the customer money? The whole point is to get the customer to pay as much as possible and when the government is involved market forces are anything but free or fair only adding to the ability for prisons to ratchet up the cost. That ignores the very literal slavery that they are legally allowed to commit. In 2012, you think people would be against slavery, but apparently not everyone is. These people are forced to work for nothing. (Pennies an hour is not a wage it is slavery.) Somethings in society just do not need to be run for a profit. Anything that benefits the society or is a function of it should not be privatized. How many more corporations have to screw us for people to realize business is no friend? There is no democracy involved when private corporations take over social functions. Private water companies work out great right? The water bill always goes down when private corporations take over, right? That's what I thought. There is not one single reason, besides making a few people rich and enslaving people like drug users who never did anything to anyone (Anything wrong.), for allowing social needs/functions to be taken over by private entities. I mean the best example is the Federal Reserve. There is a private corporation that has taken the legitimacy to print money from the government and it charges interest on the money it creates to loan to the government when the government could just print the money itself debt-free. The Federal Reserve literally privatized the function of creating money. That worked out real well, don't you think? Business is not always the answer, especially when it's a social function. Somethings just shouldn't be run for personal profit of the few. Just compare the USPS to UPS or FEDEX. It is magnitudes cheaper, it makes enough profit to keep functioning and expanding, it is a quick and reliable service, they pay very well, and have an excellent benefit package. (The government, namely Bush's, passed the law to bankrupt the USPS by financing the retirements for like 75 years or something like that. They purposefully are trying to crush the USPS so that private companies can swoop in and privatize the whole system. You think stamps will still cost less than half a dollar? Don't kid yourself. We can't keep supporting the same mistakes over and over and over and over. Time to learn from history for once.)

P.S.
I'm not arguing against your reasoning in the OP, rather I am trying to show there is no argument for privatization of prisons or any other social function. It doesn't work for the benefit of society. Nuclear energy is another privatized social function. When energy production is privatized, the company will cut costs at every corner. Nuclear plants could have been designed from the get go for thorium (Thanks military!), but even with the uranium fuel cycle they could have been made a million times safer. The problem was that since nuclear is so expensive these companies wouldn't have made any profit, if they would have created these plants to never meltdown or even if they did to never release the radiation. That cost too much money so we have Fukushima's, TMI's, San Onofre's, and on and on. Considering the billions that are just given away from taxpayers to these nuclear companies, it would have been prudent to have them run by the government with altruistic scientists having a goal of only totally safe energy production rather than trying to cut a profit for the company. Ah, nothin like a company man.

Thank-you everyone for your contributions. I would like to state for those didn't read very far into the OP that my stance is actually against private prisons the question in my title is a bit tongue in cheek.

I would further like to add a question, how can we go about demanding an end to this? These private prison corps. have already "donated" quite a bit to the politicians we would be needing to write to in order to express our concern. So what do we do?