Maybe a healthy dose of capitalism is what it needs. Although I'm not sure what the profit incentive is, because I'm not sure who pays a jail healthcare company.
The public pays. Evidently the private medical company pays at least part of the law suit damage when they fuck up. Prisoners are the consumers and their needs probably come long after budgetary concerns. I have trouble thinking of a market system beyond the provider getting a bonus for things like low death count (it might work). I wish that someone would do a pilot program where private prisons got a hefty bonus payment if they reduced recidivism. Not likely to happen knowing what I know about funding of recidivism programs in general. Police should have to carry their own liability insurance. Give every cop a raise amounting to the cost of the average officers policy and let the bad officers price themselves out of the market for police work.
Maybe a healthy dose of capitalism is what it needs.
I am enough of a sucker to interpret a one-word question as an argument, and I lack flagamuffin's enviable ability to shrug. I take your meaning to be that "capitalism" — shorthand for private firms — is somehow to blame for the horrors in the prison system. Government bodies designate themselves solely in charge of criminal justice. Perhaps there are good reasons for entrusting this work to an effective monopoly. State and federal justice czars choose to outsource some of their work to private firms. They offer contracts for such work. The motivation is invariably to save money. Private firms compete for this work, largely on the basis of cost, but also with bribery and nepotism, techniques that are rarely cost-effective in free markets but almost the norm in government contracting. Does anyone believe that if the state offered contracts to reduce recidivism, improve mental health outcomes, or protect inmates from violence, that greedy, profit-hungry firms would not tender bids for the work because these goals are not evil enough? If the state does not deign to devote resources to these ends, it is absurd to blame "capitalism" for failing to use resources to pursue them.
bfv Because of the word 'seriously', I read a timely piece from Mother Jones, a publication I normally do not touch. It told me more or less what I expected it to. However, an interesting subject. Two conclusions, perhaps not the ones I was supposed to draw. 1. These so-called private prisons are supported by so many government grants that I'm not sure what the point is. 2. If they were state prisons in name as well as monetarily, I don't think conditions would be any different (assuming the place profiled in Mother Jones represents the more extreme end).
That article ignores the important problem with private prisons, which is that what they profit from is people going to prison, so they're going to lobby for laws that send more people to prison. MoJo isn't what it used to be. Have the Washington Post instead.
Subtitle on that Washington Post article: "Sen. Marco Rubio is one of the biggest beneficiaries." Lobbying is like advertising: spending money to try and influence behavior to grow business. Promoting the business is a perfectly predictable behavior of a private firm. Advertising is at worst a nuisance to customers. But when Marco Rubio receives "nearly $40,000 in campaign donations" from the nation's second largest for-profit prison company, he has already benefited, whether or not the people he is supposed to represent gain anything. Those who pay for the service are not the ones who make the decisions; this is a big part of the problem. Delivering services via government -- a single provider, ready to guarantee market share by force -- is unavoidably harmful and inefficient, whether the work is done in-house or farmed out to contractors. The fact that government employees, following their natural human incentives, are subject to corrupting outside influence, is a further point against the model.they're going to lobby
The people in prison, "receiving the service" if you must, are never going to be the ones making the decisions anyway, and if you think "promoting the business" is acceptable behavior when the business is prison further conversation would produce much heat and no light.
The inmates are not the customers, of course. Customers demand a service, and few people would demand to be incarcerated. It is difficult to discuss such a complex arena without oversimplifying at all, but I'll try. The service is "protection from crime." Customers are the people who demand a service, typically the same people who pay for it. So the customers are the people who demand and pay for protection from crime. We might call them "taxpayers" at risk of ignoring some significant exceptions (criminals who pay taxes, perhaps, or people who receive such poor service that they would rather not pay). The service providers are the prisons and associated criminal justice apparatus, whether run by bureaus or private firms.