It’s no secret, that I’m flabbergasted by the US world record in putting people in jail (flabbergasted because you’re supposedly a First World country but has some Third World records). Of course this has much to do with failed laws like Three Strikes and the useless War on Drugs - but it doesn’t look like the fact that a bunch of companies makes a lot of dough from a steady stream of prisoners is helping any.
Tell me I’m an eurocommie and completely wrong and that prison rape is too good for kids caught impersonating school principals online…
No need to build strawmen, Hanzii. And after all, the principle is that it’s repugnant even when it happens to bad people.
In this case I actually agree with the point Anti-Bunny had in another thread, that we should try to avoid perverse profit incentives. An industry that has an interest in increasing amounts of prisoners should not be tasked with actually handling prisoners.
Certainly. If they spend time and money lobbying for tougher laws instead of stuff that directly benefits their members working conditions, I’ll hate on them too.
Wow, great lesson about standing up to judges that are wrong. Everyone knows about standing up to police and prosecutors, but won’t make a peep about judges. Also a good reminder that corruption ends up anywhere that government and business are too tightly wound.
Also, this man has a counterpoint about how awesome privatized law-enforcement and judicial systems can be:
This is, I think, the only case I’ve ever heard of where I’ve felt the sentence was far too lenient. These dirtbags ruined the lives of many many young people, and they’re only getting seven years.
edit: Also, Hanzii, I dunno how they do it in Europe, but generally you don’t get raped at a juvie wilderness camp.
This may be a foreign concept, but in Europe you don’t get raped in prison at all.
And the article linked said prison and detention center, not wilderness camp, which you make sound like it’s some sort of scout outing. I remember hearing that while nowhere as bad as your prison system, juvenile detention is no picnic either.
What are you talking about?
It’s not magic. Just properly run prisons and a humane prison system (and I should probably stop saying Europe or you’ll link me some article about somebody being raped in a greek prison in the 60s just to “prove” me wrong).
We have plenty of racism (and pooping, I suspect). By calling it magic, you’re trying to frame the argument as if prison rape is unpreventable and just an ‘oops’ side effect of the system and not yet another clear symptom of you having the worst prison system of any first world nation… hell, on some counts you have nations like China beat.
Bah, American prisons. Yet another thing that we do way worse than the other 1st world nations yet we cling to some hard-headed notion that we’re right anyway.
Speaking about prison rape, I would suppose the following demonstrates that the government is incapable of handling the responsibility of operating prisons and that they should all therefore be privatized:
Pretty sure Abu Ghraib was government run too, or maybe it’s just that picking on a single case to make absurdly sweeping generalizations is bloody retarded.
Absurdly broad, sure, broad generalizations about privatizing this particular thing? I think it’s fair.
We all agree corporations are entities which exist to seek profit right? So when you set a profit reward attached to “get more prisoners”, you are giving a financial incentive which encourages the corporations to attempt to influence the justice system to get more business for themselves. This is bad.
Of course government run prisons have problems, most of which are due to poor oversight and regulation. Problems which are only worse with private prisons. Anything government run also has the extra layer of bureaucracy and inefficiency (mostly because there is no profit motive), but I’ll take that over this, thanks. Not everything needs to privatized.
By this reasoning the funeral home and burial industry need to be nationalized because they have a perverse profit incentive to influence government health and safety agencies to abandon their duties in order to get more business for themselves. Not buying it.
Anything run by the government also tend to have problems because there is little accountability and little incentive to do the difficult task of actually fixing problems as opposed to just sweeping them under the rug and hoping nobody notices, because as a general rule they have no competition and thus nobody to directly compare them with and little to no threat of losing their jobs to any kind of competitor.
