Human lives are nothing but a form of currency to the oligarchs.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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On the subject of prison, how can a prison be privatized. I dont live in the U.S and never heard of private prisons. Are there other countries that do this and if so, how many
How does a prison even make many?
They bill the state and use the prisoners for labor. Its a us thing that's disgusting, vile and very profitable.
I think i am asking an obvious question how is this different from government prisons. I assume less regulations and more slave labor but what does the government get out of this deal
It's (theoretically) cheaper to run, because every private company is totally more efficient than a government agency and therefore better (this idea is absolutely idiotic, but people believe it). Additionally, it often is cheaper because the quality of care is so inhumanely low, and, again, the prisoners are used as slaves.
But even if it's not, it gets politicians funds for re-election as well as other benefits, so whether or not it's good deal for the government is irrelevant.
It also creates a middleman. Nobody can blame the state for treating prisoners/slaves like shit, "No no it was them doing the horrible things!" so the politicians don't take any blame.
Same deal with other government contractors. And if one fucks up too bad it just gets resolved/renamed and then it's business as usual.
It depends a bit on the country and type of business.
But yeah private companies can be cheaper and more efficient because the people in charge actually benefit from it. There is often less shit to deal with in the form of bureaucracy.
On the other hand (and this is generally where angelosaxton business culture takes over), this does push for more and more profit since people always want more every year. Everybody likes their yearly wage increase.
In the case of prisons in the US there is a twofold issue, on one hand it’s privatised, but in the other hand there aren’t laws preventing people from doing this bullshit.
It’s presented as a lot more innocent than that. Just like contracting a cleaning service or a company to run passenger rail, you contract with someone to run prisons. The government doesn’t have to focus on that, it can be smaller, and “private companies can run it more efficiently”.
I don’t think my state does that
The guards and the regulation are federally provided/mandated! The building itself is really the privately owned part! The owning corpo receives payment per housed inmate!
The idea was that the free market is going to find cheaper ways for inhabitation, but it really doesn’t! On average privately housed inmates cost just as much, or marginally more than the federally housed ones! And some pr. prisons have contracts with the state that x% of beds have to be filled or must be paid large, and I mean fuckin large fines; the pr. prisons that don’t have such contracts are blackmailing the state with such threats on a semi-regular basis! In result of private prisons non-violent well behaved criminals are rarely ever released parole!
If you replace the word prison with forced labor camp it makes more sense. Other countries with forced labor of prisoners include Russia, North Korea, and China. In the US they use the 13th amendment to prevent organization of prison labor and defense of their basic human rights.
https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/spotlights/examining-state-imposed-forced-labour/
And the thousands of corporations benefiting from both slave labor costs and it's effect on reducing organized labor's bargaining position
https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-companies-producing-with-us-prison-labor-in-2020-prison-labor-in-the-us-part-ii
Use the prisoners for slave labor. That's capitalism for you.
We don’t get the weapons contracts, homie.
We don’t get the cheap labor, homie.
WE ARE CHEAP LABOR HOMIE
-Immortal Technique
I don't exactly have that much of an issue of it being privatized as much as I have an issue with having them be for profit. Of course it's all fickle with what you encourage with money, but I feel like the aim should be to encourage rehabilitation of the inmates, so psychological treatment, opportunity to study so they can become a productive part of society again, etc and the funding should be based on that, but that could also backfire in some ways.
It can pretty much only backfire. By privatizing you're effectively saying we don't want or expect to have fewer prisoners in the future.