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jameskilton 22 hours ago [-]
The entire concept of "for-profit incarceration/detention" should not exist. Such a system only incentivizes cruelty.
virissimo 22 hours ago [-]
In practice, it doesn't seem to make much difference:
> Propensity score matching and regression analyses of the National Inmate Survey are used to examine individuals’ experiences and perceptions of environmental quality in public versus private prisons across key domains of prison life, with an emphasis on needs, behaviors, victimization, and attitudes. No differences are identified for women. Males in private prisons are more likely than men in public prisons to perceive there to be inadequate staffing and are less likely to report maintaining ties with people outside of prison. Men in private prisons are also less likely to report crowding to be an issue.
We should zoom out in perspective. The question is not “is the experience in for-profit prisons better for incarcerated people”.
It is “for-profit prisons create a system with a financial incentive to increase the number of incarcerated people”.
jazzyjackson 20 hours ago [-]
Tax funded prisons also have unions that vote for expanding prisons. The distinction doesn’t make much of a difference.
citadel_melon 9 minutes ago [-]
Public unions are fine as long as there is a counterweight.
What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.
You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.
Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.
Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.
pirate787 22 hours ago [-]
For-profit is the delivery system, which should save taxpayer money. Systems where the institutions are directly administered by taxpayer funds and their attendant public employee unions also have political/financial incentives.
xp84 22 hours ago [-]
I'm inclined to believe that.
Either way - publicly-run or private contractor, if the government is a good steward of public funds, they'll monitor well to avoid waste and remove people who are trying to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the officials are incompetent or corrupt themselves, they'll fail to recognize when those things are happen, or participate themselves. I don't see a big difference in public vs. private unless I imagine a fantasy government run only by officials who are smart and highly ethical.
chaps 21 hours ago [-]
Should private prisons have their own private prison guards that use paintball guns filled with pepper spray?
Should private prisons be FOIA'able just like public prisons?
dgellow 20 hours ago [-]
They should not exist, as simple as that
chaps 20 hours ago [-]
Agreed. There's a lot of work to get us there.
bjourne 21 hours ago [-]
Exactly why would one or more middle men trying to extract profit save taxpayer money? What's your evidence?
cucumber3732842 21 hours ago [-]
Because the state prisons are trying to cut costs and/or profit the same way the private ones are. They just tend to invest in waste and expansion rather than pay $$ to owners/investors.
The whole thing is rotten. Changing the ownership of the mess doesn't make it not rotten.
pfannkuchen 21 hours ago [-]
What we really need is a prison voucher program. The prisoners get to go to whatever prison they want to, and then the prison they go to gets paid. Incentives aligned!
TheCoelacanth 21 hours ago [-]
I'm not really sold on the idea of private prisons in general, but if we're going to have them it should at least be the prisoner's choice. Unaccountable private prisons that are also a government enforced monopoly is just the worst of both worlds.
impish9208 19 hours ago [-]
I know this is a joke, but if we just run with it, the prisons would start running targeted ads to previously incarcerated and “at-risk” people so that they choose them when the time comes. And when the voucher revenue growth is below some target for two consecutive quarters, they could maybe pay for more crimes…?
cwmoore 20 hours ago [-]
I would like to see a menu please.
hulitu 6 hours ago [-]
> "for-profit incarceration/detention"
Those had a different name in WW2, in another part of the world. It seems US took the concept, like many other from there, and inovated it.
parineum 11 hours ago [-]
It could incentivize good outcomes if we chose to pay more for some measurable amount of rehabilitation.
The nice thing about outsourcing to for profit entities is that you don't have to come up with the ideas, you can just pay for the end result.
Unfortunately, they're just being paid to babysit so that's all they do.
19 hours ago [-]
moi2388 21 hours ago [-]
Does it? The alternative is non-profit incarceration/detention, in which the incentive is to not put people in prison, leading to more crime, lower trust and more victims.
rsynnott 16 hours ago [-]
The US incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere else in the world except a couple of tiny countries and possibly North Korea (numbers for North Korea, for obvious reasons, are vague, but it probably does incarcerate more per capita than the US). For a developed world country, it has fairly high crime rates (in particular it has by far the highest rate of intentional homicide in the developed world). Like, do you think that there's a magic level of incarceration at which point it would suddenly start working, if only you could get there?
triceratops 20 hours ago [-]
> non-profit incarceration/detention, in which the incentive is to not put people in prison
How do you figure? Is the "I'll save you money by being soft on crime" election platform popular in your country?
moi2388 20 hours ago [-]
Yes. Prisons are overcrowded, criminals are released earlier or not put in prison at all, and judges punish lower because prisons are too full.
triceratops 20 hours ago [-]
And private prisons don't get overcrowded?
moi2388 18 hours ago [-]
Since private prisons make a profit instead of costing millions, you can actually build more of them.
With the added benefit of not costing the taxpayer as much.
smackeyacky 12 hours ago [-]
Who is the customer in this business model. Does that change the way you might think about prisons that must make a profit?
You might argue that it drives efficiency but what does efficiency mean in the context of a prison? Cheaper food for the inmates? Less pay for the guards?
triceratops 18 hours ago [-]
Who do you think pays for private prisons? Where's the profit coming from?
moribvndvs 21 hours ago [-]
Nice false dilemma you have here.
JohnTHaller 18 hours ago [-]
We could end the absurd war on drugs that conservatives are intent on waging and follow evidence-based solutions instead. About 20% of prisoners in the US are there for drug crimes. At the federal level it's 42.6%.
nmeagent 17 hours ago [-]
Ah, but if we stopped the drug war those in power would have less flexibility to effect unjust or even blatantly racist outcomes [1], e.g. they wouldn't be able to disproportionately charge disfavored minorities for possession or other bullshit drug crimes and consequently those folks might start thinking they aren't second-class citizens. Can you imagine?! The horror!
Deportations should be efficient and swiftly follow after apprehension. Delay only funnels public funds to companies such as these.
kelseyfrog 20 hours ago [-]
What false positive rate are you willing to accept?
throwawaypath 20 hours ago [-]
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
kelseyfrog 19 hours ago [-]
No. What false positive rate for deportations are you willing to accept?
throwawaypath 19 hours ago [-]
>What false positive rate for deportations are you willing to accept?
Your comment is a non sequitur. What false positive rate for the justice system are you willing to accept?
kelseyfrog 17 hours ago [-]
Bruh. It's a number between 0% and 100%.
I'll make it a yes or no answer to help you, and we'll narrow it down from there. For example, are you willing to accept a 50% false positive rate? Yes or no? Ex: For every two people deported, one of them would be deported erroneously.
throwawaypath 16 hours ago [-]
Bruh. It's a number between 0% and 100%.
I'll make it a yes or no answer to help you, and we'll narrow it down from there. For example, are you willing to accept a 50% false positive rate? Yes or no? Ex: For every two people convicted and jailed, one of them would be convicted and jailed erroneously.
kelseyfrog 15 hours ago [-]
Why try to counter with a "no u!" It makes it look like you know deporting people falsely is bad. Why not just change your position instead?
throwawaypath 14 hours ago [-]
Why try to counter with a "no u!" It makes it look like you know falsely convicting and jailing people is bad. Why not just change your position instead?
kelseyfrog 13 hours ago [-]
> It makes it look like you know falsely convicting and jailing people is bad.
Um, yeah? Falsely convicting people and jailing them is bad.
throwawaypath 13 hours ago [-]
And that has nothing to do with efficient and swift deportations. Congrats, you played yourself.
kelseyfrog 10 hours ago [-]
Do you agree that wrongly deporting people is bad?
throwawaypath 7 minutes ago [-]
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
JuniperMesos 20 hours ago [-]
A pretty high rate, because it's pretty easy for an actual US citizen who gets accidentally deported to simply re-enter the country.
blamestross 19 hours ago [-]
What does that look like? Dropped in a foreign country without money or documents. Likely in the custody of a government who doesn't care.
How do you re-enter the country?
downrightmike 18 hours ago [-]
Whatever country will accept the lowest bribe. So likely somewhere in Africa. SA would be too close, almost walk back
kelseyfrog 19 hours ago [-]
Curious what that translates to numerically, if you're willing to share.
Arodex 17 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it is not as if the people deported have family, children, pets, belongings, responsabilities... /s
hightrix 21 hours ago [-]
Yes, but where’s the cruelty that this administration so strongly desires? These people need to be punished for what they’ve done regardless of if they’ve done it. Additionally, efficiency means lower revenue and that simply can’t happen.
cwmoore 20 hours ago [-]
Something about “cruel and unusual punishment” has never sat well with me.
moomin 22 hours ago [-]
Always interesting to answer the question of who benefits from certain policies.
cwmoore 22 hours ago [-]
Apparently it is the luxuriating inmates: “an average rate of $307,000 per bed.”
andai 22 hours ago [-]
And, as is tradition, are deprived of approximately all the value they produce!
cwmoore 20 hours ago [-]
It’s actually medieval!
somenameforme 22 hours ago [-]
Wowzer. Can somebody please start AirBnBars? I have an extra room, and some steel bars.
22 hours ago [-]
raoulj 23 hours ago [-]
YoY Net Income from CoreCivic's own financials (2025-2022): 116.50, 68.87, 67.59, 122.32
greenavocado 20 hours ago [-]
I'm so brain rotted I read that as a new Prison-1.4B model release
isodev 21 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, slavery
downrightmike 18 hours ago [-]
You mean to say that we AREN'T rehabilitating these people? /s
achillesheels 22 hours ago [-]
Oligarchy! Sad!
iJohnDoe 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
parineum 22 hours ago [-]
It's intentionally misleading to use revenue in this headline.
People will read that headline and come away with the impression that private prisons are making billions. They're expenses are most likely scaling with their revenue.
If your concern is that private prisons exist or that detention is climbing, the dollar figure is secondary to other, better measures. Instead, revenue is (mis)used to give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this and, while that may be true, the relevant number is the increase in income, not revenue.
In short, NPR isn't above clickbait that's biased towards their audiences.
runako 22 hours ago [-]
No. Revenue is a generally accepted business metric. It is normal to discuss revenue without being also compelled to discuss profits at the same time. You don't have to like the common way of discussing business, but that doesn't change this.
> give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this
CoreCivic is a public company, so we can see that the C-suite each earns over $1m annually in cash compensation. the Chief Development officer earns more cash compensation than the person holding the same title at Hilton, a company worth over 20x more.
Then, we can look at the insider roster to see that the CEO currently holds over $10 million in stock, the heads of HR and corrections each hold over $5 million, etc.
People should get the impression that people are getting rich off this because people are getting rich off this.
woodruffw 22 hours ago [-]
Independent reporting on the treatment of detained immigrants might reasonably lead one to believe that expenses are not scaling linearly with increased revenue.
parineum 12 hours ago [-]
Which would be a great thing to write about.
diabllicseagull 22 hours ago [-]
It's a useful figure in that it shows how fast an industry, which shouldn't exist, grows:
"Swindle said that CoreCivic's total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million."
forgetfreeman 22 hours ago [-]
This "well actually" feels like it's in the same vein as tobacco companies funding cancer research. 30 seconds with Google shows that CoreCivic's Q1 earnings for 2026 are ~%50 higher than earnings reported for Q1 from last year. So yeah, they're getting rich off this.
parineum 12 hours ago [-]
My point isn't that they aren't making money. My point is that they aren't making 1.4 billion dollars on it.
It's not quite as impressive to say they've increased their profits 60m which gives a much different impression.
moate 22 hours ago [-]
>> They're expenses are most likely scaling with their revenue
A unique phenomenon that only exists in this industry and is clearly the reason you feel opposed to people performing the same sort of analysis they would on other businesses...
Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
parineum 12 hours ago [-]
> A unique phenomenon that only exists in this industry and is clearly the reason you feel opposed to people performing the same sort of analysis they would on other businesses...
I'm generally opposed to this metric as used in this headline.
I'm not sure what positions you're assuming I hold but there is some misunderstanding because I don't really understand your comment.
> Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
Unless they assume they operate for more than 1 year.
> Propensity score matching and regression analyses of the National Inmate Survey are used to examine individuals’ experiences and perceptions of environmental quality in public versus private prisons across key domains of prison life, with an emphasis on needs, behaviors, victimization, and attitudes. No differences are identified for women. Males in private prisons are more likely than men in public prisons to perceive there to be inadequate staffing and are less likely to report maintaining ties with people outside of prison. Men in private prisons are also less likely to report crowding to be an issue.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361439680_Private_V....
It is “for-profit prisons create a system with a financial incentive to increase the number of incarcerated people”.
What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.
You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.
Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.
Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.
Either way - publicly-run or private contractor, if the government is a good steward of public funds, they'll monitor well to avoid waste and remove people who are trying to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the officials are incompetent or corrupt themselves, they'll fail to recognize when those things are happen, or participate themselves. I don't see a big difference in public vs. private unless I imagine a fantasy government run only by officials who are smart and highly ethical.
Should private prisons be FOIA'able just like public prisons?
The whole thing is rotten. Changing the ownership of the mess doesn't make it not rotten.
Those had a different name in WW2, in another part of the world. It seems US took the concept, like many other from there, and inovated it.
The nice thing about outsourcing to for profit entities is that you don't have to come up with the ideas, you can just pay for the end result.
Unfortunately, they're just being paid to babysit so that's all they do.
How do you figure? Is the "I'll save you money by being soft on crime" election platform popular in your country?
With the added benefit of not costing the taxpayer as much.
You might argue that it drives efficiency but what does efficiency mean in the context of a prison? Cheaper food for the inmates? Less pay for the guards?
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/
Your comment is a non sequitur. What false positive rate for the justice system are you willing to accept?
I'll make it a yes or no answer to help you, and we'll narrow it down from there. For example, are you willing to accept a 50% false positive rate? Yes or no? Ex: For every two people deported, one of them would be deported erroneously.
I'll make it a yes or no answer to help you, and we'll narrow it down from there. For example, are you willing to accept a 50% false positive rate? Yes or no? Ex: For every two people convicted and jailed, one of them would be convicted and jailed erroneously.
Um, yeah? Falsely convicting people and jailing them is bad.
How do you re-enter the country?
People will read that headline and come away with the impression that private prisons are making billions. They're expenses are most likely scaling with their revenue.
If your concern is that private prisons exist or that detention is climbing, the dollar figure is secondary to other, better measures. Instead, revenue is (mis)used to give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this and, while that may be true, the relevant number is the increase in income, not revenue.
In short, NPR isn't above clickbait that's biased towards their audiences.
> give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this
CoreCivic is a public company, so we can see that the C-suite each earns over $1m annually in cash compensation. the Chief Development officer earns more cash compensation than the person holding the same title at Hilton, a company worth over 20x more.
Then, we can look at the insider roster to see that the CEO currently holds over $10 million in stock, the heads of HR and corrections each hold over $5 million, etc.
People should get the impression that people are getting rich off this because people are getting rich off this.
"Swindle said that CoreCivic's total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million."
It's not quite as impressive to say they've increased their profits 60m which gives a much different impression.
A unique phenomenon that only exists in this industry and is clearly the reason you feel opposed to people performing the same sort of analysis they would on other businesses...
Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
I'm generally opposed to this metric as used in this headline.
I'm not sure what positions you're assuming I hold but there is some misunderstanding because I don't really understand your comment.
> Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
Unless they assume they operate for more than 1 year.