What do you think of Corporations running prisons and making a profit?

The privatization of prisons is a multi-billion dollar industry that involves major corporations.

There is a growing trend to incarcerate people for longer amounts of time in order to maximize economic gain becauuse its an income generator and therefore much more attractive to local governments and big business. The more people in jail the more money they make.

Someone said the other day that they used to be called correction facilities to CORRECT bad behavior, Now they are DETENTION centers to hold people with no emphasis on correcting bad behavior.

Example: Sprint charges 3.00 a minute for collect calls from prison. This is paid for by the families. They have made billions and they are not alone. Is this right? Should none violent offenders be given more rehabilitation then long prison sentences?

Citizen 1 I respect your opinion ...but 1. I dont know anyone in prison. 2. If I did depending on what they did I would not right them off, (that deoending on what they did) 3. Its usually grandmothers and grandfathers that are paying Sprint 3 dollars a minute when I reg collect call costs .10 cents a minute.

I think it is too inefficient. Why not designate all corporate facilities as prisons. That way we lower taxes by doing away with trials and all Americans could just report to prison in the morning.

FYI: The change in the American justice systems from rehabilitation to punishment was done by the Legislature to better reflect the conservative elites who felt that prison was just too easy. This was what the people wanted. Now that the policy has been in place for a good many years it has proven to be a total failure. America has the highest number of people in prison per capita than any other nation with the exception of Communist China.

You are judged by the company you keep.
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Cookie Monster: Sprint doesn't build or run prisons. They just extort money from people trying to contact people in prison.

Tank you Report It

No how dare you. Leave the good little Corporations alone. Without them you wouldn't be born. Stop hassling them. Leave them to deal with the criminals as they see fit. They rule the world. We should just let them do as they please and be done with it. Why would you want to have people know the truth? WHY? Now just keep quiet. Goddamn it.

More corrupt bullshit. It's sicking, but not surprising.

If they can do it cheaper and better than the government and save my tax dollars, I don't have any problems with it.

$3 for a collect call from a prison sounds about right.

That itself is criminal and I'd gladly pay to have these criminals running these prisons/businesses imprisoned as well. These same prisons are making money off of prisoners for their cheap labor--they (the inmates) actually take customer service calls and do telemarketing! Can you say Chinese prison labor and access to your private information?
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-telemark...
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/em...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...

It's much better than the government running prisons and bleeding money because of it. If companies couldn't make profits, they wouldn't do it. If they wouldn't do it, the prisons would again be run inefficiently by the government. Then ALL families would suffer through fewer services from higher taxes. Do you think that's just?

Sounds like you believe in conspiracy's. There is absolutely no economic gain for society to have more people incarcerated and for longer periods of time.

I think running the government like a corporation is a big mistake. Corporations don't do such a hot job of running corporations and society is not a business.

The arguement is that competition in corporations makes them more efficient, but what competition does the business model have?

The US is coming full circle in realizing that the purpose of government is to serve the people, not corporations.

Private enterprise is always more efficent than government run. I don't see a problem. Rehabilitation is an illusion. MOST violent crime is committed by ex-convicts.

Are you saying that judges sentence people for longer terms so that compamies like Sprint can get more customers? Silly.

DumDum - That is called earning your keep. Running prisons and feeding, clothing, and housing them is not a cheap proposition.

It would be much better to just make drugs legal, empty out the prisons save the space for the bad guys, not someone who needs treatment for drugs. Remember 90% of it is drugs. If it was $10 for a truck load of the crap, crime would vanish.

It is just plain wrong.

I think that governments should own and run prisons, but whatever they do to make money and offset the cost of incarceration sounds excellent to me. Nobody should be making a profit, so any extra money should be put back into the prison and for programs to help inmates to become law abiding citizens.

As a side benefit, They will be giving inmates some job skills that they can use when they get out.

I think it's perfectly moral that prisoners should have to work harder and have less benefits then people on the outside. It's prison after all.

The problem with the "for profit" prisons is that legally the state (or federal government) is still responsible when the institution violates an inmate's constitutional right.

It is a proven fact (see various lawsuits) that privately run "detention centres" generate nearly twice as many constitutional lawsuits than state or federally run institutions. Many of these lawsuits end up with the state or united states paying punitive damages. The private prison never has to pay anything so they have no incentive to correct these violations, although many have been shut down by federal authorities after such lawsuits.

I am thinking that in the long run perhaps these privately run institutions are more expensive to the taxpayer than the traditional government operated ones.

We spend way to much on violent criminals.
If you are a menace to society you should be locked away in a cell and fed 3 light meals a day with water to drink. That's it.
When your time is served you get out.
They should be put away to protect the decent people in a civilized society, not to lift weights or get a jailhouse law degree.
How much would that cost the tax payers?

I will disagree with this. Corporations are trying to make the public believe privatization will be a benefit to the taxpayer solely so they can jump on the cash cow bandwagon.

Fully one third of the monthly budget for my prison is medical costs incurred maintaining health standards on the inmates. This represents over 18 million dollars a year, and this is just ONE institution.

For a private prison to show a profit here, they would have to eliminate medical care to the point of just issuing aspirins. We would be up to our necks in lawsuits within months that we would stand NO chance of winning.

I will also state for the record that there is absolutely NO financial gain in running a prison or in longer sentences. The old days of the prison factory producing a product are LONG gone. Your average inmate today spends his days watching tv, working out or researching the legal library that we are providing by law to try to find a loophole to beat their case. (Note, they are not saying they are innocent, only looking for a mistake where they can try to walk free.)

Although we are now "enlightened" and use a rehabilitation and correction philosophy, no one can rehabilitate anyone. Only the inmate can do this and then only if they want to. We offer the tools to do this, but if you look at the recidivism rate today, it is running 85%. Under the old Crime and Punishment system, it was 15%.

In that time period, a man was kicked off the face of the planet and offered little or nothing until he regained his freedom. Life was harsh and he was forced to reevaluate his priorities in order NOT to return to prison again.

I might also add that in the old system, we actually did use prison factories that produced items that were sold. We actually did something that made money to reduce the burden on the American taxpayer.

I hope this can help you somewhat and you can find it useful.