For Profit Prisons. What could POSSIBLY go wrong.

My thoughts on this:

http://www.examiner.com/article/pennsylvania-judge-sentenced-to-28-years-prison-for-selling-teens-to-prisons

If you still think privatized prisons are a good idea, just go ahead and unfriend me now. THIS is exactly why privatized, for-profit prisons are a TERRIBLE idea.

Our courts should never be a source of profit. There should never be any incentive for anything other than serving justice in our judges.

Given the extreme violation of his public trust, I would have no problem what so ever seizing everything he owns to pay some restitution to those unjustly imprisoned. Hell, if he's going to be in prison for life, he won't need any of it.

None of this $1.2 million crap that averages out to $240 per person. Take every last thing the man has. Not punitively, but to try to pay back as much as possible of what he stole from those people.

And yes, I know some of them may have been legitimately imprisoned, just... expedited. Still, in the expediting process, he skipped over important protections our society provides.

I'm sitting here, and I honestly can't think of a punishment that I'd think was out of line. I can think of some I wouldn't personally ADVOCATE, but if it were to happen, I wouldn't argue in his favor...

*     *     *

There's ANOTHER reason to point out to the "privatizing is better" crowd: Each of these cases (or at least, those who would not otherwise be found guilty in a fair trial, or who would have received lighter sentences if there weren't a bounty) are costing taxpayers money.

Each one of these people is now in the prison system, and the privatized jail model doesn't mean we don't have to pay for it, it just means we pay on a "per inmate per day" basis rather than a "time and materials" basis. So each day one of these wrongly convicted or up-punished kids spent in jail is one more bit of money going from the taxpayers.

Which means even if the jail is run more efficiently than the government can do it (an assertion about which I've seen numerous studies indicating that it's not actually true, which makes sense if you think about it, if you can't do something for less than $x dollars, how can you turn it into a for-profit model, add in the overhead of profit margin, and come in UNDER $x), that difference was almost certainly more than made up for by the increased bed count in the prison, paying for inmates that under a fairer system would not have been there.

And finally, I have to say, I'm a little afraid of the slippery slope. I know slippery slope arguments are themselves slippery slopes, but really, if we privatize the jails, is it really that much of a stretch to believe someone might suggest privatizing the courts as well? And if that happens, can you not see people shopping around for a court the way one shops around for a lawyer, choosing the court that has a history of finding in the direction you want them to find?

This whole thing is a huge travesty of justice, brought to us by greedy people who have reaped all of the benefits of the system we had, and can't conceive of either being expected to pay to continue to support the system that got them where they are, or that these things aren't just magically delivered by fairies, if we stop paying for them, they WILL stop happening.