>Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii.
Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.
Prison profits are spent lobbying for tougher crime laws. Thus, unnecessarily harsh criminalization of behavior has a strong economic incentive. Having an incentive to turn citizens into criminals is bad for society.
I wonder if you can raise evidence of unreasonable imprisonment. I completely agree that this can create a feedback loop that would be bad, ideally we should have a much more sophisticated system of rehabilitation. Maybe the problem lies on the state being too incompetent to even set metrics for third parties.
All drug offenses are violent. Illegal drugs channel money into large organized crime syndicates that kill, torture, terrorize and maim people. Just because those people are brown, poor, and not Americans doesn't mean we should care less.
If you ask me, we need substantially more drug enforcement. There are severe inequalities in how we police for drugs that often result in only the poor and marginalized locked up. We need to refocus our drug war on the rich and powerful and put them in jail to, to make things more equal.
Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition. If we decriminalized these drugs, we'd eliminate the price premium that can be commanded from secrecy and use of force.
I watched a really great lecture online that was about how everything that rich countries criminalize (primarily prostitution and drugs) ends up becoming powerful industries in poorer countries because the demand from rich countries persists and creates a price floor higher than normal economically productive work in those poor countries. If rich people want something and it's banned in their country, it becomes an extremely profitable endeavor in poorer nations to meet this demand. Because profit margins are greater than normal economic activity, this enables criminal to gain political power within those countries. The speaker had a name for this idea which I can't remember, something like "hedonic exportation" - if anyone knows what I'm talking about I've been looking for this lecture for a few years.
> Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition
The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning. Although, in principle, I agree that your reasoning ought to make sense. Unfortunately, my principles and empiricism are often at odds, so it's best to side with the latter.
> The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning.
It actually does, because federal prohibition has not been lifted (even though there is non-assured enforcement forebearance).
The fact that anyone in a significant ownership, leadership, or management position in any business in the industry is technically guilty of a federal felony with a 20-year minimum sentence (and, just by being sufficiently successful, that can bumped up to a life-without-parole minimum) [0] has a fairly substantial impact on the willingness of otherwise legitimate businesses and businesspeople to participate in the industry and thus on what kind of business people do participate, even when the feds aren't actually prosecuting at the moment.
[0] the “drug kingpin” (formally, Continuing Criminal Enterprise) statute and it's later-added “super kingpin” provision.
> Also, much of violence is related to legal marijuana businesses being unbanked
Right, except for the critical fact that there are no legal marijuana businesses, that is certainly an important effect of the continued federal prohibition.
Drug dealer Y kills someone to protect territory - This is violent.
If X was willing to buy drugs from anyone, and/or if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available, Y is not the cause of the violence.
Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
X got the drugs from somewhere. At some point, someone paid someone to get the drug. This enables Y.
> if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available
If I want to buy a nuke, but one is not available from a legal seller, does that mean I am not responsible for paying an unscrupulous seller to furnish that for me?
> Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
Where did you get the weed plant? Last time I checked, weed doesn't magically sprout in your hydroponic set up (and I'd know).
Yes, especially if you're buying guns for recreation. If it's for survival and you live in the middle of the wilderness, perhaps you can make a case for it.
Oops, was that not the answer you were trying to bait?
If using a drug puts you in the category of someone who has committed a 'drug offense', then you have -- by definition -- taken an illegal drug.
> An excellent argument for decriminalizing them.
Indeed, but that doesn't automatically exculpate those who have -- during prohibition -- directly caused violence by their money. In my opinion, they should all be in jail for murder. For life.
> There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
The same criticism can be applied towards forced prison labour, and yet, it is explicitly permitted by the thirteenth amendment. (And is commonly used in state prisons.)
Just because a profit incentive falls in the hands of the state's coffers, as opposed to some corporation, does not mean the incentive is not perverse.
Agreed. However, in terms of perverse economic incentives I think the private for-profit prisons are a much much larger problem than prison work programs. They are not bringing in anything on the scale of what private prison systems bring in from the government. Also, least a few people claim to have benefited personally from the work programs.
>They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better
Not only would you want more prisoners, but you will also be interested in keeping them as long as possible (i.e. no parole) and pushing recidivism incidents to its maximum.
The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.
But we also have other side of the equation - politicians willing to expand definition of "crime" to placate people's fears and emotions combined with prosecutors willing to throw the book to make and example and build a career on it, all while not appropriately funding the prisons.
California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population, where you have to BECOME a RACIST to survive the prison gangs. Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
This is one single step in a series of steps to get anywhere positive. Knowing their Governor and his political expedient past, I am skeptical.
> The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.
And well established as a thing that happens at all times in California, but the real major culprit of that type is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, not the private prison industry.
> California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population
It's been declining for nearly a decade, and despite California being the largest-population state, it's got a smaller prison population than Texas. But, yes, the prison population is too high.
> Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
This is true, though that has also been reduced as prison population has.
> I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
Better would be to reduce the prison population to the level that can be safely housed in the existing facilities. California's problem is too many prisoners, not too few prisons.
Wouldn't the better solution to these priorities be shrinking down those definitions of crime, and not filling up the prisons we've got, rather than building bigger ones?
Only 1 in 5 prisoners are there for nonviolent drug crimes. You can't reduce the prison population by more than that unless you want to repeal laws against fraud, burglary, rape, assault, or murder.
One alternative would be to reduce sentences for those crimes, but good luck getting the public to vote for any politician who would propose such a thing.
Rather than building enough prisons, what if they just set target incarceration rates, built capacity for that, and then required that the justice system sentence and parole accordingly?
There's no reason to have over half a percentage of point of the entire population in prison. Almost no other country in the world does this.
Capping incarceration rates not only prevents prison overcrowding, but is a forcing function for policy changes that actually lower crime, as well as alternative sentencing options for non-violent crime (which almost always have better outcomes.)
What we believe is that a lack of private prisons will disincentivize new prisoners from being systematically introduced in an abusive fashion. More accountability. Releasing people like non-violent drug offenders is a separate issue.
> instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii
Of course, no one could have rationally believed that these people -- considered to be lawbreakers -- would just get FREED automatically. That would be an idiotic assumption. And yet, the article is worded as if there actually were people who believed it.
Many states have cut sentences in face of prison over-crowding, including California.
So, yes, some people believe private-prisons are a useful tool to deal with over-crowding in state facilities and that the likely alternative is further reduced-sentence releases.
I saw their comment and frankly I think it's a perfectly reasonable sentiment. That objecting to incarceration practices in America is viewed as contributing to a "political flamewar" by the mods here is surprising to me.
"[F]acists" and "concentration camps" are intentionally incendiary and do not promote a constructive discussion. There is nothing reasonable about that wording at all.
These are descriptive terms for what currently exist in the US (and have existed before in the US). If hearing them causes you to feel emotions that don’t allow you to engage in civil discussion I think it’s worth investigating why that is —- not insisting we find less precise terminology.
If I'm allowed to ask "What should we do about the Jewish Question" in a manner that appears civil, it's still not a civil discussion, regardless of the tone. If someone responds "don't you dare ask the Jewish Question," they aren't at fault for the lack of civility; the premise of the question was deeply uncivil.
Contextually, if someone on HN is asking "what should we do about the prisoners?" about people detained by ICE, the premise of the comment is uncivil. They are not prisoners, they have committed no crime (even by the standards of US law), and they are being held in deeply inhumane conditions. By any reasonable moral standard, the question is not "what should we do about the prisoners", but "how should we free people who are inhumanely detained." Allowing such an uncivil premise while banning emotional responses only reinforces the view that these people have committed some crime, and that they somehow 'deserve' the abhorrent treatment.
Furthermore, "concentration camp" has never meant "death camp", as many people seem to assume. I don't understand how it is incendiary to state they are concentration camps, when they largely meet the standards of a concentration camp.
I don't expect my posts to help these people, but I also refuse to remain silent about their inhumane treatment. If you still think this is inappropriate, I accept my ban, but I ask that you consider banning posts with such uncivil premises as well, even if they are written in an inoffensive tone.
Denunciatory rhetoric breaks the site guidelines regardless of what you're denouncing. If you hurl the buzzword weapons of the moment, it will take the thread further into political flamewar regardless of whether your position is right or wrong. Yelling a right position doesn't help; it will only trigger others into yelling their position back. We know what sort of comments take internet forums further into flamewar. What good does it do if this place burns down?
We took the word "civil" out of the HN guidelines because people kept lecturing us about it, as if we were ignorant of the objections against that word or somehow on the wrong side of them, when the truth is we know as much about it as the people doing the lecturing, couldn't care less about that word, and aren't motivated by the concept.
If you're bringing up "the Jewish Question" as a way of insinuating something about HN moderation, that's pretty offensive.
> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
No. The goal of wiping out the private prisons is simply that profit motive in the justice system is always an inherent conflict of interest.
The fact that ICE is getting smashed is just a side benefit.
Adelanto is almost 2,000 people and is the second biggest detention center for ICE. Who knows, ICE may indeed free these prisoners rather than spend the money to transport them to facilities that can't house them anyway. Wouldn't that be a nice benefit?
Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?