Many statists are celebrating the announcement that the U.S. Department of Injustice will stop relying on corporatist prisons, by saying stupid things like, "Some things should not have a profit motive involved."
Let's back up here... Private prison doesn't equal free market prison. Think about who the customer is. When the provider is ONE of like a mere 3 massive corporations that contract with the government, you have a giant cartel, or oligopoly, providing a service to a "customer" who happens to be Uncle Sam. Yet we're supposed to believe that this is everything that is wrong with the so-called "free market." But are YOU a customer? Am *I* the customer? Can any of us even say that there is a single person anywhere who represents "the customer?"
No? Then this isn't a voluntary market arrangement.
The closest true customer-provider arrangement would be if communities directly contracted to a private prison, in which case, they wouldn't tolerate things like minimum sentencing laws and locking up their loved ones for smoking a plant. Even in the case of murder, I believe at the community level most people would be interested in seeing more humane forms of imprisonment -- which I might point out -- will not be achieved by the statist-alleged "superiority" of "non-profit" prisons. We also need to call b.s. on state and federal prisons being "non-profit" when they cost exorbitant amounts in tax-dollar-funded administrative costs. Sounds like a government-for-profit kind of arrangement.
State-run and federal-run prisons are still hellholes. But that's something which cult fanatics of government would like us to forget.
The fundamentally corrupt nature of the U.S. Criminal Injustice System will not be corrected by eliminating private prisons, because now it's just the govt serving itself as it's own provider and customer. The govt will now have the defacto monopoly, and while many people seem ridiculously happy about that, it doesn't solve any fundamental problems.
It's not the profit motive to blame here, it's the structural arrangement in who the provider and the customer are. The government should not be the customer, individuals and their communities should be. And the provision of these services should not be a government monopoly, whether government-backed corporate-cartel or "pure" socialized.
The same is true for healthcare as it is for criminal justice. Government fanatics would have us believe that healthcare "for profit" is the ultimate evil, when the ultimate injustices of the American healthcare system have to do with regulatory capture towards total cartelization towards further and further corporatocracy under the government -- to a degree that would make Mussolini blush. Both healthcare and criminal justice suffer from government-as-customer relationship with the providers, when the only genuine customers in a truly free market would be you and I.
Until that happens, we will see perverse incentives across the board in any service where the state is involved. Abolish the criminal justice system, and get the government out of justice entirely.
I believe you will really enjoy this video if you haven't already seen it:
It's one of my favorites on this subject!
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