xoxoANP!

15 Responses to “Babies havin’ babies”

1. alo Says:
   June 23rd, 2008 at 6:59 am

   I cannot for the life of me understand why you think the answer to recidivism would be a free market prison. Talk about incentives to increase recidivism. Growth and expansion is always good for the bottom line!

   Indiana’s most notorious free market prison has quarterly riots (by Arizona prisoners here for the cheap rent).

2. ANP Says:
   June 23rd, 2008 at 8:15 am

   Here’s how: different payouts as a function of recidivism. So, as a prison operator, I get downstream kickbacks each year someone that was in my prison stays out of another one.

   Right now, with outsourced facility / cafeteria management, the goal is to have more prisoners stick around longer. If a system is designed s.t. society’s goals are aligned with prison operators’ goals, there’s theoretically a way to make free market prisons work.

   Tho, I am curious about this Hoosier free market prison about which you speak. Where is it?

3. alo Says:
   June 23rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm

   There’s no reason you cannot build the same incentives into a public budget, if that’s the route you want to go. For example, the Marion county sheriff gets paid per tax warrant served or something like that. But then everybody gets up in arms over his annual pay, which ends up sounding exorbitant for a public servant. No one would bat an eyelash if a private sector honcho got the same pay. It’s the free market! He must be good at his job!

   The prison is in Pendleton.

4. ANP Says:
   June 24th, 2008 at 5:57 pm

   You’re right.

5. Jonesy Says:
   July 1st, 2008 at 2:56 pm

   ALO,

   From what I have read, broadly speaking private prisons are more cost effective. That is, when the institution is taken out of the hands of the government, the return on capital increases. If that is true, all else equal . . . why not more broadly privatize prisons. In the context of ANP’s goal of reducing recidivism by incentives and your issue with concerns being raised over public servants being paid too much . . . it makes even more sense. That’s the beauty of capitalism / free markets, strong performance gets rewarded. And people will act based on incentives to improve performance. We are naive to think otherwise.

   -Jonesy

6. bomee Says:
   July 6th, 2008 at 2:51 pm

   Jonesy - same reason why it’s a bad idea to have private contractors kicking in the heads of Iraqui citizens — delegating responsibility for pretty nasty behavior that the government deems necessary to outfits that have no accountability to the public.

7. bomee Says:
   July 6th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

   Also, what “return on capital” would you be talking about in this context? Prisons, like armies and highways, are not creatures that throw off cash flows except to the extent that you draw the box at an arbitrary point in the transaction to make it seem so — ie. if the private prison shows that it’s generating a cash flow, that’s money coming from the taxpayer and getting better “performance” on that scale is pointless if you are not internalizing the social c/b of having prisons in the first place, which is where Ms. ANP is going with the post to begin with.

8. bomee Says:
   July 6th, 2008 at 3:04 pm

   and finally, I “offer” the possibility that perhaps your faith in the operational leverage inherent in private corporations is a bias that blinkers your capacity for thinking outside that particular model

9. Jonesy Says:
   July 11th, 2008 at 7:51 pm

   Bomee,

   I admire your faith in government and government institutions, but alas it seems somewhat, ummm, idealistic? I could point to many examples of government and public officials acting with reprehensible conduct and bad ethics . . . Gov Spitzer fucking prostitutes and transporting them across state lines strikes me as one example. More to your point, in Iraq, the Abu Grabi (sp?) attrocities were committed by the army and not private contractors. No doubt private contractors have committed attrocities, but it seems difficult to substantiate that they have worse conduct than the army in Iraq.

   The point is, thoughhow do you improve performance of prisons? Since better run prisons that do a better job of lowering re-entry rates will benefit us all. The fact of the matter is, without debate, prisons, are run terribly in this country by almost any metric and they are largely run by the government. Probably not a stretch to assume that better incentives and measurement could improve that system. As for highways, I’ve invested in private highways . . . accountability to shareholders can be an amazing thing my friend. Most private highways are run much better and more efficiently than governemtn run highways. And actually fix potholes.

   There is a reason we didn’t have to fight the Cold War. Communism (i.e. big government) imploded on its own lack of incentives, free markets, and bureaucratic mismanagement.

   As the finest President in modern history said:

   “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

10. Jonesy Says:
    July 11th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    P.S. . . .The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
    Ronald Reagan

11. bomee Says:
    July 12th, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    Jonesy, it’s not about “faith in government” — it’s about recognizing that BOTH government and the private sector are filled with normal ass humans who are on the whole idiots, you and me included. It’s not about what’s the appropriate division of what’s the appropriate domain of the public vs private sectors, and I would argue, again, that when you have institutions that are closely linked to police powers and civil rights (of prisoners), it seems pretty clear to me that you want this thing called “government” to deal with it.

    Also, if you want to see what becomes of private business when government institutions fail, there are no shortage of examples. You’re lucky enough to be in a place with public institutions that function well enough for you to think that they’re not all that important.

12. Jonesy Says:
    July 13th, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Bomee

    The point is not whether “I’m lucky” or “normal ass humas who are idiots” are running things, but rather to debate whether prison performance can be improved by private management. (As an aside, I actually have faith in my fellow normal ass humans.) Undoubtedly prisons need to be regulated, but that’s not that point, rather the point is can we devise a system, with more market based incentives, that leads to better prisons? The answer may be yes, or may be no, but is likely worth investigating. Broadly speaking prisons are run by the government and prisoners are, from what I know, treated terribly and regulary abused. I would question whether it is an institution that is functioning “well”.

    -Jonesy

13. bomee Says:
    July 13th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

    Jonesy-
    When you pose the hypothesis that private management or “market-based incentives” can improve performance of something, you’re making assumptions that go something like this list off the top of my head:
    1. That the performance is somehow tied to incentives
    2. That the public institution isn’t doing a good job because the incentives are not well-aligned
    3. That operating an institution that delivers a public good is sufficiently like operating a business that running said institution like a business is a good idea
    4. That the desired public outcomes can be tied back to incentives in a way that creates a feedback system that “learns” to produce outcomes
    5. That it is ethically appropriate to assign responsibility for the particular “public good” to a private entity

    My argument is that in the case of prisons, probably more than most public services, I don’t see a good case for embracing these assumptions.

    Even in the case of, say, water — a public service that has been put under private management in a number of places, and a service that seems a lot less problematic to privatize, the outcomes have been decidedly mixed — according to research I’ve seen, private management resulted in higher prices (which in of itself isn’t a bad thing), but didn’t improve quality of service in general. In fact, there are studies that show that in making the operations more “efficient” (measured in NOI terms), the private operators delivered poor service quality.

    Clearly, there are plenty of gray area and examples on both sides, but it seems to me that when you don’t have a free market — and when you bid out infrastructure services, you aren’t creating a private market for the service, you’re giving a monopoly license to a private actor — I don’t see why you should accept prima facia that a corporation, merely because it’s private, should perform better than a public body.

    Broadly, I think you have to ask two questions: 1. Is private management likely to improve performance? and 2. Should a the provision of a public good be assigned to a private actor?

    With prisons, I think a big part of the problem is that it’s hard to link positive public outcomes to prison performance. As Alice pointed out earlier, if you can figure out how to tie positive outcomes to specific prison management policies, then why wouldn’t a public institution be just as well-positioned to figure out how to run with it as a private one?

    But I’m more concerned about #2. I think that problematic public functions (ie. ones that violate human rights), ought to stay in public hands, whether or not the government is any good at executing it because our system, if it works at all, is based on being able to have those functions out where the public can see them. Abu Ghraib was a tragedy (as are the human consequences of whole damn war in Iraq, whether you think it was justified in the first place or no). The fact that the government screwed up doesn’t seem to me a good argument to say that we should then switch to using private armies. Ditto police forces. Ditto prisons.

    I’m happy to agree to disagree with you on this, on global climate change, potayto vs potahto, etc.

14. ANP Says:
    July 14th, 2008 at 9:35 am

    I would just like to point out that ALO = Angie, and while both ALO and Alice are lawyers who have spent at least three years at Columbia and have been my roommate, the above comment was made by ALO =)

15. Jonesy Says:
    July 15th, 2008 at 9:15 am

    ALO, ANP, Bomee, Angie, Alice = confused Jonesy

    Just for the record, I believe in global warming (for the most part), but I also believe the best way to thwart global warming is high oil prices, which is a market based solution. And what I don’t understand is how Democrats (and Republicans) can both want to legislate lower oil (and gasoline prices), but also want to fight global warming. Creating incentives for people to use more oil / gasoline by artificially lowering the price increases pollution, no?

    As for prisons, armies, police forces, courts and other critical services, I definitely do not disagree that they should be controlled by the government explicitly by regulation etc. I would only question whether they can be improved via better incentives and private management.

    As for Iraq, very justified. We just needed more troops from the beginning. Thankfully a great call by President Bush on the surge.

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