Wow. Arizona opens the floodgates to private prisons that are LESS cost efficient than state run prisons. Sounds like not-democracy in action.
New Arizona law allows cost-inefficient private prisons
Wow. Arizona opens the floodgates to private prisons that are LESS cost efficient than state run prisons. Sounds like not-democracy in action.
I suspect ALEC-owned legislators at work here. Tennessee passed a bill in the just-completed session expanding the use of no-bid contracting. Soon after, a bill was introduced that will reduce state oversight of state contracts. The second bill was tabled until the next session.
CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) is based here in Nashville and is a former corporate member of ALEC (officially leaving ALEC in 2011). Representatives of CCA have been on the Public Safety and Elections Task Force.
CCA, which is the largest private prison operator in the US has benefited from ALEC model laws like the “Three Strikes” laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and “Truth in Sentencing” laws. “Truth in sentencing” promotes imprisonment without parole.
In addition, CCA boosts its profits by using inexperienced, poorly trained and low paid staff, denying medical treatment to prisoners in need of treatment, and cutting corners on food services. They also augment revenues by contracting out prisoner labor.
Sounds like a win win win for the private prison industry, at the expense of everyone else, except the politicians who get contributions out of the deal.
Alternet has an excellent article concerning a privatized juvenile prison in Mississippi.
Niklaus: That for-profit “juvenile prison” is a real life nightmare. No human being should be put into the custody of such a place. It would seem that it is a guarantee to make a disturbed juvenile more disturbed.
I’m a libertarian and a vocal proponent of outsourcing, which is poorly understood. Running prisons is a proper function of government. Turning over a proper function to private interests can only be a bad thing. I encourage turning over such things as medical care, maintenance, and cleaning in prisons to private contractors. Particularly in the area of medical care, not only is it less expensive, but the quality is always better. But running the prison, NO. There are few legitimate functions of government, certainly compared to the number of functions the federal government has arrogated to itself. I find it consistent for a small-government libertarian to want government to exercise its legitimate functions.
I took a look at this about two years ago and found that it’s part of the fundamentally corrupt government purchasing processes. I say fundamentally corrupt because no part of the process is in the least focused on the interests of the citizens. DoD contracting gets the headlines, but the constituency supporting war is infinitesimal. The case brought up was ventilators in the federal stockpile that had not been maintained; obviously the fault of Trump. Not so fast.
The maintenance contract was about to expire, so it had been put out for tender. The incumbent won, but another firm objected. It doesn’t matter what the reason for the objection is, once the objection exists the appeal process takes over. It is run by the contracting officer, who knows less about ventilators than my dead grandmother. He knows the Federal Acquisition Regulations. Chapter one is about two thousand pages; I think there are nearly 20 chapters. The first thing is to determine if the tender had been created in accordance with all sub-bullets in the FAR. The customer is never asked why the services are needed, nor what the urgency is. Both are irrelevant. The Contracting Officer, a technocrat, runs everything.
Objections and appeals are filed often on Federal and State contacts. The incumbent usually wins the contract, and doesn’t have a wide variety of other clients. He is somewhat stuck. It is not unusual for a contractor with much deeper pockets to file a dispute and slow down the process until the incumbent goes bankrupt. Then the contract has to be let again. Contracts are usually let to companies employing former senior members of the hiring agency. That is the organization that writes the Scope of Work. It is actually written by the recently-departed senior government employees, very carefully, so that only one bidder meets all qualifications. The former senior government employees aren’t used on the contract, that would be corrupt. They’re used on contracts written the same way by different former government employees. The truly shocking thing is that the coffee pot cost ONLY $3,000.
Outsourcing is misunderstood in the U.S. The popular narrative is that outsourcing means sending jobs to India or China. That is off-shoring, not outsourcing. I typically recommend to clients that they outsource everything except sex with their significant other. Almost all jobs outsourced stay in the country where the jobs currently exist. Outsourced payroll is huge, inexpensive, and for American companies always done by other American companies. IT is another area that is typically outsourced in-country. Janitorial and maintenance services have to be kept in country. It’s difficult to e-mail mopping the floor.