Originally Posted by
Nessus
If you consider prisoner on prisoner assault and rape a bad thing, then it's not a very good model, no. But even Old Munchkin wants "bad people" assaulting and raping each other, ie. where the public idea of justice is somehow served. But once you start having similar feed-back loops for having more and more people assaulted and raped in prison, just as you have loops for growing more and more corn, it is in my opinion possible that these loops of money, lobbying and legislation-purchasing will at some point start to go against the public idea of justice.
Now, I realize that Americans really, really love prisoners (and prison officers) assaulting and raping prisoners, but I posit that it's possible for the prison industry to reach a point where it inhabits such a large sector of the economy that the sheer number of people required for the raping and the assaulting means that it will in some way touch almost everyone. That could be a breaking point, but the soft sciences are more your field than mine!
On the other hand, is the argument then that with the proper checks in place (how could they be put in place if the government is fundamentally unable to govern?) the private sector could produce the most efficient centers for rehabilitation? How would this be incentivized? Ostensibly you still wouldn't actually have private parties buying verdicts to put other private parties behind bars; there'd be some kind of external justice system that'd be funded by taxes. (Or would there?) And then the government would buy this prison service from the private sector, like it does with Black Water and what have you. How do you set up the funding so that it'd actually make the facilities genuinely rehabilitate as many people as possible? (I am assuming you would prefer this over the rape and assault factories, I apologize if that's rude.) Would the government also purchase some kind of evaluation system from the private sector? How do you make sure these two industries don't form a cartel? Especially since a vast majority of capital is accumulating in a smaller and smaller number of hands, it might even be logistically impossible to keep the two industries' leads apart.
If you can show that this would be the cheapest and most rehabilitating system out there, I would be really interested in seeing that. And before you say it, no, I'm not suggesting by some long con that, say, the Norwegian system would carry over well to the US. I guess the way I see it, it's the path of least resistance for the citizenship to try and stop its own government from operating rape factories, rather than just throwing their hands in the air, shoving the whole thing off for the private sector to have a go and hope for the best. (Or it would be, if the citizenry had any way of influencing its own government; this doesn't seem like a "thing" these days. Damn kids, get off my lawn!) It's entirely plausible to me that this would cost the tax payers some extra money, but I wonder what the price tag is on rape factory removal? How much is too much? I haven't a clue.
