Not that it's any secret that state politicians are playing these games with our people and communities to their own advantage - the media here has been trying to tell folks about the private prison fiasco in AZ for awhile now, but people don't seem to listen or care. It scares me sometimes to think how much more stupid Arizona voters can still get about crime and punishment. If a politician says something will save taxpayer money and protect us from all the bad guys, our electorate will buy it even if it starves our own schools and poisons our own wells...which makes us look awfully cheap, vindictive, and just plain foolish.
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Prisons, Privatization, Patronage
June 21, 2012
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Over the past few days, The New York Times has published several terrifying reports
about New Jersey’s system of halfway houses — privately run adjuncts to
the regular system of prisons. The series is a model of investigative
reporting, which everyone should read. But it should also be seen in
context. The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which
essential functions of government are being both privatized and
degraded.
First of all, about those halfway houses: In 2010, Chris Christie,
the state’s governor — who has close personal ties to Community
Education Centers, the largest operator of these facilities, and who
once worked as a lobbyist for the firm — described the company’s
operations as “representing the very best of the human spirit.” But The
Times’s reports instead portray something closer to hell on earth — an
understaffed, poorly run system, with a demoralized work force, from
which the most dangerous individuals often escape to wreak havoc, while
relatively mild offenders face terror and abuse at the hands of other
inmates.
It’s a terrible story. But, as I said, you really need to see it in the
broader context of a nationwide drive on the part of America’s right to
privatize government functions, very much including the operation of
prisons. What’s behind this drive?
You might be tempted to say that it reflects conservative belief in the
magic of the marketplace, in the superiority of free-market competition
over government planning. And that’s certainly the way right-wing
politicians like to frame the issue.
But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one
thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex —
companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant
Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is
competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government
contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no
reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency.
And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance,
part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not
materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to
save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe
benefits, and other labor-related costs.”
So let’s see: Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards
and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror
stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise!
So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?
One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of
government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront
expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while
raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot
about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension
liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being
accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies
hired to operate prisons, schools and more.
Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public
employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic
in any case.
But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what
privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what
it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of
politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get
privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both
political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a
quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations
capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the
corporations? Does it matter?
Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its
own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’
unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts
public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively
transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public
pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to
bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.
The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times
discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated
instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a
pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and
patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.
