In an interview with KQED’s John Myers, Arnold makes his usual level of sense, which is to say very little. As I understand his point, if you cut from one area, you can spend it in another. Of course, this doesn’t really address the overall structural deficit, but, um, that’s Arnold for you.
He spends quite a while discussing privatizing prisons. He’s wanted to do it for a long time, partly because he’s no fan of the CCPOA (California Correction and Peace Officers Association), but also because he’s just really into privatization. I love how he talks about all of the great (??) aspects of prisons being cheaper per prisoner, but ignores the failings of private prisons. Like this:
For-profit prison companies like CCA have always presented themselves as both cheaper and better than the traditional publicly owned prisons, staffed by state employees. However, from the mayhem and murders at the prison in Youngstown, Ohio, which eventually led to the company paying $1.6 million to prisoners to settle a lawsuit, to a series of wrongful death civil suits, and numerous disturbances and escapes, the authors document in detail a staggering range of failures of prison management.
- failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners;
- failure to control violence in its prisons;
- substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings;
criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of illegal drugs to prisoners; and- escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody.
Many of the company’s problems are blamed on its labor policies. Because prisons are very labor intensive institutions, the only way a company like CCA can sell itself to government as a cheaper option than public prisons while still making a profit, is by using as few staff as possible, paying them as little as possible, and not spending much on training. (Alternet 12/15/2003)
So, ya, privatizing prisons is totally teh Awesome! That Arnold and all of his genius ideas!
You can listen to the whole interview at KQED here.
….love this.
The possibilities for kick backs from private prisons to judges for convicting as many as possible are unlimited. Dickens would have found much to write about here.
And if some of you low-info folk think I need a tin-foil hat use Teh Google dudes and dudettes.
This scenario has already happened.
Me?
I’m still working on my plan to plant 10,000 pot plants on state park land. Gonna start my own ‘stimulus plan’ Mr. President since the only folks you seem to care about are the….
…banksters.
Yeee-Haaaaaw!
It’s every citizen for his or herself.
Australia uses private prisons. GO check out the word there. They have failed big time.
Not only does the Gov. and the Repubs want to privatize our penal system but wonder if you knew that the largest builder of prisons in CA is a subsidiary of Haliburton. It’s great that they can divert the public’s attention from their thievery by demonizing the Guard’s union while they and their prison corporate friends move us toward the further dismantling of our commitment to the common good. That huge prison building boondoggle, AB 900, will keep us inhumanely incarcerating brown and black skinned people and will further impoverish the State and divert our resources away from schools, the environment and the safety net.
I think that we’re way past the point of optimistic books from the late 1980s like Reinventing Government, where the idea was to put public sector functions like waste disposal and service provision in competition with private contractors. This was done to some extent (going back into the 1970s), and as long as you built competition into the system, you potentially got not only better service provision, but even more efficient public provision of services, since government bureaucracy often does not have a “customer service” orientation if you don’t do things like this.
We’re way past that point now. The private contractor class has gamed the system so much, and bribed elected officials to such an extent that the private contracts see access to free government money as an entitlement, with an expectation that these businesses will be protected from government competition. This is the core issue behind the “public option” debate in health care, and it’s the core issue behind prison or military privatization as well: the contractors want easy money with no standards and no accountability.
It’s a nice gig if you can get it — a government sanctioned license to steal, for real.
Politicians like Arnold who push for these arrangements should not only stop doing it. If they persist, they should be thrown in jail.
…to make the motive for profit the very thing we would like to avoid. We would be better off if people didn’t commit crimes and had to be sent to prison, but a private prison system has incentive to see us incarcerate more citizens at the expense of all other less costly option. Same for Health Care – we want all people covered and to keep costs down with preventative measures – but an insurance company make’s more money by both denyng coverage and discouraging people from making use of their insurance. Electricity is another example, where, for instance, the primary motivation of a public utility is to keep the system working, whilst the private compaines make more money letting the grid fall apart and then begging for government for help when there are failures and blackouts – nevermind the loss of human life.
And yet Californians seem perfectly happy to embrace these things in the name of the almighty “Market.”