A little less than three years ago, my old friend Kevin McLeod wrote an article that stuck in my brain, decrying for-profit prisons (courtesy the Way Back machine); since then Vicky Pelaez, Kevin Matthews, the FindLaw organization, and Katie Rose Quandt have addressed various facets of this little industry:
One of the most perverse incentives in a privately run prison system is that the more prisoners a company houses, the more it gets paid. This leads to a conflict of interest on the part of privately run prisons where they, in theory, are incentivized to not rehabilitate prisoners. If private prisons worked to reduce the number of repeat offenders, they would be in effect reducing the supply of profit-producing inmates.
But none have really considered taking the next step in their criticisms: abstracting from the immediate situation to attempt to understand how to prevent such mistakes in the future.
Let’s consider something else that can get my knickers in a knot – the businessman who decides to run for office and repeatedly offers up his businessman experience, his acumen, as his credentials that makes him qualified for office – H. Ross Perot being the best known example in my lifetime (“I just want to get under the hood and fix things.”). So what’s wrong with this picture?
What we’re forgetting is that the goal of business – commerce – is NOT the goal of the government. I’m finding it a little hard to articulate the goals of government that are not objectionable to someone out there, so I’ll suggest that, if only currently, the goals of government are to protect society from outside intervention; and regulate the internal interactions of society, individually and collectively, such that, well, colloquially, everyone is equally unhappy; or that everyone is justly, according to their actions, treated.
As the one is not the other, it seems reasonable to propose a simple principle by which we can avoid future mistakes: those activities, supporting the goals of government, which may reasonably be undertaken by government, should always be taken care of by government. It is not a necessity that government be absolutely lean; showing a profit at the end of the year is not a requirement, although certainly a large deficit can be a drag on the economy. When the principle is abrogated, we find such distasteful activities as companies lobbying for longer prison sentences solely to inflate their bottom line.
And even when the principle is technically not abrogated, we still find such problems: simply consider the Military-Industrial Complex.
