Friday, June 22, 2012
PK and The Privatized Prison
PK follows up on the NY Times expose of New Jersey's corporate prison halfway houses. The Times showed how bad they are and PK shows us why privatization never works.
The horrors described are part of a broader pattern in which essential functions of government are being both privatized and degraded...So it doesn't work. Why, you might ask, do our fearless leaders do this?
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...
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?In the end your tax dollars are turned into private profit that they won't even share with the workers who make it possible. And the same story applies to any other public service that someone wants to "privatize", a fancy term for stealing from the public treasury.
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