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Saturday, October 24, 2009

Privatizing Death Row

There are a few simple questions that this article does not adequately address.

If a private company is running a prison, then do they get paid per prisoner? If this is true, then we get back to a very strange case of how the private company turns a profit. In simple terms, the more prisoners, the more money.

Am I missing something here?

Is this a good idea. If increasing the prison population would mean more profits for the private companies running the prison, would it not be more desirable to have more prisoners. And so then we get into the area of creating an environment where crime is committed to increase prisoner population.

Okay, so now you are going to tell me that a privately held company would never do such a thing. And exactly why would you think that. Corporations have a mandate to deliver profits, more and more profits. The environment as an example certainly has not benefited from corporations, why would societies and prisoners. Corporate mischief is about as common as head colds. Don't we have enough examples of that already.

Imagine where wink and nod cronyism is going to take this one.

This is the stuff of science fiction, and not the bright side of it either.

We go one step forward and two steps backwards at every opportunity.

NY Times: Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row.

Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.

...executions would still be performed by the state...

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