patrick.net

I disagree. Ban government funding of prisons, and strike down all victim-less crimes. That should solve the problem nicely.

Patrick says

Their economic efficiency is no better than government-run prisons.

I tend to agree, but one problem with public system is you tend to have unions, protecting people who shouldn't be in these jobs. Then fat retirements promises, leading to people who retire with more than most people make, all paid by your taxes. If you want the full cost of gov prison, include pensions, and future pension funds bailouts.
The government is just ill equipped to deal with unions.

Yes @Heraclitusstudent you are right.

That's one reason we must prohibit all public sector unions, which is also one of my proposals.

rando says

we must prohibit all public sector unions

Starting with prison guards and police unions. They are the two groups most responsible for corruption of our government, human rights abuse, and increasing violent crime.

Dan8267 says

and increasing violent crime.

How so?

BayArea says

How so?

www.youtube.com/embed/gJL6qvBvCoU

BayArea says

How so?

The prison and court systems are designed to maximize profits for police unions, guard unions, lawyers, and the courts. The way to maximize the profits of any business is to increase sales. In the criminal court system, crimes are sales. The more people committing crimes, the better. The more crimes committed by repeat offenders, the better. The more instances of crime, the more court proceedings, prisoners, and thus more prison guards, more paid time for lawyers and judges, more cops on the street and more paid overtime for cops.

It all comes down to perverse fiscal incentives. Just about every evil in our society comes down to perverse incentives. Thus, all solutions come down to proper mathematical models and engineering of systems. That's why we need STEM people automating the politicians, judges, and lawyers out of jobs.

I feel guilty for linking to Amazon since it denied Patrick that sweet, sweet referral money, but it's still the number one source for books.

There is a good book called On the Logic of Failure that describes why human beings are lousy at managing complex systems, i.e. systems with many feedback loops (positive and/or negative) such as the weather and economies, and how you can change the way you think to deal with complex systems.

I disagree any transgressions by the private prisons are minute compared to the transgressions committed by unions.

Stating that they make a profit like that is a bad thing is poor reasoning.

Here is a private police force operating out of Detroit, without guns, that do a stellar job.

www.youtube.com/embed/vqlVL26jrCA

indigenous says

Here is a private police force operating out of Detroit, without guns, that do a stellar job.

Do they do a stellar job at policing or at marketing? Privatization tends to increase perverse incentives, not fix the ones that already exist. I've read much material detailing how privatization of police and prisons results in atrocities.

I've always thought it was pathetic that someone is such a loser that he feels to need to dislike every post I make regardless of content. It doesn't bother me. I don't give a shit how many times a person clicks the dislike button or what that number is besides my name precisely because this petty practice of disliking posts solely based on the author rather than the content renders the dislike count completely meaningless and useless.

But it is still pathetic and cowardly. Real men voice their objections out loud and back up those objections with rational justifications. Anonymous bulk disliking is an indication of micro-penis syndrome. That's not an ad hominem attack, it's a fact. Plus, you really can't attack an anonymous agent.

If Patrick wants to make the dislike feature have any use, he should simply count massive numbers of dislikes of an author X's posts by user Y as a single dislike of author X by user Y and not count them as dislikes against specific posts. This can be detected with a simple percent count and can even be scaled proportionally to the percentage. Distinguishing between someone who just hates person X from someone who hates a particular post by person X would actually make the dislike feature useful. It would also disincentive spamming of dislikes while rendering such spamming futile.

A similar thing could be done with likes if that is also abused with spam.

Oh, and if @Patrick needs some motivation to implement this, I could always write a bot that logs into PatNet with multiple user accounts and just goes through all the posts of trolls disliking them all causing each of those trolls to have millions of dislikes. It would not be hard to do that. Less than a hundred lines of code.

Dan8267 says

I've read much material detailing how privatization of police and prisons results in atrocities

I have read the same about public ones, the good thing about private ones is you can cancel the contract.

I think we have a responsibility as citizens to help maintain prisons where atrocities do not occur.

This is one reason for my proposal of free speech for all prisoners.

End Union Jobs in the Government. The Voters are the only damned Union a government worker has any business being in.

Dan8267 says

The way to maximize the profits of any business is to increase sales.

For the record, increasing profits can happen in two ways. You either increase revenue (sales) or you decrease costs.

I agree with the rest of your post.

indigenous says

I have read the same about public ones, the good thing about private ones is you can cancel the contract.

And does that actually happen after human abuse is discovered? No.

BayArea says

For the record, increasing profits can happen in two ways. You either increase revenue (sales) or you decrease costs.

Yes, but that does not contradict my point. I did not imply that increasing sales was the only way to increase profits. Also, the cost per prisoner, and by that I mean money actually spent on the prisoner not the guards, sheriffs, etc., is already minimized. This does have the effect of inflicting needless and pointless suffering on the prisoners, however, it does not affect the desire to increase recidivism or to over-prosecute or fraudulently prosecute. The financial incentive to increase the sales operates independently of decreasing product costs.

Dan8267 says

And does that actually happen after human abuse is discovered? No.

Sure it does which is more than I can say for the state.

Government prisons: where there are more losers outside the bars than inside the bars.

indigenous says

Sure it does which is more than I can say for the state.

Examples?

Dan8267 says

Examples?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/us-to-phase-out-use-of-private-prisons-for-federal-inmates.html?_r=0

indigenous says

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/us-to-phase-out-use-of-private-prisons-for-federal-inmates.html?_r=0

“Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own bureau facilities,” Sally Q. Yates, the deputy attorney general, wrote in a memo to the bureau. Such prisons, she said, “do not save substantially on costs,” and they provide fewer rehabilitative services, like educational programs and job training, that are “essential to reducing recidivism and improving public safety.”

This article completely contradicts your thesis that private prisons are better than state-run ones while not supporting your assertion that private prisons are shut down when it is discovered that they have abused humans.