Prison Broke, the Series

Arnold Swarzenegger has suggested that California might ease its budgetary crisis by paying Mexico to build prisons to house some 20,000 illegal immigrant prisoners.  He also believes that California should consider outsourcing prison services to the private sector.  According to CorpWatch: The largest provider of private prison facilities in the United States is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).  Excellence in Corrections is CCA's motto.  You have to admit that their sales pitch (website) is pretty slick.  But what does "excellence in corrections" really mean?  Would recidivism be reduced; or would the real measure of success be a lower cost to house an exploding prison population? 

A hundred years ago private prisons were a familiar feature of American life, with disastrous consequences. Prisoners were farmed out as slave labor. They were routinely beaten and abused, fed slop and kept in horribly overcrowded cells. Conditions were so wretched that by the end of the nineteenth century private prisons were outlawed in most states.

The modern concept of the penitentiary was born in 1779, when John Howard introduced the Penitentiary Act to correct the abuses that Howard had documented in his report, The State of Prisons in England and Wales.  Under Howard's concept, prisoners were expected to work long hours in heavy manual labor during the day and be confined in individual cells at night to meditate upon penitence or remorse over their bad deeds. 

But prison management means different things to different people.  The out-of-control fascist US Attorney General Eric Holder is  currently persecuting Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio for alleged civil rights violations.  Holder's Department of Justice has become the Department of Injustice and may as well be staffed by the National Lawyers Guild or the ACLUseless. There's also the very real possibility that Arpaio and some of his staff might be indicted by a Federal grand jury looking into alleged abuses of power by Arpaio.

 

Proverbial ham sandwiches aside, forcing inmates to wear pink underwear and live in tents is made to sound like the second coming of Abu Gharib, but only if you're so inclined to believe the Liberal-Fascist vermin press and other Leftist America haters.  The above-cited Wikipedia article on Abu Gharib is rife with undocumented  allegations written in the style of the average Daily Kos kook.  This is in line with the general m.o. of the Left, which is to lie and then lie some more.  I've yet to meet a Liberal Fascist ideologue that ever told the complete truth about anything or anyone they are opposed to.   

The 19th Century English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed  a prison building, which  he called the Panopticon.   The key feature of the building is that prisoners can be simultaneously watched.  Although the Panopticon was not constructed, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject, the the design had an important influence upon later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of a whole raft of nineteenth-century 'disciplinary' institutions.  Ironically, the former Mexican prison,  Palacio de Lecumberri in Mexico City, Mexico was inspired by the Panopticon.  It now houses the General National Archive.

It's not beyond the span of possibilities that a privately run prison might take on the clinical coldness of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange in which experimentation with behaviorial modification techniques in prisons  might become commonplace.  Moreover, the temptation to make a prison even more profitable could result in a fascist gulag mentality in which common decency becomes an afterthought. Prisoners could be rented out to big Pharma for drug experimentation, used for dangerous projects, slave labor, or even for organ transplants.  The possibilites for predatory socialist commercialism is frightening.

There is always the temptation to let the private sector take over government services or for politicians to say that they will run government "like a business."  There isn't a more boneheaded concept floating around the political arena.  Governments are not profit making entities.  Core government services such as law enforcement, fire protection,  code enforcement, zoning, and yes, prisons are the  responsibility of government and not CPAs or Harvard MBAs.

One last question Arnie, how we gonna pay for building prisons in Mexico?  Did you instead ever think of billing Mexico and other countries for the cost of maintaining their wayward citizens on the oppressed California taxpayer's dime? No, of course not.  Pinhead politicians seldom have any good ideas--just the really stupid ones.