What is the most important thing a government can do with its citizens? Collect taxes? Build roads? Public education? All important; but the power to take away liberty, through punishment and imprisonment, is the most fundamental power and democratic governments have a special responsibility to be rational and accountable in using it.
The United States uses this power a lot. We have 5 percent of the world’s population, but 23 percent of the world’s incarcerated.
And the most severe form of punishment is irrevocable, putting people to death. Unlike most countries in the world, the United States allows the death penalty and uses it. In 2008, five countries — the U.S., China, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia — accounted for 93 percent of all executions worldwide.
So we use state power a lot. But embedded in American politics is resistance to paying, through taxes, for the public services we use. Instead, we have a magical belief that private markets can solve our public problems at no cost. And these three factors — high use of prison and capital punishment, aversion to taxes, and belief in markets — is now leading the state of Arizona (truly strapped for cash, like most states) to consider abandoning
its role as a civilized government and selling its most essential feature — the right to punish citizens — to the highest bidder.
Of course, Arizona — the last of the contiguous states, admitted to the Union in 1912 — could deal with the costs of imprisonment by raising taxes, rethinking the delivery of services, revamping punishment for nonviolent crimes and handling of illegal immigrants, or eliminating the death penalty (which is the biggest cash sink of any criminal-justice system.) But instead it wants to privatize all imprisonment, even death row. (For now, Arizona would still have a public employee pull the switch or inject the sedatives.)
And it won’t even work. The advocates of prison privatization claim they can deliver better services, but the reality has been lower standards, overcrowded cells, and stripping prison workers of employee benefits and decent wages.
This dystopian vision of privatizing the state, while all other public services such as transportation, education, and safety are allowed to disintegrate, was prefigured in the 1987 film “Robocop.” (Click the link to see the trailer!)
The financial crisis and the recession have shown us that markets cannot even solve economic problems. It is even more foolish and irresponsible to cede the power of punishment to private markets.
12 Responses to Living in a Robocop World
lartnec - October 26, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Maybe it sounds a little bit more worse than it really should be — from what I’ve seen at state and city levels, government employees have little fear of losing their jobs because of performance –private organizations may well fear losing licenses — if lower standards and overcrowding are a problem, then let’s set higher standards and a minimum sq. ft. per prisoner from a regulatory standpoint — there’s no reason that private should be synonymous with “free market” –I think that we both agree that the existing system is not efficient — sometimes private industry can be a more effective way of creating better systems through trial and error under the watchful eye of a regulator — I definitely have no confidence in the government of Arizona to provide that watchful eye One thing that the public system has not done — is find a way to effectively reduce the strong and unhealthy network relationships between the affected –personally, I think I prefer the old notion of exile to the death penalty — and as a side note, relocation to child imprisonment
11232033 - October 26, 2009 at 1:59 pm
The movement against privatization of prisons has been led for many years by Grassroots Leadership based in NC. It needs your assistance and support to stop the terrible abuse of prisoners and their families in the name of bad budgets and market economics. Google them up and help them do their necessary work.Bob in Madison.
primaryovertone - October 26, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Can you show how many countries allow the death penalty world-wide? Why is the death penalty “the biggest cash sink of any criminal-justice system”? Can you back that up? I want to see the figures which reflect a greater cost to kill an inmate as opposed to feeding, clothing, housing, and guarding them for 25 years or more. Do you have those figures?How accurate are the statistics presented in the Amnesty International report? How many countries provided statistics to AI? Are there countries which refused to communicate with AI? Who were they?
fcslchron - October 26, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Dear primaryovertone,Other people have done the research; if you don’t believe it, then try a really novel concept and look it up yourself. You have asked the same questions that others have asked and answered; if you want to do it all over again, hey, go to it. Just common sense can explain some of the expense: The number of years a deathrow inmate is held, the cost of appeals and retrials, etc., are a huge cost. Not all of the cost, but a huge part of it. Imprisioning people for non-violent crimes is another brilliang idea our country’s penal system employs. In addition, even allowing the death penalty at all is a disgrace for any country which presumes to call itself civilized.Grow up.
primaryovertone - October 27, 2009 at 9:42 am
fcslchron,Perhaps you are unaware but in the academic world when we make statements like the ones Ms Ghilarducci made we are expected to back them up with some evidence. I am sure that research has already been done and that Ms. Ghilarducci has read it but she failed to cite it. The reason we cite research when we make statements is so that others can read the same research and draw conclusions themselves (either in support of the argument being made or against it). If there is evidence that shows that appeals for death-row inmates are more costly than those of people serving a life sentence I would like to see it. If there is evidence to prove that those on death-row spend more time in prison than those sentenced to life without parole I would be very surprised but completely willing to concede such arguments. But, Ms Ghilarducci has not presented any citations to support this part of her claim.You and many others feel that the death penalty is a disgrace. I and many other people I know feel that the death penalty is more humane than a life sentence. These are all opinions. I have mine and you have yours. We both have a right to hold those opinions and speak about them. If we are going to have a reasoned debate about our opinions we need to present evidence. Without any evidence, all we have is an argument which will go nowhere quickly.As to the imprisonment of “Non-violent” offenders, we need to come up with a definition of a Non-violent crime as a nation. If we can come up with one definition that everyone can agree on I think that the fight to remove non-violent offenders from the prisons could have a chance to go forward but that is based purely on opinion and not hard data.
goxewu2 - October 27, 2009 at 10:35 am
(This is a test to see if I can get a comment through on this thread. I can’t on Prof. Bauerlein’s most recent.)
suomynona - October 27, 2009 at 10:49 am
primaryovertone,This [http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1020/p02s04-usju.html] may be the report considered above in the statement about the death penalty being a ‘cash sink.’ There are figures to the contrary produced by death penality advocacy groups, but the fact that in the US executions have decreased while thousands of people remain on death row suggests that we’re indeed wasting a lot of money on this. Obviously the solution isn’t ‘kill ‘em quicker,’ and what we’ve seen in Texas in the Willingham case confirms as much. It turns out we’re a depraved enough society to actually have the death penalty, but a decent enough one to have serious (legal) reservations about executing as quickly (rashly) as they do in, for example, China.Whether death row inmates spend more time in prison than those on life sentences without parole is not the most relevant question, by the way. Of course what drives up costs of state execution are the appeals, court costs, and CYA measures that come with a practice as grave and, frankly, as infrequently performed (in the US) as state execution. Heads will roll in a very different way when an execution is botched, or when someone is wrongfully executed, or when a capital trial is suspect. But because of all this, death row inmates these days spend on average 10-13 years on death row before being executed (you can google stats on this for different states). Death penalty issues aside, the prospect of privatizing state powers like law enforcement is frightening. This would seem to open up the doors for rampant political corruption.
suomynona - October 27, 2009 at 10:51 am
I should add that we’ve already seen rampant political corruption in the case of our private military contractors. Perhaps there’s a lesson there…
primaryovertone - October 27, 2009 at 12:47 pm
suomynona,Thank you for your answer. I would like to see a report showing the number of or price of appeal made by death-row inmates as opposed to those who are sentenced to Life. This would be a more clear picture of whether there is any savings to be had by abolishing the death penalty. I do agree that a privatized justice system seems a little dangerous. I do think that prisoners should be required to do some kind of work while incarcerated. Why should society as a whole be punished by having to pay for the upkeep of these inmates through our taxes when they are the ones who behaved badly to begin with.
eleutherian - October 28, 2009 at 12:52 pm
This article is very flawed in stating, “…abandoningits role as a civilized government and selling its most essential feature — the right to punish citizens — to the highest bidder.”First, punishing citizens is not the most essential role of government. Preserving (not removing) liberty is the most essential role.Second (and regardless of your view on my first point), prison privatization does not sell the right to punish citizens. It sells (or, in most cases, leases) the right to manage their incarceration. That is a big difference and cannot just be chalked up to semantics. Fearmongering seems more appropriate.
22067030 - November 2, 2009 at 4:24 pm
While the death penalty is an interesting litmus test (we are keeping company with China, Pakistan, Iran…), bees kill more people than death chambers. The most striking line to me was “We have 5 percent of the world’s population, but 23 percent of the world’s incarcerated.” Either we have an unusual number of criminals (and what would that say about our society?) or our political system is depraved…
dank48 - November 3, 2009 at 10:18 am
Privatization, outsourcing, and all the other nostrums and fashions amount to abdication of responsibility, on the part of business and government. The idea that anything and everything can be “farmed out” without anyone’s being responsible is simply fallacious.