Watching the watchers

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Alex Tabarrok has started a good thread on the privatization of prisons. The comments section is especially interesting. One commenter writes:

I spent a few years as a civil rights investigator in a major U.S. city that had two jails - one public and one private. The inmate populations were the same, and the guards were drawn from the same labor pool.

Investigating alleged abuse at the private facility was much harder. The guards felt a strong economic motive to cover up their actions (even if their actions were not criminal) - the loss of their company stock, or the decline in its value. The stock price of the private company was written every morning on a white board in the jail lobby, and it -rather than prison management- became the focus of the institution. Also, the private company had trouble finding guards, so it drew from the ranks of the public system, often hiring the fired, or the worst performers. On the other hand, their cover-ups were much more efficient than the ones at the public jail.

I see how it's supposed to work, but in my experience, outsourcing such an essential government function is both wrong on a theoretical level and dysfunctional in practice. I worry even more about the outsourcing of law enforcement (speed cameras, red light cameras, and private patrols are current examples).

Power always corrupts anyway. Why provide economic incentives on top of that?

I spent a year as a clerk in a public interest lawfirm that monitored the Puerto Rico jail system. The complaints about abuses in the "privatized" prisons were considerably higher and more severe than those at the public ones. I seem to recall that inmate-on-inmate violencewas higher at government run facilities, but these housed the most dangerous criminals, so the lines of causation may have been muddled.