Ah yes, I have mentioned in other comments about regulation keeping private prisons in check too. I should have restated it here. I am in favour of checks and balances, which is why my goal for the system contains ”...within the limits of the law”. I agree with almost everything you say here (I’d keep some public prisons until confident that the market is mature enough to handle all cases better than the public system, but I wouldn’t implement your 10-year loan).
Human rights laws. Etc.
Yep, I’m all for that. One thing that people are missing is that the goal of a system kind of… “compresses” the space of things you want to happen. That compression is lossy. You want that goal to lose as few things as possible, but you will lose some things. To fix that, you will need some regulation to make sure the system works in the important edge cases.
prisons may not have a strong incentive to care about the welfare of the prisoners whilst they are in the prison
This is incorrect. They do have a strong incentive, since the contract comes into effect immediately after the auction: If a crime happens in their prison, the prison has to pay the government. The resulting problem is that prisons have an incentive to hide these crimes. So I recommended that prisons be outfitted with cameras and microphones that are externally audited.
Ah yes, I have mentioned in other comments about regulation keeping private prisons in check too. I should have restated it here. I am in favour of checks and balances, which is why my goal for the system contains ”...within the limits of the law”. I agree with almost everything you say here (I’d keep some public prisons until confident that the market is mature enough to handle all cases better than the public system, but I wouldn’t implement your 10-year loan).
Yep, I’m all for that. One thing that people are missing is that the goal of a system kind of… “compresses” the space of things you want to happen. That compression is lossy. You want that goal to lose as few things as possible, but you will lose some things. To fix that, you will need some regulation to make sure the system works in the important edge cases.
This is incorrect. They do have a strong incentive, since the contract comes into effect immediately after the auction: If a crime happens in their prison, the prison has to pay the government. The resulting problem is that prisons have an incentive to hide these crimes. So I recommended that prisons be outfitted with cameras and microphones that are externally audited.