Privatization sounds like a good idea, if you believe that a for-profit corporation can provide any service more efficiently than a government agency. In some instances it may be true, but across the board? It's a false and dangerous premise.
In Iraq we hired soldiers of fortune, aka Blackwater and others, to run POW prisons and perform other functions that historically fall to our own military. We actually paid them more than we pay our own warriors, and exempted them from the rules our own men and women in uniform must operate under.
The result? When prisoners, many of whom turned out to be guilty of nothing, were tortured and humiliated, our military personnel were punished but not the highly paid private operators who gave the orders. Some of the bloodthirsty psychopaths, hired and paid by American taxpayers, murdered civilians with impunity.
What horrifies and disgusts me is that there was no huge outcry against this, no law passed to prevent the privatization of American military services in the future.
Another word for privatization is commercialization. Clearly there is a place for commercialization. A manufacturer may be partly owned by your government; no big problem. A manufacturer should operate under reasonable regulations enforced by your government: After all, a government is supposed to govern, and while regulations aren't always convenient, it's a real pain in the ass when a manufacturer poisons your drinking water. Or lets a little rat poison get into your baby's formula. Or builds cars that frequently explode when you signal for a left turn.
But it's also a pain in the ass when a government, especially one as backward and inefficient as a Communist government, decides to perform every step of a manufacturing operation. Remember those goofy little East German cars, the Trabant?
Commercializing necessities such as police protection and criminal justice? Bad. Tragic, in fact. It's only logical that a for-profit corporation operating a prison isn't going to be strongly invested in the rehabilitation of offenders. The more often a prisoner blows his chances of parole and the more quickly he comes back after serving his time, the more profit he represents. There are numerous opportunities to exploit the inmates, and their families, in the interest of CEO bonuses and against the long-range interests of the taxpayers, and like any corporation with its eye on the bottom line, the prison operators have not been shy about reaping this harvest.
Now we've had a glimpse of a "worse case scenario." I don't say "worst" because that's still to come, if we don't stop this folly of selling off your government to the highest bidders.
Turns out that two judges in Pennsylvania were taking fortunes in bribes for supporting the construction of new juvenile facilities, and for sentencing young offenders to unreasonably long terms in those same facilities. OK, maybe they haven't been convicted yet, and may be claiming that some Wall Street fat cats were just slipping them millions of dollars out of the kindness of their hearts. And maybe pigs really do fly.
There are too many people who can get angry about a mob assassin escaping justice, as did Harry Aleman the first time around, because the judge accepted a bribe, yet would dismiss as a minor problem an innocent person being convicted, even if that were also because the judge's hands were dirty. "If he didn't do that, he's probably guilty of a lot of other stuff, so who cares." Maybe you've found yourself thinking along those lines. And a judge sentencing someone to a long term, for a minor offense? "Lock 'em up and keep 'em. We're better off that way."
Those private prisons aren't cheaper for us. It still costs $22,000 a year and more, per year, per prisoner, to keep someone behind bars. And like it or not, they're human beings. Suppose your son, who may be the all-American boy, is at a party with friends. Party crashers start a fight. Although he did no more than defend himself and perhaps his girlfriend, he's charged with battery and mob action. He and his lawyer are confident the case will be dismissed. It isn't. Now your son isn't going to college. He's going to prison for ten years.
A $220,000 bill to the taxpayers, and the down payment on a yacht for the judge. And as one young man did in the case I've described, your son kills himself. Now what do you think about it?
To repeat myself: Stop selling your government to Wall Street, before it's too late.