Reading about prison rape at 9:45 on a Sunday morning isn't my usual routine, but here I am, reading Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy blame government for things that take place in prisons by people who were put there by... uhhh... the government:
Returning to the prison rape question, we probably cannot adopt here the standard libertarian solution of simply ending government involvement with the issue - at least not without unacceptable social costs. We can, however, reduce that involvement.[,,,]
A second way of reducing (though not eliminating) government involvement in this field is prison privatization. As co-blogger Sasha Volokh demonstrates in a recent paper, replacing government-run prisons with private ones may well reduce the overall lobbying power of the prison industry, and thereby make it easier to both reduce overall incarceration levels and force improvements in prison conditions. Even under privatization, it would still be difficult to force through legislation that reduces incarceration rates or protects prisoners. But it would be easier to achieve this than under the status quo.
Yes, the subcontracting of military services has done a great job eliminating lobbying by defense contractors. The fact that contractors are getting cost-plus contracts to run mess halls and deliver fuel in Iraq means that we no longer have to worry about rent-seeking from the powerful veteran's lobby. Private prisons will never cut corners to prevent prisoner-on-prisoner abuse and will never try to cover it up when it happens. Private prisons will never lobby, as the guards' unions have, for policies that give them the most money for the least effort. Never.
Solmin points out to this paper by Alex (Sasha) Volokh, summarized thusly:
I conclude that there is at present no particular reason to credit this argument. Even without privatization, government agents already lobby for changes in substantive law -- in the prison context, for example, public corrections officer unions are active advocates of pro-incarceration policy. Against this background, adding the “extra voice” of the private sector will not necessarily increase either the amount of industry-increasing advocacy or its effectiveness. In fact, privatization may well reduce the industry's political power: Because advocacy is a “public good” for the industry, as the number of independent actors increases, the largest actor's advocacy decreases (since it no longer captures the full benefit of its advocacy) and the smaller actors free-ride off the largest actor's contribution. Under some plausible assumptions, therefore, privatization may actually decrease advocacy, and under different plausible assumptions, the net effect of privatization on advocacy is ambiguous.
If I understand Volokh correctly, he's arguing that the move from a unified union to many private actors increases the free-rider problem and reduces the lobbying power of private prisons. Sounds great. Except for the fact that there are significant economies of scale in the construction and operation of prisons, leading to a few large players with interests that align very closely, at least in terms of profit-maximization.
What this comes down to is a choice between rent-seeking of unions and the rent-seeking of large corporations. It's a near zero-sum choice between two competing interests, and GMU Law Prof Solmin has made his.
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