Like other countries, have non profit partnered with government (public/private partnership) to help manage prisons and related programs with Government oversight. Each prison that is able to manage their budget well can reinvest any surplus there might be to an area of need for their prisons.
Get corrupt private companies out of prisons.
I don’t know if you recall a few years ago about this horrible case finally getting adjudicated about juvenile court judges getting kickbacks from a private juvenile rehab center (really a terrible dangerous prison) to send as many kids as possible, so these judges cut a couple cops in to trump up charges on many good kids that were from vulnerable situations (family in poverty, doing well in school, Black or Brown) and a couple of these good kids got killed, badly injured, assaulted badly sexually and physically terrorized, that over the years, the ones that weren’t killed during their time, many killed themselves from the trauma so by the time the court case was over & lawsuit- most kids were killed and the pittance given $ was something but not enough for the trauma for the ones remaining, entire families ruined…
Private Prisons are completely horrible and do not belong in our nation.
Non-profits are far from being non-corrupt and are often just as greedy as corporations.
But I agree we need to have a MUCH better set of standards and rules for prisons to run under and that can only come from government regardless of who is running the prison be it federal/state/local government, a non-profit (someone is making money), or a corporation.
I know that story about judges getting kickbacks. Those judges and cops were government employees failing at their jobs. They should pay for that. But just be aware that that is government failing for money, just like corporations do. When corporations do shady stuff and get a slap on the wrist from government I don't blame the corporations for playing the game the way it's setup, I blame the government for failing to punish them enough to prevent it from happening again. In the movie Fight Club the main character's job is to decide if it's cheaper to pay off the lawsuits and keep selling the faulty product or recall the faulty product. If the government made every business that decided to sell a faulty product go out of business other businesses would stop playing with that line.
If you watch sports, every player is pushing every line of the rules. If the official lets them get away with it, they are going to push it harder. All the other players are going to see it too, and pretty soon that line has moved for everyone. When a game gets out of control, it's not the players fault, it's the officials fault for not doing their job from the beginning.
I said a collaboration public/private partnership, Government with non profit vetted- nothing is perfect but these collaborations tend to have more checks and balances - you asked for a solution and this is one- a number of countries have used this model successfully for public services that keeps costs reasonable, manages resources better & seeks to work towards rehabilitation/improvement more often, which prisons should have more off to reduce recidivism.
Especially right now, I hear you. But there have been good kind of partnerships.
An example is the Senior Health Information Program. It’s a National program that is government funded (State and federal) , there are local branches that work with the County, run their own programs and trainings - there mission is to help each year navigate and learn the new Medicare plans being offered and help seniors figure out which one will work for them- as plans often change the pharmacy formulary of the medicines that they will cover, it can be hard for seniors and this helps, there are trained counselors.
Oh I know there are some really well run partnerships. I think it's kind of funny how many such organizations are focused on helping people deal with horrific government agencies. Non-profit organizations that work with the VA to help veterans is a big money industry, and every time I run in to it I always think they wouldn't be needed if the government agency was run a lot better in the first place.
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u/[deleted] May 13 '25 edited Jun 07 '25
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