How would prisons work in a libertarian/anarcho-capitalist society? After watching Moore’s movie (gulp which is full of illogical fallacies) he claims since private prisons need to make profit they’ll pay off judges to send more people in jail. I was wondering how to debunk this claim and how actual private prisons work.
I’m not so sure there would be prisons…
Somebody has to pay for these prisons. In all likelihood, it would be insurance/defense agencies. However, in the absence of a state, the primary goal of these institutions would be restitution for a criminal’s victims. I doubt there would be much of a market for prisons anyway.
For those prisons that remain, they would have an incentive to get as many customers (inmates) as possible - however, insurers have an incentive to pay for as few inmates as possible. They would balance each other out I guess.
In an anarcho-capitalist society who do you think will pay for a person’s stay in prison? Unless the victim has the financial means to keep his offender jailed for the entirety of his sentence or the victim has enough money to pay for his stay in prison himself or insurance companies see the offender as a big enough threat to merit the cost of keeping him jailed then prison isn’t even an option. Instead of using prison as a punishment for each and every crime commited there would be alternative means of punishment which would better reflect the the damage the criminal caused. For example if someone robs a store he would most likely be required to pay the victim back for everything he stole and to cover the cost accumulated in catching him. This would ensure that the victim of the crime isn’t forced to suffer an even greater financial burden in keeping the thief jailed.
Anyone have a free version of this article? http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/250110
I think the global prison population would fall drastically, but I don’t see them going extinct. Some of you might enjoy this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Penitentiary
This is what happens today, under a state. The lawmakers, judges, police and prisonguards are all on the same team. So they invent phony victimless crime laws so that they and their friends get to keep their jobs.
Judges are already ‘paid off’ in our current Corporatist system. Much like the Military-Industrial Complex, there’s a Prison-Industrial Complex.
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If the judges are a part of a monopoly institution, that argument certainly holds, because the person who the judge will judge, the potential prisoner, cannot choose the person who will be his judge. If, however, the judges are a part of a non-monopoly institution, the argument does not hold anymore, because the potential prisoner can indeed, to some extent, choose the person who will be his judge. In both the former and the latter conditions, the potential prisoner will attempt to avoid unfair and corrupt judges but would obviously be much more successful in that venture within a non-monopolistic system vis-à-vis a monopolistic system.
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If prisons exist within a free society, insurance companies would have to fund them. In such a situation, the prisons, as profit-oriented establishments, would indeed want to sell their services as much as possible and therefore to accumulate as many prisoners as possible in order to profit as much as possible; but the insurance companies, also as profit-oriented establishments, would want to minimize their cost of production as much as possible and therefore to pay the prison system as little as possible and therefore to fund the incarceration of as little of an amount of prisoners as possible. In such a situation, the profit-motive of the prisons and the profit-motive of the insurance companies would, atleast to some extent, balance each other in that respect.
Here is a free copy of Bob Murphy’s Chaos Theory in which he constructs a society that is 100% based on voluntary exchange. There is a section concerning private prisons, punishments, defence and various other private entities. It does not go into much detail but it is a perfect for getting a basic understanding of how a free society would function.
You don’t have to debunk the unproven. Nor does the smear help, since government judges are paid off NOW.
If a legitimate argument is an argument which one must debunk in order to undogmatically continue to believe what the argument implies that one should not believe, the argument which Moore advanced is actually a completely legitimate argument against the idea that the prison system should be ‘privatized’. If you do not believe that the precedent sentence is true, I would like to hear what you believe constitutes “pro[of]”.
Non sequitur. Moore’s “argument” isn’t an argument at all; it’s an unbacked blatant assertion.
I see that you failed to quote the second part of my response. I will re-post it here:
Ok. Who’s going to pay for the incarceration? And if word gets out that the judge is being bought off, what’s that going to do to their reputation? Perhaps Moore should put some thought into the crap he spews.
What part of “the unproven does not need to be disproven” do you not get? Are you purposefully being obtuse? Do you think your red herring about “what constitutes proof” means anything to me? Listen up: I can say that the moon is made of green cheese, but that doesn’t make it so, now does it. Similarly, Moore can make all sorts of smear-tactic accusations he wants to, but unless he has something other than his say-so: it won’t fly with anyone who has a functioning brain.
If the institution wherein the judge works is a monopoly, that information is worthless because the persons who must see a judge cannot choose which judge to see.
Then maybe Moore should get a clue and focus his ire on that.
That would be way too much like having to admit that he’s wrong.
It is amusing that you believe that you can both (a) determine whether an argument constitutes proof and (b) not define what actually constitutes “proof”.
Why would anyone in their right mind go before a judge that they know for sure will unfairly convict them of a crime?
Then they could choose not to go to a judge at all or both parties could find someone each of them trusted to hear the case. What they couldn’t do is to force each other to see a judge the other party didn’t agree to see.