February 28, 2005
Private, Public Prison Cocktail, shaken not stirred
Though anti-privatization in theme, this NY times piece sheds light on the manipulation that the left is imposing on the term "privatization." When broad socialized services privatize small aspects of their operations they're typically just cutting costs. The extent of these costs are difficult to calculate, as is the nature of socialized provisions. The important thing to note is that costs in this arena are more than just obvious tax dollars but quality services as well. But how are quality services to be quantified in an industry with no direct customer base? Mises' socialist calculation debate rings true.
Posted by djdamico at 4:37 AM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2005
PC policies could put gaurds and inmates in danger
This California ruling shows the bazaar logistical outgrowths of state provided services. When political goals are placed before customer satifaction or efficient competetive practices serious ouput issues arise. When you're dealing with something as integral to societal order as justice and corrections people's lives are often on the line
Posted by djdamico at 8:49 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2005
Ban on newspapers?!
This philadelphia news report explains a suit filed by inmates to lift a ban on newspapers in a local prison. I can't decide whether the newspaper ban seems like a ridiculous policy resultant from centralized prison control and lack of competition, or if the prisoners have some nerve thinking they're entitled to reading materials. Either way its ridiculous to tie up tax payers dollars with litigation costs to solve this dispute.
Posted by djdamico at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
Curriculum Vitae
Visit my new homepage at danieljdamico.com
Posted by djdamico at 8:38 PM | Comments (2)
Common sense makes a run for the border.
Published in Loyola University's student newspaper: The Maroon on April 30,2004.
"Common sense makes a run for the border" by Daniel J. D'Amico
Posted by djdamico at 8:34 PM | Comments (0)
That Taco Bell Boycott posted at mises.org
"That Taco Bell Boycott" By Daniel J. D'Amico
published on www.mises.org
Well meaning or not, the boycott of Taco Bell by misguided activists, in the name of helping labor, is deeply ignorant and very destructive. Stopping the market transactions of mutually benefiting exchange, even in the name of moral obligations, does not produce anything of lasting value to assist in capital accumulation or increasing standards of living. It interferes with the freedom of contract and makes people poorer.
Posted by djdamico at 8:20 PM | Comments (0)
Bruce Benson, "To Serve and Protect; Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice." Independent Institute. NYU Press. 1998.
Xiv Forward: Corrections = law enforcement, the police, prosecution, trial and judicial response, probation, prisons and parole.
Xvi. Bio-cultural significant contributing factor to crime in addition to free will.
This sounds like a load of crap at first. Understanding this is just an understanding that people's value scales are shaped by their own experience and surroundings over the course of their life. The state is the major producer of these negative instigators and is thus greatly responsible for the crime rates that exist in today's society.
xx. Private citizens stop crime more than officers.
While Benson spent a hell of a lot of time in The Enterprise of Law convincing the reader that a stateless provision of justice was most likely a peaceful serene environment, this suggestion seems to bring us back to the implementation of vigilantism. I shall define the term vigilantism as simply utilizing the method of immediate personal violent action so as to seek retaliatory justice against a guilty aggressor. In the theoretical sense vigilantism is completely legitimate, which is to say that in the example that person x aggresses against person y and y attempts to seek justice from x through vigilantism, no individual z would be legitimized in stopping him, knowing the nature of truth and justice in the scenario to be that y had been aggressed against by x.
Theoretically, this justification of violence is true, but Benson makes a good point in exposing certain incentives of the individual within the private society to prefer peaceful means in the realistic application of law. Simply put, it is a lesser risk to maintain a personal stance of pacifism when operating in society.
Scenarios: equal victims, weak victim, strong victim.
Introduction:
4. First historic development of police, courts, and prisons in England and the US was in the late 18th century.
5 - 6. Public and private justice working together.
Could this just be paving the way for another government subsidized industry? Is this acceptable for the safety of millions of American citizens? When the market falls out or foreign firms realize that they can out produce us can we afford flint Michigan in the realm of justice? How can we know for sure? Look at the subsidies trail, look at the worker union legislations. Look at the construction agreements. There is a direct linkage with halfway houses and drug rehab. Are we just going to be taxed to death to help the junkies recover?
9. Normative issues of whether a state is one and only legitimate provision of justice. Benson claims that this is a normative issue which he is too afraid to touch.
Hoppe presents positive statements to assert a system of natural law. Hoppe's four positive criteria for legitimizing the conditions of property ownership are, self ownership, original appropriation, productive appropriation and the freedom to exchange and contract. These four guidelines to justifiable property pass the conditions of universality and openness to argument that their opposites do not live up to. Accepting Hoppe's arguments, this paper must assert that a connotation of justice positively does exist thanks to an appropriate theory of natural law. Historically and definitively a state exists by breaking these guidelines of justice and thus it becomes reasonable to assert that a state positively does not have legitimacy, and therefore a just person may only claim that a state ought not to exist. Any theorizing of a notion of justice in coexistence with a state is self contradictory. Asserting then whether certain aspects of justice are achieved at increasing levels of efficiency within that system is irrelevant and futile.
Justice for victims of crime is the primary normative objective.
Can we know anything about justice with positive knowledge? The normative aspects of justice are not necessarily a concrete notion of justice but merely the collection of definitive attributes that are associated with the term? So anytime you're dealing with how to 'best' provide for justice, you are simultaneously defining justice. That definition, unless based upon a rational conception of natural law is normative. Once you successfully define justice through natural law theory it becomes a positive issue. All aspects of injustice are also taken out of the realm of normative debate and engulfed into a simple understanding of product quality standards and can only be attributed as benefits or costs by individuals in the market and more specifically the market for justice. To say that a private prison, or a contracted out prison has less violence, healthier inmates, and lower costs than its public counter part and therefore it is more just, is not an accurate statement, but rather pure empiricism. According to this logic a public system could provide these quality standards in a more efficient means and would therefore be attributed as just. This is obviously not the case.
When Benson asserts that his proposals or more moderate examples of contracting out prison services are preferable scenarios to current state controlled corrections, it does not suffice to theoretically assert their implications as policy. This same logic could be used to support minimalist state structures. We could argue for infinitely better scenarios and never achieve a truly functional system of actual real justice but we may falsely legitimize their policy implications by simply asserting their superiority over our present condition. The fact remains that it is theoretically contradictory to attempt to develop a system of criminal justice as provided by or complementary to a state. To say that a contracted out prison is more efficient, one must ask efficient at what? If one is attempting to claim efficiency at providing justice then one has made a false claim. A contracted out system is not in line with the positive notion of natural law justice.
15. Part I Private Inputs for Public Crime Control
Chapter 2 Partial Privatization, The Level and Scope of Contracting Out in Criminal Justice.
Privatizing is not the same thing as contracting out.
16. The government doesn't really produce anything. Government employees are just contracted out.
These workers or companies are engaged in contract because they infer themselves to be better off than had they not engaged in such a contract.
Then isn't the same true for the government itself. Each individual or agency in contractual relationship with a coercive government is merely building this entity up higher than it would have been had it been ostracized and shunned from legitimate contractual society in the first place? Boycott the state mother fucker!!!
When we speak about contracting out specifically in the realm of prison services we would be inclined to talk about efficiency issues and producing prison services at lower costs. We are slightly confused that we automatically think that this is preferable to completely state run agencies because of the mere utilitarian aspects of more prisoners, cleaner facilities, less violence, and lower dollar expenditures.
We fail to recognize the greater state that still exists. A penny saved for the state in the prison industry is a penny earned in its main functional arena of coercion and war. While I completely agree that a state operated prison will have no qualms about asking for higher taxes willy nilly to fund its operations, rather than using this argument to justify the alleged efficiency obtained through contracting out, I parallel my opinion by realizing that I don't expect that same state to cut its tax levels after we have successfully contracted out those prison services but merely redirect those funds to other areas of state operations.
The only way to speak of the production of prison services and maintain a legitimate connotation to the definition of justice is to speak of a complete and radical removal of state control.
THIS STUFF ABOVE WILL BE OKAY AFTER WHAT I WRITE ABOUT A SOCIETY WITH NO CRIME.
21. Private prisons are the most visible aspect of privatization.
They are also the least available for pure privatization and opting out mechanisms.
26. Chapter 3: Potential Benefits and Pitfalls of Contracting Out for Criminal Justice.
30. Incentives to Reduce Costs:
Cost savings arise because private profit-seeking entrepreneurs have strong incentives to monitor costs and avoid unnecessarily expensive means of production, perhaps in order to increase profits, but more importantly to attract and keep customers in the face of competitive alternatives.
This is all true but not applicable in current private prisons because the only customer possible is the government. Private security and courts have been successful less because of contracting out services but more because of the liberty of individuals to completely opt out of the system at their own additional costs.
34. Benson parallels the example of economies of scale to demonstrate the potential for governments to raise efficiencies by contracting out smaller services to private separate sectors, this parallels the Rothbard's theory of the firm as expressed in Klein's lecture during Mises University. Basically the market will determine how big or small firms decide to be based on economies of scale.
This example does not transpose itself successfully onto the government sector. Making this analogy is the same as wondering whether a kidnapper should outsource the production of ropes and handcuffs in order to be more efficient.
39. Quality standards are subjective according to the wants, needs, and opinions of the customer.
Answering the question of who the customer is in the hazy examples of government and private corporatism is difficult. The only real unquestionable theory of the golden rule, "he who has the gold makes the rule."
43. Contracting doesn't necessarily reduce taxes. Shows local government is cost efficient helps for elections.
Benson fails to offer empiricism of this point.
45. Corner cutting is not a result of market forces but rather corruption that limits competition.
46. Contractors are a main source of campaign funds.
As Austrian economists, we recognize the link between businesses and government as corporatism. This phenomenon is one of the major contributors to the business cycle. Those who receive the first wave of inflated currency as payments for services profit while at the expense of the lower class citizens by devaluing their currency.
Look at the time lines of expansive money supplies and prison contracts.
Source: not with our money: "who profits off of prisons."
47. Lower police costs won't solve over crowded prisons. Nazi Germany efficiency argument.
48. Corruption has not occurred in criminal justice contracting!!!
Privatize the demand side of refuse collection
50. Chapter 4: Private Inputs into "Public" Arrest and Prosecution. Vital but Reluctant Victims and Witnesses.
51. Poor people more likely to commit crime. Source: (Lott 1987)
58. Bails and bonds explained. The public system is less efficient than the private, and he points out that guilty people who anticipate being found guilty are more inclined to run away than the innocent. They way public release programs catch fugitives is at traffic check points.
We all have to give up civil liberties to catch a few rotten criminals.
62. plea bargaining defined. Coase's explanation of voluntary exchange.
What is important to remember is the scenario and conditions affecting the valuations of each party. The costly judicial system makes it more and more arduous for victims to seek compensation. Think if a mall made it harder and harder to get to the stores that you wanted to shop in.
Alaska banned plea bargaining.
65. Victim Activist groups: Mothers against drunk driving, Parents of Murdered children. Petitioning for more strict sentencing and victim testimonials.
68. Probability of victim satisfaction (successful prosecution/justice) is very small: SEE FIGURE.
127. Chapter 7 The Benefits of Privatization: Theory and Evidence.
135. Public prisons are a scarce resource just like anything else. Since they are publicly available they suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Why would people be eager to take advantage of prisons as a resource? Politicians use prison resources within their campaigns to appear tough on crime and benefit their local constituency at the states grouped expense. For example the 1980s saw a lot of violent criminals released from Florida prisons so as to make room for the politically hot and happening war on drug offenders.
Posted by djdamico at 8:15 PM | Comments (0)
Roger E Meiners: Victim Compensation, Economic, Legal and Political Aspects. Lexington Books. Massachusetts. 1978.
Xiii The fundamental question of this text and victim compensation in general is written as:
What is the extent of the state's duty to compensate citizens for harm from criminal actions?
Are existing civil remedies adequate?
To what extent would victim compensation replace private individual insurance?
Would national health care serve as an alternative to the proposed victim-compensation programs?
How do victim-compensation schemes affect the incentives and behavior of criminals and potential victims?
There is no place for the state in a just society because the nature of the state is to monopolize coercion. The real question is to what extent is the state responsible for the inefficiencies in our justice system? Is victim compensation one of these inefficiencies?
Chapter 1, Introduction:
1. The modern context of victim compensation is the granting of public funds to the victims of crimes to cover such as medical costs, lost wages, compensatory damages (pain and suffering). It is not representative of the value of lost property.
2. Public Choice: Will a system of compensatory justice be feasible within the context of a public system of legal services and courts. I for one highly doubt it.
Society is at fault for crime?
3. If the state is at fault for crime then the state owes a debt as compensation this is a Social Contract.
If we see the need for the existence of a social contract why not assure ourselves the fulfillment of such a contract by placing it in the private setting as it is proven to be more responsive than the state. Individuals will be better served by private contracts than social contracts.
90% of criminal in the Atlanta prison system are indigent and incapable of being productive enough to repay their debts.
I don't believe this for one second. Productivity is subjective. Low productive workers are forced out of the work force thanks to minimum wage laws and arbitrary labor regulations. What is the lowest training necessary industry and how much do they make a year? Worst case scenario they can be blood donors, or tattoo canvases.
4. Few victims actually seek compensation because of the opportunity costs associated with the current justice system.
Why the hell do we care about the difference between a criminal and a civil crime?
5. The system of state funded victim compensation that this book proposes is nothing short of forceful and coercive insurance payments, theft to avoid theft.
Empirical evidence supports that harsh punishment deters crime.
Accepting a state authority is an acceptance of the social contract. An increase in crime is a justification in an increased tax rate, which can increase crime thanks to Hoppe's analysis of time preference. The state wants more crime so it can reap more taxes. State also stands to benefit more from a prisoner than if they were allowed to repay the victim.
Chapter 2, Historical and Foreign Methods of Compensation:
7. Babylonian Code of Hammurabi: eye for an eye justice.
Compensation in history was motivated less by a concern for the victim than by a desire to punish society for failing to find the criminal.
This seems compatible with Hoppe's theory of the development of civilization. Competing monarchs served as judges and a provisionary of legal justice.
For a long time the criminal paid the victim but then the state claimed harm as well.
9. Criminal pays (historical), but there appears no solution if he is to poor in comparison to his crime.
A state is incapable of forcing the most productive labor from a criminal or a citizen. Productivity requires some degree of autonomy. The state canÂ’t stand freedom; it's too risky they insist upon controlling individuals (See Benson: prisoners businesses).
Great Britain and New Zealand.
10. The Accident Compensation Act of 1972: This is just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. It pays not based on justice, wrong doing or crime but mere expense and pain. If two people beet the crap out of each other they can both seek restitution and money from the state.
12. Listed accidents with their monetary values.
14. The Theft Act of 1968: Return stolen property or pay for damages. This is different than in America where you have to file two separate cases.
Civil Evidence Act of 1968: A criminal found guilty of criminal case can be used as evidence in his civil case.
Criminal Damage Act 1971: no more than L400.
15. Compensation in Northern Ireland:
Riots are uninsurable according to private agencies.
Criminal Injuries (Ireland) Act of 1920: paid by county treasurer.
Source: D.R. Miers, Paying for Malicious Injuries Claims, Irish Jurist 5 (Summer 1970), p. 56.
This section is very interesting because it is no longer one criminal but entire gangs of rioters. Is this the socialization of crime and compensation?
16. Australian Compensation Schemes.
17. Compensation in Canada.
19. Compensation in Non-English Countries. Not often because of extensive welfare programs.
First International Symposium on Victimology: all countries as a matter of urgency should implement compensation to victims of crime.
In this citation it says that the members of this symposium stand to gain personal benefits if countries agree. What the hell is this all about?
Source: Israel Drapkin and Amilio Viano, eds., Victimology: A New Focus (Lexinton, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1974), p.210.
Chapter 3: American Compensation Plans.
25. California was the first state to implement victim compensation.
1966 they started taking fines from criminals and depositing them into the state treasury. These were miniscule amounts. In 1973 they increased the maximum awards pay outs to $10,000 and so on, but only few victims were claiming assistance. Then from 1974 to 1977 they insisted police be informing victims of the program and it tripled in size. Because of this rapid growth, the program still only assists a small percentage of victims.
26. New York.
Good Samaritan statute: Some guy tried to stop a drunk from bothering people on a subway and got stabbed to death.
This story would make a good short article for LewRockwell.com, public transportation and public police have led to this problem. Now it's creeping into the courts and legislation.
28. $3 million was paid out in awards to victims. 1976
I wonder how much the courts, police, and jails consumed during that year. Wouldn't it be cheaper not to do anything at all?
Source: Crime Victims Compensation Board, Annual Report.
29. Maryland.
Awarded 1.7 million dollars. Criminals paid $5 court fee, totaled at $130, 000.
Where the hell is the rest of the money coming from?
30. Hawaii. First to offer payments for pain and suffering.
31. Massachusetts.
31. New Jersey.
32. Alaska. Highest average payout. Mandatory posters to explain program.
32. Illinois. 1975 planned on suing criminals to contribute to the compensation program.
33. Washington. Money per body part.
Isn't this incentive to not be productive. If I can fix my arm I don't get my money.
Recovery from the criminal means that the victim must repay the state.
I'll take the money guaranteed up front and ignore the criminal.
34. Minnesota.
34. Delaware. additional penalties levied on criminal even if fine is suspended
34. North Dakota.
35. Kentucky
35. Ohio. $3 from everyone convicted of a crime except non moving traffic violations.
35. Wisconsin.
35. Pennsylvania.
36. Virginia. $10 fine to criminals.
36. Michigan.
36. Florida can fine a criminal up to $10,000.
38. Georgia. Compensation is money from the taxpayer to the victim. Restitution is money from the criminal to the victim. Criminals work at community employment places, they pay their own living expenses, give money to state, and victim. It's working great (LEAA Law enforcement assistance administration).
Source: Bill Read, Restitution Program Coordinator. Offender Restitution Progress in Georgia, Georgie Department of Offender Rehabilitation, Atlanta, Georgia, 1977.
Basically each state has implemented a method to grow victim compensation into the realm of workmen's compensation. By imposing a small distributed fine over the violators of all the state legislations and regulations these states are capable of raising fractional amounts of funding to be divvied out as compensation to victims. Georgia is the only state that appeared to be doing anything close to justifiable restitution.
39. Federal Compensation $49.3 million paid out.
Chapter 4: Public Choice Considerations of Victim Compensation.
49. Lawyers like the idea of federal compensation programs because it will increase the demands for their services.
Police like federal compensation because so much crime goes unreported. Now there will be incentive to report crime and get money back. This will lead to more crimes reported and assist in justifying greater police budgets.
The Department of Justice would be expanded in size because the money will be distributed through out the department.
50. Incentive to seek restitution from criminal through civil proceedings is less because money from the state is cheaper and easier.
93. Conclusions: 1974 Punishment per crime is low, and odds of a criminal being sent to prison for any single criminal act are low.
94. How much criminals make, tax free as criminals.
We need tougher punishment. Criminals cause a lot of damage victim compensation is an attempt to lift the burden of that damage but if the costs of it productive legislation outweigh its payback then society, we, and the victims would have been better off with nothing at all.
Posted by djdamico at 8:14 PM | Comments (0)
Alexander Tabarrok (editor): Changing the Guard, Private Prisons and the Control of Crime. Oakland: Independent Institute, 2003.
2. Define the difference between privatization and contracting out.
They isolate Benson as the radical of the book... but claim that better is better, justice be damned.
"Rightly or wrongly most interested observers of prisons are concerned about costs and quality, not about what an economist would call the general-equilibrium effects of prison privatization on how many people are imprisoned and for what crimes. On the cost score, as the chapters in Changing the Guard demonstrate, private prisons are superior to their public counterparts."
But Benson addressed all of these claims in his texts.
-Hulsmann's fraudulent industries claim would show that this is very important to look at. Most interested observers are too narrowly focused.
Chapter 2: The Economics of Prisons: Kenneth L. Avio
9. Prison population and growth statistics.
Lists questions pertaining to prisons: Do rehab programs work? How do prisons fit in the larger justice system? What do we know about recidivism? Etc..
-These questions are positioned from a public choice perspective, and are ignoring the questions of individual's subjective incentives that are the real place where crime decisions take place.
This chapter is cut into eleven parts:
10. Efficiency and Equity: "Constitutional contract-arian models applied to punishment can rationalize independent constraints on social-cost minimization and will be implicitly assumed as follows."
11. Prisons versus Fines: Dismisses the ability of restitution because of overzealous victims. Incarceration is more efficient at deterring crime than fines and restitution (assumed for rest of paper).
Prisons are multi-product firms: General deterrent + removal + rehab - criminal training
Offenders discount the future more: higher time preference.
12. Parole:
Parole reduces incapacitation effect but can have good effect on behavior of inmates.
Current research fails to link parole accounted for criminal training with recidivism.
14. Organizational Design:
different agents motivated by different incentives set different variables...law, court, parole board...
This has lead to more centralization, judges decree parole eligibility.
Tabasz (1974) proposed a two-part penalty period. One restitutional then one rehabilitative.
Avio thinks there is no way to separate the effects and purposes of each. The penal functions are defined as retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Avio is assuming that retribution will have negative effects on rehabilitation.
-I think these can all be accomplished through retribution.
Roper (1986) says the purpose of prison is to turn out prisoners who don't commit crime. Prison will make contracts with inmates for parole conditions.
Nardulli (1984) exposes tragedy of the commons for prison space. Local officials want to appear tough on crime so they send lots of people to state prisons (see Benson).
(Nardulli) The solution is to allocate price of prison space with what is left to aovide free rider problems, but (Avio) would result in different sentences for similar crimes.
Gillespie (1983) a market for prison space, administered by centralized correctional authority.
18. Privatization:
This phenomenon has found a capital opportunity on the incentive differences between variables in the provision of justice. They are making a killing in providing the restitutional, rehabilitative, and deterrence and eliminating the inefficient bureaucracies of the parole board by honing to the demands of the state budget allocates. With the presence of private prisons the state retracts from the productive role of corrections and hones its focus in regulation.
Kant says autonomy is not compatible with force restitution. This supports the warehouse example of crime.
-If this were true wouldn't people only demand justice regarding recurring instances of crime? If one was convinced that a particular crime would not happen again and was merely an isolated incidence. He would not require justice as the purpose defined by Kant of justice is merely to inhibit crime from happening again. In conclusion it is obvious by the demand of justice existent, though difficult to expose because of current de-incentives to seeking justice, on the market. People demand restitution in civil cases.
If prisons continue to be efficient at providing for the states perception of justice than the state could successfully incarcerate thousands and thousands of immigrants, with the support of powerful interest groups.
22. Statistical Models of Recidivism:
The research cannot keep up with the growing prison populations and changing and expanding legal policies.
26. In-Prison Rehabilitation:
The "nothing works," attitude has been stated, supported and challenged but remains a major part of penological lore.
-Of course nothing works, we are incapable of distinguishing between the ability of correctional facilities to have correcting effects with the policy implications of the prison industry preconditioned institutions of law and police services. For all the mainstream economist knows, all of these in-prison programs work great at reducing recidivism but the state works great at encouraging it. Legislation expands the criminality of voluntary action and police officers have an easier job in arresting old criminals than taking the time to find new ones.
28. Manpower Programs for Former Prison Inmates:
Nothing really seems to work. Inmates were increasing their skills but not their tendency to find work or remain crime free. Suggestions point to job search and on the job training over education and general job skills.
-I'd bet the same is true for education firms in general. Schools that successfully place people do not necessarily educate them the best but rather take the initiative to assist in job finding.
32. Criminal and Legitimate Labor Market Opportunities for Former Prison Inmates:
34. Does Prison Pay?:
How much do criminals cost society by committing crime, compared to how much prisons cost society directly. For every dollar a prison costs it saves "society" $64.
-I highly question this statistic because of the criminality of victimless crimes being included in the calculation, victimless crimes cost society nothing, in fact one could argue that they benefit society so prisons holding such individuals hurt society more than just that one dollar.
-This implies that if a particular criminal commits less than the average amount of crimes than he should be released so as to maintain his cost. This totally ignores whether the victims of his particular crime are satisfied in their receipts of justice.
-This would be the equivalent of turning away customers by any traditional business. Which in theory would be legitimately acceptable but the problem is that the victims of crimes ignored by the justice system so as to maximize efficiency are still forced to pay taxes.
See Benson: "you cannot ration justice."
These numbers are warped and not representative because of the war on drugs.
Age is relevant to proclivity to commit crime, when prisons are overcrowded it saves money to release old criminals to make room for younger ones.
-All of these studies seem to be at least contributing to our status quo level of regulation and governmental policies. But they still build more prisons.
Preschool is a greater deterrent of crime. What is the best way to operate prison on a particular budget?
40. Additional Topics and Suggestions for Future Research:
Economic factors in the origins of prison systems (Conley 1981; Langbein 1976; F. Lewis 1988, 1990; Nicholas 1990).
The theoretical models developed in economics do not appear to address these facts satisfactorily. One policy implication is that more attention is paid to influencing the lifetime profile of established criminals than to attending to the prevention of such careers in the first place. See the earlier comment on preschools.
-This uses prisons to legitimize government intervention in schools, healthcare, housing etc...
57. Chapter 3: Correctional Privatization in America: An Assessment of Its Historical Origins, Present Status, and Future Prospects. Charles W. Thomas.
61. Privatization started slow because it was not supported by unionized public justice service providers. Now they are more prevalent.
59. Initially it was proposed that having 10% of prisons being privately operated would have an increased efficiency in even public operations thanks to competition.
64. Now it seems that innovation and creativity is being less privatized and more governmentalized. Private prisons are clones of public prisons.
65. A society may be judged by the manner in which it responds to those for whom it has the least regard and who have at best meager access to economic and political power. Prisoners are certainly one such group.
72. The day has passed when the dominant view was that the proper role of government involved both the making of public policy and the delivery of policy-mandated services. The day has arrived when it is altogether common to see government agencies actively involved in shaping public policy regarding the content of essential public services but contracting with the private sector for service delivery.
-No one is trying to understand why we term these services essential. We can hope for the day when the policy aspects of all services are removed from the government's hands.
74. Initial Contract Awards. 84 and 85
76. The 1987 Texas Department of Criminal Justice decision awarded to CCA and Wackenhut.
78. Housing capacity rose over 800% from 1990 to 1999 in private prisons.
78-81 critics who doubted privatization, what they said and how they were wrong.
Opponents and proponents were misguided on the actual happenings of the privatization phenomenon.
86. Private construction is faster.
87. How government pays for prisons. Private companies are starting to build prisons before they have contracts to operate, risky for private money holders not for taxpayers but successful nonetheless.
-When analyzed through the Austrian business cycle how does this look? Boom periods would have the price indicators to fuel construction but bust periods would have higher crime rates to respond to need.
89. Operating cost savings.
91. Recidivism is lower in private prisons
94. Legal liability issues results in closer attention to inmate's rights.
96. Privatization abroad.
Barriers to privatization:
98. Politics: California democrat corrupted by labor unions
99. Florida department of corrections remained stagnant despite the governor's attempts to request private prisons. New agency to oversee the purchase and contract of private prisons, now its own existence is reviewed routinely.
100. Governmentalization: forced labor policies on private prisons, ignore local labor markets and architectural advancements.
Arizona mandates that private prisons mirror public prisons.
103. General failure of cost calculation.
-Mises socialism problem.
104. Progress in Avoiding the Pitfalls of "Low-Ball" Cost Proposals.
-You get what you pay for.
106 vague terms: suitable programs, adequate medical services, and properly qualified staff. Contracts of private firms are more specific and clarify these terms.
-Clarity comes to anyone who has the responsibility of evaluating contract compliance. As long as this person is selected according to political means of the election process we will be subject to inefficiencies, corruption, and red tape in the criminal justice system.
107. Contracts fail to measure output. For example English training measure participation rather than improvement.
107. Third party standards.
-What effects could a completely privatized certification agency have on the prison industry, public and private?
110. On site contract compliance monitors positively affect the operation standards of private prisons.
112. No answer is yet available whether policy makers will be blessed with the fortitude to push efficient policy.
-It would take a blessing, because all of the incentive structures point to no.
125. Chapter 4: Prison Privatization and Public Policy. Samuel Jan Brakel and Kimberly Ingersoll Gaylord.
This paper claims to be a modest proposal to "privatize" parts of the correctional machinery in response to price pressures.
-Its actually a state sympathetic document which marginalizes libertarian philosophy by deeming it as radical.
126. Unions have not been as much of a problem as people claim?
127. Decriminalizing won't work because voters won't approve.
-This shows how slow democracy is at production.
130. What does privatization entail? 1) philosophical component that government should not manage what it does poorly. 2) recognition that private sector is better. Compares to privatization in Great Britain.
-Ignores the difference between privatization and contracting out according to its own definition offered. We have no successful opt out for prisons...The government is the only customer base...see Benson
131. History of private justice predates state operations.
132. Most prison labor has been and is performed at the direction of the state and federal government and is not done for private firms.
130. Privatization defined: the transfer of ownership, operation, and responsibility from the public sector (i.e., the government) to the private sector.
132. Privatization model offered in this chapter: involves the management, sometimes construction, and occasionally the financing of entire prison facilities by private correctional companies under contract to federal, state, and local governments.
133. There is no compelling philosophic argument for government to divest itself of this responsibility and its burdens. The issue is pragmatic.
Costs: Construction, management, and financing construction.
-The only way to understand costs is with money? This ignores appropriate means of justice and subjective valuation preferences. With this logic wouldn't it hold sound that if it was cost effective to put everyone in jail compared to allowing their freedom we should implement such policy? Or on the opposing spectrum if it were cheaper to simply ignore crime than pay for it to be corrected we liquidate the entire justice system?
140. Quality standards listed.
143. Cream skimming claim is false.
144. Financing Costs: When privatized, lease financing, legislative appropriation and taxpayer approval is bypassed. In view of the small annual impact costs spread out over the long term, these concerns may not be of paramount importance.
145. Does the US government have the authority to privatize corrections facilities. They say yes.
-The real question should be does the US government have the authority to provide prison services period.
146. List of state legislations pertaining to private prisons and contracting out.
151. The Role of Contracts in Legitimizing Private Corrections.
-These contracts exist between government and private enterprise. Typically this would be okay. But if this enterprise is the prison system, then what happens as punishment if they ignore the contract, break the contract, steal the money etc...Do they go to their own jail?
153. Pay per inmate is incentive to keep prison full. Bonus rewarded for lower recidivism.
154. Building frenzy v. prison reform. Building prisons simply leads to having more filled prisons, we need more non-incarceration alternatives.
-Compare this to Dr. Thornton's skyscraper piece.
155. Social costs of crime.
157. If private prisons aren't the answer than other private corrections are.
-What about private justice in general?
163. Chapter 5: Do We Want the Production of Prison Services to Be More "Efficient"?
Bruce L. Benson.
Technological efficiency v. allocative efficiency.
Tech: 1) Improvement in the quality of a given quantity of goods or services produced at a given cost. 2) a reduction in the cost of producing a given quality of goods or services. 3) an improvement in quality accompanied by a reduction in cost.
Allocative efficiency refers to the redirecting of scarce resources from uses having a lower value to uses having a higher value.
Opportunity costs of building prisons include money spent for drug rehabilitation programs that are more efficient at alleviating drug use.
166. Normative issues: Government production is a fiction. At some level they have to contract out. Each individual working for government wages is contracted out.
168. rationally ignorant voters allow power to interest groups.
176. Competitive firms represent the demands of the customer base.
2 aspects of private firms: 1) competition and 2)voluntary contracts
179. Prisons are used to arrest people who have not violated property rights but are rather political criminals. If prisons are more efficient they can be misused more efficiently.
Gains in technological efficiency are better than no gains at all, sometimes.
-is this a direct contradiction to the enterprise of law?
186. Drug laws increase in size and scope because police forces are a major interest group and they make more money enforcing drug laws than other laws because the federal agencies offered to split the confiscated monies.
-Like pirates hiring henchmen.
-Remember the commercials that said that buying drugs contributes to terrorists. Now we can say that buying drugs contributes to a stronger police force. Someone's daddy has a job because Stinky Joe the homeless heroine addict is a junky. The money he spent on crank built a drug empire which was seized by the local police and paid for uniforms, squad cars, walky talkies and so on.
187. Florida's rise in drug arrests after the federal asset-seizure law. Decrease in percentage of jail time served.
189. Drugs are allegedly the root cause of most societal problems. Drugs lead to property crimes through spillover effects.
-Would this be true is drugs were legalized?
This perspective has not shown to be effective, as increased drug legislation has not relieved other numbers and crime statistics.
190. Drug users commit crime to finance their drug habits. How many users are addicts?
Some drug users commit more Index II crimes to support their habits than property crime, for example, prostitution, drug dealing etc.
191. Estimated effects of crime as a result of drug use was more than ten times the amount of property crime in all of New York city.
194. Crime leads to drug use, more than vice versa.
195. Moving money from property crime deterrent to drug crime deterrent reduces the likelihood of criminals getting caught committing property right crime.
198. contracting out increases technological efficiency but decreases allocative efficiency. The war on drugs may last longer because of technologically efficient private prisons.
-We still haven't combated the issue of social cost. Why does Benson bow down to the legitimacy of social cost theory? No one in this text answers the question what is the legitimate purpose of justice? Benson proposes a brief summary attributing justice to the provision and protection of property rights, but when discussing efficiency he mentions social spillover repeatedly. Does he consent to the legitimacy of social cost? Is social cost compatible with a pure property rights approach to justice?
Posted by djdamico at 8:12 PM | Comments (0)
Social Contract Theory
A. Rousseau, Jean - Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. New York: Washington Square Press,
18. Conditions being equal for all.
In short, each giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is not one associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have.
B. 2 crimes against the social contract.
1. Crime against the state, for example, destruction of public property.
Apparently, this is the only way to demonstrate your lack of consent against the social contract. By abiding the law you give tacit consent.
2. Crime against an individual, for example, murder, rape, or theft.
When held to justice according to the social contract the victim sees no restitution because society claims the loss and therefore the rightful reconstitution. The victim is at a loss this contradicts Rousseau's above assertion.
Meiners held that the victim is due restitution not from the criminal but from society which has failed to uphold its side of the bargain at protecting the individual against injustice. Victim compensation comes from the state. This is logistically inefficient. Why have a middleman apparatus of justice?
C. Social contract is the giving up of individual freedoms so as to receive the benefits of society. The freedoms they speak of are not freedoms at all but aggressions. Individual behavior and rational human action can diminish the incentives of the aggressor enough to deter crime. Individuals can protect themselves through explicit contracts better than through the social contract.
Society does not need to seek justice from the criminal because individuals are inclined to seek justice as a condition of basic human action and self interest. Individuals want to be same from murder, rape and theft.
D: Cost Benefit Analysis of a free market in justice services:
In the proposed system of justice in which individuals are left to provide their own system or systems of justice through contractual relationships and insurance, there exist market forces to lead towards an existence of peace and prosperity.
Take the following example. At time 1, person x has $5, and person y has $0. Y aggresses against X and steals his money. So at time 2, person x has $0 and y $5. For justice to ensue, the money would have to be returned to x from y. Justice would be if at time 3 x had $5 again and y had $0. We can say that the administration of justice is simultaneous positive force returned to x and a negative imposed upon y.
Lock, John. The Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1980, pp 70 - 73.
The social contract is man giving up his right to punish his aggressors. It claims that this is an agreement on the part of the victim to feel more secure in the protective abilities of the state than his own. If this is a willing arrangement why must it be funded through coercive methods? Coercive methods have implied losses; if they benefited the individual being coerced he would have chosen their course as his most highly valued preference. The provision of justice at the hands of the state is protected not by the social contract but rather by forceful monopoly. If you don't pay your taxes you go to jail. There are no opting out mechanisms available for the individual to seek justice against his aggressors without the state.
E: Cost benefit analysis of the social contract.
To walk through the administration of justice under the social contract assumption is a different task. At time 0 a state exists which imposes a level of taxation upon both x and y. Lets assume x and y produce nonetheless and we are faced with the same scenario of time 1, x has $5 and y $0. Y aggresses against x and steals his money so at time 2 x has $0 and y $5. As Hoppe demonstrates crime is a participation of high time preference, so it is reasonable to assumer that y stole said money for the means of consumption. At time 3 x has $0 and y has $0. At this point the state steps in to institute justice. It claims that the social contract has been broken by the mis-action of y. It assumes that it has felt a loss when in fact it has not. If both x and y exist within the society than y's consumption of x's money is no different from the perspective of the state if x had consumed it himself. Society seeks justice nonetheless. In an attempt to mimic the administration of justice in our previous example, the state imposes a negative force upon y. But y has squandered the wealth he has stolen from x, so y becomes imprisoned. Does society receive the positive restitutional force as seen before, only if it relies upon forced prison labor. X receives an assumed benefit from societies benefit but as this benefit is distributed amongst all of society it is reasonable to assume that he is still at a loss in comparison to his initial state at time 1.
From a purely utilitarian perspective the former scenario is preferable to the latter.
Benson, Enterprise:
"James Buchanan asked, if government is dismantled "how do rights re-emerge and come to command respect? How do 'laws' emerge that carry with general respect for their legitimacy'?" He contended that collective action would be necessary to devise a "social contract" or "constitution" to define rights and to establish the institutions to enforce those rights. But collective action can be achieved through individual agreements, with useful rules spreading to other members of a group (p 13)."
Posted by djdamico at 8:10 PM | Comments (0)
Michael Levin: The Rothbard-Rockwell Reports
June 1996 Michael Levin: Punishment Capital.
p. 5 a criminal will willingly give up part of his life for opportunities at freedom.
p. 6 even liberals are willing to execute Timothy McVeigh.
January 1997 Michael Levin: Flog Them.
p. 14 Intelligence of average criminal ranks about 90.
Criminals have high time preferences and may be more responsive to immediate excruciating pain that subsides than they would be to long prison sentences.
Posted by djdamico at 8:08 PM | Comments (0)
Presentation to Mises summer fellows: July 15,2004
The Impossibility of State Justice: Private Prisons in a Free Society.
Presentation to Mises Summer Fellows: 11:00am July 15, 2004.
Introduction:
When I gave Dr. Block the first draft of this paper, he returned it claiming I had written two papers on two unrelated topics. One on the economics of prisons, and the other on anarchy, and he gave me the advice to pick one and stick to it.
At that point in time he was right, so I focused my attention on the problems and issues of prisons and produced analysis explaining the free market's superiority of production and management to apply to these prison inefficiencies.
Legal accountability, financial costs, intra prison violence, prisoner conditions and medical care, addiction, applications of the death penalty, gangs, black markets, prison labor, crowding issues, rehabilitation, and recidivism
A fast glance at the statistics associated with these issues brings value to the study of prisons. State operated prisons are in a dismal state of efficiency and justice.
Nonetheless this analysis was premature. The question at hand is not, how privatization can handle each particular problem of the prison industry. The question is what is the appropriate role of prisons in a free economy? Once answered, we can answer these former questions well armed and ready.
Prisons are an industry made up of firms dedicated to protect justice. The implementation of justice is a more roundabout process than the exchanges that take place between prison firms and their contractors. Just as McDonald's could not successfully operate as it does today, ceteres paribus, without farmers growing potatoes for its fries, prisons cannot successfully operate without functioning systems of police and courts. To understand what legitimate place prisons have in the provision of justice one must understand what place each of these distinct industries has in the provision of justice.
Modeling Rothbard's what has government done to our money I attempted to begin my analysis by assuming a world with no need for prisons. Prisons attempt to provide justice so I began with an assumed world without the need of justice.
So we start by answering, what is the appropriate role of justice? To apply praxeology to this case is to ask, what conditions of human action provide for an ever pressing need of justice? The condition of human reality is scarred with unavoidable conflict. Justice is the process of resolving the three examples of conflict. Explain with diagram.
Rothbard's moral condition of the non aggression axiom leads to free market efficiency.
We see that the goal of a firm dedicated to justice is to provide for the needs of consumers faced with injustice.
So we offer definitions for the terms used in the industry of justice in the most obvious order, tracing justice from injustice to rectification.
Rights: Property and human rights are the same.
-This paper accepts Hoppe's position and proceeds from there.
Law: A free market will lead to standards defined to protect rights and eliminate victimless crimes.
Benson, Friedman, and the Tannehills discuss this.
Laws against non violent crimes are more costly to enforce and impose. The imposers have less incentive in doing so.
Crime: The breaking of a law, or the violation of property such as murder, rape, and theft.
Time preference influences the incentives of criminal behavior just as it does for all purchasing decisions and human action in general.
Criminals: Individuals guided by time preference to break laws.
Victims: Individuals who feel the loss of a criminal's behavior.
Police: A firm dedicated to protecting innocent individuals against rights violations, or dedicated to investigating crime that has occurred and specializes in administering force so individuals don't have to.
Benson and Tinsley have shown the preference for private police and security.
Rothbard's claims that subpoena is unjust. It is unjust when a state insists the sole right to do so. It is not unjust when protected by the mechanism of competition. Subpoena the innocent v. the guilty.
Courts, Judges: Third party arbitrators who specialize in ruling and determining the extent of rights violations.
Benson and the others have shown this to be preferred on the market as well. The Law merchant is the historical example. Just as money becomes standardized so does law.
Sentence: The mechanism imposed upon a criminal to make the victim whole again. Examples: wage garnishing, liquidating assets, indentured servitude, imprisonment.
Restitution: The payback from criminal to victim of his debt through his sentence
Which sentence most effectively succeeds in restitution?
Prison: We can't say how much prisons will be used in a free market if at all, depending on the profitability and success of other sentencing mechanisms. To predict such would be the equivalent of claiming that red shirts will sell more than blue on the free market.
We can only outline what an appropriate prison may look like. A controlled living environment used to minimize the risk of a criminal's default on his indebted restitution.
What examples will a prison work best? When a criminal is likely to flee from justice. More prominent in today's society than has been given credit by libertarians reliance upon reputation and ostracism.
-When a criminal is a constant threat to society.
-When prisons are faster than other sentencing mechanisms at facilitating restitution.
Conclusions:
A successful free market in prisons rests upon the successful free market application of these previous industries. Now we can understand why the initial paper was accused of being off topic. A justification for a free market in prisons is a reliance on a free market in all justice services. It is a refutation of minarchy and a support of free market anarchism. The two topics are related and we can see why.
Future Research:
Now that we understand the legitimate applications of prisons in a free market we can move on to interpret how the government uses prisons? This will be able to shed light on current policy issues of privatization, decriminalization, recidivism, etc.
The topic of privatization is the most noted in the economics of prisons. What is most important to make note of is the difference between the prison industry and other areas of justice services. Benson describes how each of these industries is moving closer and closer to the private sector as budget constraints force the state to divest its monopoly. Police, security systems, self armament, and private arbitration are all successful opting out mechanisms for private individuals, but nothing similar is offered in terms of prisons.
Private prisons are just being contracted out by the government. No justice facilitation devices are available on the market for individuals to prefer over the public system. The government has monopolized force. This is the crux of its power. Show the cost benefit analysis of social contract theory.
I will look for a historical explanation of where we went wrong. Do the dates of prison budget allocations, construction, and operation coincide with the theory that states rely upon them to wield coercive power over their citizenry?
And I will expose the general negative affects that the acceptance of Social Contract Theory has had on our justice system.
And finally after this analysis is complete I can hope to offer a free market solution to take society in the direction of justice provided through prisons.
Posted by djdamico at 8:06 PM | Comments (0)
Oppenheimer, Franz. The State. New York: Fee Life, 1975.
xi. Examples of stateless societies.
ix. political self interest.
xii. Social contract theory claims that the rise of the state is a natural process.
xiii. Differentiation and specialization are natural developments but the state is not. The state is an expression of violent means over other individuals (history).
xv. There happens to become a subtle difference between a state and general robbery. Under the state there is less or no resistance, the robbers leave the victims alone to a certain degree so they may be more productive, as the profitability of the state is dependent upon the economic success of its victims.
7. How much land do we have on planet Earth? Was land allocated through political means?
14. One force impels all life, "hunger and love."
18. Agriculturalists are not warlike. Herdsmen can increase their populations faster.
23. Six stages of state development.
1. Small mobilized robbers. The bear steals honey and destroys the hive.
2. The beekeeper leaves honey so the bees survive the winter and protects them from other robbers.
3. The bees offer willful tribute for this protection. Is this the social contract?
4. A union between the genetic breeding of robbers and victims.
5. Quarrels erupt between neighboring clans. Lords discourage this as judges.
25. Is the human ego the same all over the world?
The murdered peasant no longer plows his fields.
34. The state comes into being through sexual propogation.
35. The gods of the victorious rule over the gods of the losers.
36. Liberalism is the law of equality.
-Has today's society gone past the mere legitimacy of the state and into something far worse in which people trust the state and their coercive means more so than the voluntary means of commerce? Is this anti-corporate mentality a result of democracies false claim to be ruled by the people? How do we fix this? Is teaching economics preaching to the choir?
40. Psychology belongs to the stage of development that it is set in society, not to the race.
41. States must grow through robbery to compete with other states.
42. The caste system distinguished between the roles of men and women.
45. The state grows to its maximum capacity which is held to the limit by the deaths of its people.
IV: The Holy Roman Empire is the maritime state.
The law of marginal utility leads to bartering, mutually beneficial exchange and is dependent upon peaceful encounters by foreigners. This develops cultural norms of hospitality and courtesy.
51. Listed examples of the trade between women and cattle. Incest has always been frowned upon.
52. Robbers are also merchants and must support the market. They steal what is valuable, and attempt to exchange it for liquid wealth.
57. Colonies can become strong enough to shake off their foreign rulers such as the US independence.
63. City dwellers are more accustomed to change, they are less superstitious, they are not afraid of the ghosts of their ancestors.
64. The Holy Roman Empire was the only city state capable of balancing consumption of population with production for a lengthy period of time.
-Suggested writing topic: Is the modern United States democracy just a copy cat of the Holy Roman Empire? Look at the foreign intervention in Iraq.
V. The Development of the Feudal State.
67. Everyone is at liberty to take as much of the un-cultivated land existing in masses as he needs and will or can cultivate. Why would you take more, when it would be an additional cost of maintaining your exerted property rights over it? Why would you try to horde air?
70. The state has and tries to maintain a monopoly over the power to trade.
77. What is a state within a state?
79. Free men block the power of the central government through ownership of private property.
80. Class is determined by wealth. Court positions are filled by relatives of the ruling class.
84. A shift back to the second stage of states development, the relationship between taxation and protection.
VI. The Constitutional State:
88. The division of property switches from lord taking most of the product to the peasant keeping most of the product.
95. Capitalism allied with plebeians leads to the modern constitutional state.
97. The three classes of society are: 1. financial owners, 2. captains of industry, and 3. workers.
The middle class is the transition of successful workers to higher classes. A political party is the organizational representation of a class.
100. Officials are subject to economic interests of their constituencies.
VII. The Tendency of the Development of the State.
102. The hope for the future lies in the cease and desist of the political means. A freeman's citizenship lies in his ability to partake in self governance.
106. The right to move from a location that is a precursor to freedom and justice.
Posted by djdamico at 8:04 PM | Comments (0)
Abstract: Blacks and Whites Behind Bars: An Emergent Analysis of Race Proportions in America's Prison System.
This paper is being turned in as part of Richard Wagner's macroeconomic theory class. The following abstract has been submitted to Dr. Jeffery Herbener for consideration to be accepted for presentation at this years Austrian Scholars Conference.
ABSTRACT: The black race is dominantly represented in prison populations in the American public. Various proposals have been presented from different areas of the social sciences to explain this imbalance, but they all seem to take a centralized approach to finding a single phenomenon to explian this aggregative result. This paper will present a brief summary of the major proposed explanations and refute their claims by offering a bottom up approach of emergent therorizing to explain disproportionate race populations in America's prisons. A short review of successful bottom up work (Murray and Hernnstein's Bell Curve and Gary Bcker's Economics of Crime and Punishment) on this topic is presented and saluted as steps in the right direction, but incomplete in application. Finally an emergent diagram of private security services will be explained to offer one plausible contributing factor to race proportions in America's prisons. In conclusion the paper hopes to show the interconnectedness of institutional arrangements that all need bottom up analyses to grant full understanding to the multiple social problmes developed in America's justice system. This paper presents the Austrian paradigm as the best fit for such research and will serve as a proposal to gain support for an applied Austrian research analysis of America's entire criminal justice system.
Posted by djdamico at 8:01 PM | Comments (0)
Prisons: What's so important?
Prisons have a number of critical differences from the traditional institutions analyzed in the minarhcy v. anarchy debate. The institutions of police, courts, and national defense are current hot beds of libertarian debate and anarcho-capitalist theorizing. From surveying the literature it becomes apparent that the general anarchist opininion about such institutions is as follows. First, production of such services is possible without the state, and second, production of such services on the free market is preferable in terms of legitimacy and efficiency. Amongst such literature there is an apparent glossing over of prison institutions. Why have prison institutions not received adequate analysis in the theoretical fields of free market economics and anarcho-libertarianism, especially since they are more categorically integral to liberty and property than the allready interpreted institutions?
Next I will elaborate on the following topics:
I. Security v. Justice:
Police and national defense provide security. They attempt to deter crime ex ante, before the event takes place. Courts interpret crime after the event takes place but provide a service which determines when crime has and has not taken place. In this sense courts are very present oriented. Prisons are the specific ex post mechanism for justice in our modern legal system.
II. Opting-out:
Posted by djdamico at 7:59 PM | Comments (0)
Texas news report confirms race statistic disjuncture.
This Texas news story offers another study which draws attention to the obvious unbalance between the proprotion of free blacks and the proportion of incarcerated blacks which I make reference to in my latest paper.
Posted by djdamico at 9:11 AM | Comments (0)
David Friedman: The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism. Open Court, La Salle Illinois, 1970.
Friedman's text is a difinitive source on Anarcho-capitalism. Its influence has permeated every aspect of the libertarian movement and is integral to the analysis of any state institution from the anarchist framework.
My notes on the text are as follows:
Chapter 1: In Defense of Property
4. "The desire of several people to use the same resources for different ends is the essential problem that makes property institutions necessary. The simplest was to resolve such a conflict is physical force. If I can beat you up, I get to use the car. This method is very expensive, unless you like fighting and have plenty of medical insurance. It also makes it hard to plan for the future; unless you're the current heavyweight champion, you never know when you will have access to a car. The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations."
16. Love is limited in its applicability in the sense that it is not effective in achieving complex ends such as intricate production processes because it does not accommodate for the divergence of opinions between different individuals. Trade works better than love at these ends. Love only works at shorter simpler ends in a familial setting.
28. Harsh conditions in the workplace.
This can be attributed to a negative product quality standard. All goods and services start out at lower levels of technology and standards than what they mature to be, even employment. People assume that the accomplishments in labor conditions are thanks to unions and regulations but the prison industry is just another example to demonstrate that it was actually the functioning market that set the standards higher. Private prisons got flack from activists, then competition set in see Benson.
30. Chapter 6. Monopoly I: How to loose your shirt.
Source: Gabriel Kolko: Triumph of Conservatism. End of last century business thought the future was in big. They conglomerated and got beat out by smaller competitors.
The size of the firm is dictated by the market. The larger a firm grows the further away top decision making management gets from the day to day demands of the customer. A firm can only grow so large as mass production will accommodate for. The state in general is recognizing this phenomenon hence its need to raise reliance on private enterprise to operate its individual tentacles.
This defeats Nozick's claim that one firm providing justice may rise to monopoly power without aggressing against rights. Nozick thinks that forced payment is not a rights violation, because it is an attempt to preserve the rights of the payers. Well this exposes that a firm providing military protection or justice services can only be so large as to not spread itself too thin of voluntary v. non-voluntary customers. The majority of the customers must willingly pay. The geographic size of this firm becomes arbitrary and eventually all customers must be voluntary.
81. Chapter 18. Counterattack.
Enforcement methods; each party would surrender a sum before arbitration took place, then arbitrator gives out the sum appropriate or blacklisting. This is only for civil arbitration.
115. Arbitration is only used for pre-existing contracts.
117. Capital punishment bargaining.
121. Wouldn't anarcho-capitalism be overrun by the mafia. No because mafia gets its power through bribery. Private enterprise would have lower prices as a result of more crime. Bribe has to be more than the value of the goods stolen.
Posted by djdamico at 8:55 AM | Comments (1)
Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia. Basic Books Inc. New York, 1974.
Nozick spends a lot of time discussing what can and cannot be prohibited. I don't understand why he chooses to use this word "prohibited." Prohibited seems to me to imply something different from simply taking preventative measures to safeguard against it occurring. Prohibition is simply the legislative process of deeming something illegitimate. But let's face it, anything can be arbitrarily deemed illegitimate especially when the entity performing the prohibition is a state. This says nothing about the actual action taking place, the violations of rights and justice involved, the subsequent actions to be taken afterwards, and certainly nothing in regards to the extent of precautionary tactics.
He proceeds to digress about fear that is felt by victims. He demonstrates that pure restitution does not account for fear. He fails to see the interpersonal utility comparison that he makes because no third party arbitrator can read the mind of a victim for whom he is deciding a case, but the voluntarism takes place when the contract is made between the arbiter and the victim for arbitration services and an acceptance of the ruling. He said that someone who knows their car will be stolen but compensated still drives around in fear. Well this person would also take precautions to protect his car especially if he felt said fear. All action is participated in so as to relieve felt uneasiness. We live in a constant state of fear because of the free will of other human beings. We are free to protect ourselves as much as we care to without aggressing upon the rights of other innocent people. For example I cannot kill everyone on the planet to alleviate my fear of being murdered.
Prohibition is only legitimate when the prohibitionist is the rightful owner of the resources in which he is claiming legitimacy over. For example I prohibit you from entering my home while wearing shoes, is a reasonable and legitimate prohibition, but to say that we as a community prohibit you from being a ballet dancer because of the potential affects it may upon us is ridiculous and un-defendable.
My notes on the text are lited below:
10. Chapter 2: The State of Nature: Man is in a state of free will in nature to engage his actions and do his will with his property. From this we can develop ought statements in regard to liberty, health, private property, and life etc...
Hoppe expands pat this, see notes from Benson: "To Serve and Protect"
11. Locke claims that overestimations of pain will take place, escalating violence. This is why we need a state?
13. "When a member of the association is in conflict with nonmembers, the association also will want to determine in some fashion who is the right, if only to avoid constant and costly involvement in each member's quarrels, whether just or unjust."
57. Punishment equal to the crime is the only just form of restitution.
58. This equal conception of restitution will not deter crime.
Block's Russian roulette doesn't necessarily solve this because it's crazy but it does expose the answer. Arbitration must take place. Interpersonal utility comparison. The victim has a greater voice in the anarchist court sentencing prison scenario. Let the market decide what the appropriate restitution is.
Posted by djdamico at 8:51 AM | Comments (0)
Gustave de Molinari. The Production of Security. 1849.
http://praxeology.net/GM-Ps.htm
Molinari was the first thinker to describe how market institutions could supply all legitimate legal and protective services.
Men combine into society as following their individual self interest. From here division of labor takes over. The object of society is the most complete satisfaction of man's needs. One such important and prevalent need is security.
If all men were perfectly moral and wouldn't steel then security would exist.
-I'm not too sure about this. Isn't he talking about justice here? If a man were to build a basketball hoop in his driveway, and use a long pole as the base. He may use too little cement and the pole by no intent of his own destroy his neighbors car as it comes crashing down. Surely this is not a scenario of moral question and yet security did not exist for the neighbor. This is not even a question of justice yet. The question of justice only exists when the neighbor requests the man who put up the basketball hoop to compensate him for his wrecked car. If the man refuses then we have a problem.
-Thus the question of security would persist nonetheless in a morally pristine existence. The only way to avoid security and justice all together is to eliminate conflict which is impossible. Conflict is paramount as part of existence and a responsibility of property ownership.
-When you analyze security in Molinari's fashion the development of the state is geared towards providing security but by instilling morality? If the only means of completely obliterating the need for security is for everyone to be consistently moral than the state is almost justified because no productive function will ever achieve a secure existence.
Molinari still comes to the accurate conclusion that the production of security is best accomplished by means of a market resulting in the lowest price to the consumer. No government should inhibit another government from competing or force people to use its services.
-This is how the state uses prisons.
Every monopoly rests upon force.
When the consumer base becomes more powerful then the coercive authority they seize the industry. The do not open it up to free competition but they bureaucratize it for their own interests. This is communism.
6. What indeed is the situation of the men who need security? Weakness. What is the situation of those who undertake to provide them with this necessary security? Strength.
Communistic security spawns universal communism.
Molinari talks about the the possibility for a Free Market in Security to arise out of a new society with the assumed morality of no one aggressing against someone else's property.
-This is not our scenario so is it useful? What we need is people to hold the state responsible for its aggressive nature and to initially compete and maintain competition.
Posted by djdamico at 8:45 AM | Comments (0)
Lots of topics
The following list is a number of ideas that could use further research and investigation to specifically address in scholarly papers.
1. Does the Immigration and Nationalization Service use prisons and the war on drugs, to fuel the war in IRAQ, by influencing the bargaining conditions of impoverished individuals?
2. How similar are the lives of the inmate and the lives of the soldier? How similar are the roles of the warden and the drill sergeant?
3. Are prison operation policies likely to be more harsh and controlling in a contracted out private prison or a typical state run prison? So called private prisons are built, designed and financed pre-emptive to government contracts, along the attitude, "if you build them they will come." This is just market response. If these facilities are available as a resource, states will use them to cut costs. State operation is unsustainable. If you have a Solitary housing unit unfilled. The state will find people to put in it, for example 17 year old gang members. How much does cheapening the marginal cost of incarceration to the state encourage liberal sentencing?
3. Prisons take money out of the pockets of society and put it into the pockets of the government. When you ask any typical citizen, why they pay their taxes, they answer that they're afraid of going to jail.
4. How does prison architecture influence the sociological ideas of humanism, control, and autonomy. The current tools implemented in these design processes are to maximize the goals of the state. The incentives of the state do not encourage rehabilitation or restitution. Private firms would.
5. How much benefit can the average consumer benefit from effective prison labor? Could prison produced goods and services give Wal-Mart a run for their money?
6. How do you get a hostile, uncooperative, and unwilling criminal to produce wealth to be repaid to his victims?
7. Prisons don't help America's drug problem. If you're a drug addict you might prefer prison life because it is easier to get drugs than on the outside.
8. Start a company that only hires ex-convicts. More employee controls, lower wages. Succeed then offer services to the state instead of incarceration.
Posted by djdamico at 8:31 AM | Comments (0)