« Roger E Meiners: Victim Compensation, Economic, Legal and Political Aspects. Lexington Books. Massachusetts. 1978. | Main | That Taco Bell Boycott posted at mises.org »
February 26, 2005
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 February 26, 2005 8:15 PM