>I quite agree that the way it currently works, private prisons are the worst. However the root of the problem is not that they are private, but rather that they are still paid by the government. Private prisons have all the incentives in the world to hold prisoners for as long as they can, because they know government is paying and it's paying with taxpayers money. Now, for a moment, imagine private prisons and systems of law that are directly financed by each and every person and which have competitors.
How would this change anything, if not for the worse?
In this version, they have an incentive to keep the legal system churning even more prisoners, so they can get paid more, build more prisons etc. That will end in a huge witch-hund, revamped racism, worse drug laws etc.
People will not have the option "not to pay", because the law says those people have to be put in jail, and the jail is private (e.g municipal).
And as for the prisoners themselves, they will get even worst treatment, they will try to make money out of them (forced prison labour), and they will try to keep the costs as minimum as they can, e.g shoving them in cells with 10 and 20 people, like in some Latin American hell hole.
>It is a completely different thing to decide whether to have some additional money this month or pay for the imprisonment of someone whose lifestyle you dislike.
Yes, so the "good people" in conservative states, say, might also say: "Why pay to keep in prison all these people? Make more offenses punishable by execution, and make execution procedures faster and cheaper, so we cat get rid of those n... (the n word), for, say $10K per head".
So you might get pressure to get some people off for lighter crimes, but you'll also get pressure to execute people for things that would get 20-30 years or life currently.
> People will not have the option "not to pay", because the law says those people have to be put in jail, and the jail is private
I think you misunderstand the idea. The only system in which you have to pay is when you have a government collecting taxes. If you don't pay, you're gonna get in trouble.
By contrast, in a polylegal system with no central body issuing laws, people choose law firms with the set of laws they like the most, voluntarily. If at some point they dislike how a firm does its business and protects its customers interests he may switch to a different firm (how conflicts are resolved between customers of two different firms is a more interesting question, which for the sake of brevity I'm gonna leave out for now).
My objective as a customer is to be safe, not treat prisoners like shit and make money off them. Thus, if I don't like how my law firm treats prisoners, I stop paying immediately. Note: I don't need to vote or convince anyone it's a bad thing, I simply stop financing bad things.
> Yes, so the "good people" in conservative states, say, might also say: "Why pay to keep in prison all these people?
Exactly. Then don't go to conservative states and don't become a client of such a conservative law firm. These laws may be brutal, but if some group of people voluntarily decides to live by them, not forcing me to live by them too, why should I be against it?
Sicily inadvertently created the conditions where a "polylegal system" took form in the 1810s during its transition from feudalism to capitalism. As government-sponsored police forces were sparse, private police forces formed that would protect from bandits and enforce contracts (src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia#Post-feudal_Sic... ). I think history pretty much shows what resulted from this.
>By contrast, in a polylegal system with no central body issuing laws, people choose law firms with the set of laws the like the most voluntarily. If at some point they dislike how a firm does its business and protects its customers interests he may switch to a different firm (how conflicts are resolved between customers of two different firms is a more interesting question, which for the sake of brevity I'm gonna leave out for now).
The whole "how conflicts are resolved between customers of two different firms" is the core idea behind law enforcement! If the same rules do not apply to all (and you opt for rules from the law issuing body you want based on your preferences) then there's now "law" among citizens.
Oh, and those "private law --issuing-- firms"? They would also have to have the means to enforce that law. So even if some poor black or latino population could not afford to pay them, a rich white majority will very much afford. Would they be able to enforce those laws to the non participating poor?
The problem is that you try to mix to things that are not compatible, absolute individual choice (at the consumer level even) and law. Law is that which is above individual choice, for it is a trans-individual (social) agreement, and that's the only way it can make sense.
This whole notion is ill-thought. It's not like the government is the problem with prisons. That's the "all I have is the liberal hammer, all problems are governmental nails" notion.
For one, the US has the highest incarceration rate of the western world (or the world, period). That's a problem not due to government. All the other countries have government made laws too. Most don't even allow private prisons at all.
Others countries have so nice prisons that you could spend your vacations there -- and even less crime than the US does, while maintaining a highly competitive economy and even more equality (so less poor people and more vibrant middle class). E.g skandinavian states. So government is not at all incompatible with a perfectly good legal and prison system. If anything, it's the contrary.
>Then don't go to conservative states and don't become a client of such a conservative law firm. These laws may be brutal, but if some group of people voluntarily decides to live by them, not forcing me to leave by them to, why should I be against it?
For a lot of people their home state, and where they have their roots, home, family, property etc means a lot to them. You propose they jump state just so the racist majority (or the richer racist minority) can have the prison system it likes? Wasn't the civil war partly about putting an end to this crap?
If you would like to understand this question and accept the possibility that your assumptions and conlusions might be wrong, I suggest you start with this article "Law As A Private Good" http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Law_as_a_private_good... by David D. Friedman (he's an economist AND a law professor).
That is an outright horrifying idea. What Friedman is suggesting in this article is basically applying the model of inter-state diplomacy to criminal law. That is an inherently unfair and inequality-promoting system.
Happen to be a poor man who opposed the death penalty? Too bad. The rich guys' law corp. is pressuring your law corp. to accept it in cases of inter-corporation conflicts, and - while your firm is very much against it - they represent lower-class people and simply can't afford to purchase the anti-tank weapons they'd need to survive a war with the other corp.
(Did I mention the other guys have tanks? Of course they do; they have the liquid funds and it's a sound investment.)
And what about this idea that inter-corporation conflicts are to be resolved by arbitration or ad-hoc negotiations? That spits in the face of the very basic concept of law where you're supposed to know if something you're doing is illegal or not. Would you really want to live in a world where anything you do can get you thrown in jail at any time because the corporation representing you decided it's cheaper to settle? I sure wouldn't.
It's horrifying until you realize that all the same things you fear actually happen today, except that the entity doing those things is a monopoly which is less accountable and more hostile to the public than any corporation ever could be. When you dislike something a government does, you can't just stop paying and hire another government - you have to wait n number of years and then vote hoping the next candidate is going to keep his promises (and they never do). When you dislike something a corporation does, you can stop paying it (recent successful example related to the current thread: godaddy and SOPA).
>It's horrifying until you realize that all the same things you fear actually happen today, except that the entity doing those things is a monopoly which is less accountable and more hostile to the public than any corporation ever could be.
That's only the way one sees it if you have a market bias.
For what it actually is, is an organization setup by the people (in most countries people literally died and fought to be able to set up their own government and state) and controlled by the people through voting off and on and through participating in it.
It's not perfect but far better than the alternatives were private interests play it out. And we had those, historically, only instead of corporations the private interests at the time feudal lords and large land-owners.
The effectiveness of government, and the purer representation of the people, only depends on one thing: the people's vigilance and participation in politics. People withdrawn into their own private affairs do not deserve neither freedom nor a state, and they don't get one, either. They get "career politics" to fuck them over. But that's not a flaw of democracy: it's a flaw of the people not taking care of it.
It does happen today - to a point. (The extent this happens depends greatly on your state and government.) And I dislike it when it happens today. What you're advocating is basically taking the instances where the current system fucks up and embracing them, making them not only legitimate, but the focal point of the entire system.
The system as set up is meant to make everyone - both rich and poor - equal before the law; in theory at least. Granted, it's not as perfect as that in practice. But what you're suggesting is basically allowing the rich to pay their way to their own laws, and if they happen to run afoul of some of those - to pay their way out of them. That is not a version of justice I can get behind.
How would this change anything, if not for the worse?
In this version, they have an incentive to keep the legal system churning even more prisoners, so they can get paid more, build more prisons etc. That will end in a huge witch-hund, revamped racism, worse drug laws etc.
People will not have the option "not to pay", because the law says those people have to be put in jail, and the jail is private (e.g municipal).
And as for the prisoners themselves, they will get even worst treatment, they will try to make money out of them (forced prison labour), and they will try to keep the costs as minimum as they can, e.g shoving them in cells with 10 and 20 people, like in some Latin American hell hole.
>It is a completely different thing to decide whether to have some additional money this month or pay for the imprisonment of someone whose lifestyle you dislike.
Yes, so the "good people" in conservative states, say, might also say: "Why pay to keep in prison all these people? Make more offenses punishable by execution, and make execution procedures faster and cheaper, so we cat get rid of those n... (the n word), for, say $10K per head".
So you might get pressure to get some people off for lighter crimes, but you'll also get pressure to execute people for things that would get 20-30 years or life currently.