Solutions to California prison overcrowding through public-private partnerships

Prison Over-Crowding

Prison Crowing Solutions

The over-crowding situation in California prisons has reached critical mass and the state is fairly short on options that are both possible and viable given public opinion and/or budget constraints. Even with that being the case, a solution has to be come to given the spiking crime rate and over-crowded prisons. All of those will be explored with some fleshing out of the topic as the paper goes along.

PPP Types

As noted by the assignment text, there are a good number of different public-private partnership types. They include public ownership and operation, quasi-public agency, operations assistance, contract operations and maintenance, contract operations and financing, design/build/operate, lease and operate, joint ownership and private ownership (American Water, 2013). The California prison system is very much system that involves a lot of interaction between the public and private sectors.

Solution

As far as finding money to build prisons, California has one eighth of the country's population and one third of the welfare recipients. People that are verifiably using drugs or using their benefits for illegal acts should have their benefits stripped immediately and that's just the tip of the ice berg. Social welfare spending in California (and around the world) is abused pervasively by people that give not a wit that the money is coming from the taxpayers and the malfeasance is not that hard to detect (Kumar, 2011).

In short, the money that could be used to build modern and large prisons is there. It just needs to be spent on prison-building rather than being poured down a rat-hole on people that either abuse it or simply do not need it. All social welfare programs need to be means tested with at least some sort of verification or standards required for benefits to be bestowed. Anyone who has a legitimate need should be helped but anyone who is obviously manipulating the system (e.g. filing for disability only after exhausting two years of unemployment benefits) should be made to get some sort of job and contribute to society.

This may seem like a harsh and controversial stand but California simply has no other options. Crime is spiking up and leaving murders, rapists and other miscreants roaming the streets to inflict themselves on society is a non-starter. People that only harm, kill and steal have no place in society and it is honestly not that hard of a sell to the public to make it clear that the current infrastructure is entirely too small and entirely too unsafe to the guards that keep those people secured and behind bars. One need only watch an episode of "Lockup" on MSNBC (now called NBC News) to see how bad some of these prisons are and just how bad some of these inmates are. It should be made clear that the prisoners will not be comfortable and they will not be given creature conforms that they are not entitled to given their dastardly and depraved acts (MSNBC, 2013).

A little enforcement of common decency, being a contributing member of society and the like, and this applies to people inside and outside jail, is all that is needed to right the ship in the California prison system. Some of these suggestions are going to cause people to howl but just like with many other things, kicking the can down the road and doing nothing is going to hurt a lot of people including some people that will get killed because voters and/or elected officials can't (or won't) do the right thing. Rather than hold people accountable, one gets crap like what occurred in Bell, California where most of the major leaders of that town were being paid ridiculously salaries that could not be justified in the private sector let alone the public one (Reuters, 2013).

There has been much vitriol and verbiage about how government is good or evil and the truth is that it's a mixture of both. It is true that serving the public good is the best idea but when half empty schools are closed down in Chicago and people refer to Mayor Rahm Emanuel as a "murder mayor" in reaction, that is just insipid to put it lightly (CBS Chicago, 2013). Taxpayer money in California (or anywhere else) should be spent wisely and efficiently. It should not be just raised every year automatically just because some interest group or party will cry foul when spending they cannot possibly justify is being cut and they often demagogue the issue by claiming racism or some other baseless claim.

As far as financing this venture above, and as noted above, all that is needed is redirection of money that is already being spent. California taxes are already entirely too high and a good amount of it is being wasted. The same is true of the federal government and they should save some money with the ridiculous amount of overlap they have and either finance prisons or help with out-of-state transfers. Using the money already on hand to better serve the public good is a win-win for everyone involved and this is especially true when speaking of prisons and keeping violent offenders where they belong…behind bars.

Conclusion

In closing, the author of this report knows full well that these suggestions will probably be rejected straight out of hand by many to most people but the author of this report simply does not care. Treating the taxpayers (even the rich…who already pay the vast share of taxes) like piggybanks whenever a crisis comes up is simply wrong-headed and makes the problem worse in the long run. The money going through the system right now is not being spent wisely and it needs to be spent on keeping our society's miscreants away from the public.