The nightmare scenario when public services are privatized

The New York Times is doing a series on New Jersey's halfway houses, with a special focus on the Bo Robinson center in Trenton, which is a private facility that receives government money.

What the Times found is Exhibit A on the pitfalls of letting private businesses making money off of social services.

Multiple inmates and workers describe a place that is so bad, inmates are begging to be sent back to prison because they feel prison is ... of all things ... safer.

The Times described...

* Inmates being raped by workers and fellow inmates, with no prosecutions
* Drug and alcohol counseling that is being run by gangs
* The counseling being run by workers with just a high school diploma
* A 73 percent rate of drug testing failure among one group studied
* Inmate to staff ratios that are about 300 inmates to one or two staffers
* Having a sole woman staffer try to guard hundreds of inmates
* Guards (and that term can be used very loosely) being trained for eight days, as opposed to those socialistic-inspired union correction guards, who get trained for 15 weeks.
* Guards (yeah, right), being paid $10.50 an hour to risk their lives, as opposed to those lazy Commie correction officers.
* Falsified reports that the company sends into the government
* Guards who are practically gang members themselves

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/nyregion/at-bo-robinson-a-halfway-house-in-new-jersey-bedlam-reigns.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Yep, those government services provided by those lazy government workers with good benefits are just soooo inefficient. :

 

Any judges being bribed like they were in Pennsylvania to send kids to private juvenile facilities?

 

Like the tub-thumpers for privatization give a single solitary droplet of shit about any of this.

Once again it comes down to: they don't want to pay one rusty nickel in taxes for anything, at all, period.

 

In such a corruption-free state, who could've ever foreseen this happening?

 

Disagree. They're quite happy to pay many, many shiny nickels for weapons systems and defense contracts. Veterans' care not so much.

 

If you don't want to get raped in a gang-infested halfway house, don't jaywalk or whatever.

Or if you do commit a crime, do it at Zag's house. He'll put you out of your misery straight away.

 

I know it will be insane when the postal service, which hemmorrhages money, actually could turn a profit like FedEx or UPS.

 

To be fair, a government entity like the postal service was never meant to show a profit.

And a profit is much easier to show when you're charging ten times more per ounce for the same service.

 

Yeah. That's why it's called the "postal service." It was designed from the outset to provide a service, not make a profit.

 

To be further fair, government wasn't all that great at administering institutions like the Bo Robinson Center, either.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School

 

And yet people complain when the cost of stamps go up.

 

The post office loses money on paper because a Republican congress rigged it to look that way.

You could, as they say, look it up.