Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Republican legislative leaders continue their ongoing quest to privatize every function of the state's government. Currently on deck: prisons. Wednesday the Florida Senate Budget Committee passed a bill to privatize South Florida's 29 prisons, turning them over to for-profit companies that would be required to produce costs 7 percent below the cost of state-run facilities. But legislation they're moving forward wouldn't just privatize prisons—it would make it easier to privatize any state function. At the AFL-CIO blog, Donald Cohen writes that:
Under the latest proposals, an agency would not have to report its privatization of a program or service until after the contract is signed. And they also would eliminate a current legal requirement to do a cost-benefit analysis before privatizing any government function.
Eliminating cost-benefit analysis lays bare how little concerned with actual savings Scott and his legislative allies are, though they're certainly not averse to the union-busting effects of privatization. One way for-profit prison companies will cut costs, of course, is cutting jobs and cutting wages—after all, a guard who has worked for eight years at one of the prisons to be privatized makes all of $32,000 a year.
But that's not the only way the for-profit prison operators can reach their supposed goal of 7 percent savings. In fact, the state has already acted to cut costs for them, moving most "close management"—extremely violent—and disabled or seriously ill prisoners out of the prisons slated for privatization. That means that the for-profit companies will avoid having the most expensive prisoners, while the contrast with the state-run prisons that have to absorb those costly inmates will be held up as evidence that privatization really is cheaper.
It's kind of satisfying when proponents of privatization show so clearly how little they care about their stated motivations of cost cutting and the like. But in Florida, the fact that they've showed their hand is unlikely to stop the terrible policies they're pursuing.