Your commentary about personal commentary bothers me more than the personal commentary, since you made a broad assumption that you’re doing some sort of public service by calling people out. Just for the record. It’s annoying and childish on your part.
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No, I don’t think of it as a “public service”, and I know it’s annoying.
It’s a “reaction function” in the game theory sense.
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I’ve never used either one. What’s the difference between them?
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Ignore suppresses all posts, PMs, and notifications. Mute suppresses notifications and PMs.
Go to your profile and select Users. On the right you will see options.
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Interesting, thanks.
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I highly recommend it. Makes for a much more pleasant reading experience. Kind of like having a bath without a toddler running in every 3 seconds.
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That’s an insult to toddlers.
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You would be wrong in your doubt. Phone calls from jail cost me $3.00 a minute when my son was in county jail. The county does not run the phone system. They get paid by an outside, private contractor for the right to run the phone system for inmates. It is very much a “revenue source”.
Want deodorant? You need to have someone put money on your commissary account. Because that is also outsourced to a private company that pays the county for the commissary concession. And be prepared to pat $10.00 for the deodorant. Want paper, envelopes, stamps? Commissary. At grossly inflated prices. This is a captive customer base. There is no competition, so the company can charge whatever they want.
And before you think, “Well, gosh, I’ll just send a care package with all that stuff”. Not allowed. Part of the contract signed is a non compete clause. Care packages from home never make it to the inmate. But, you guessed it, there is a company that can provide that for a price:
https://shop.icaregifts.com/shop/
The inmate is a huge “revenue source” for many different companies.
Sheilah
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There is no doubt that county jails have a number of sources of gross revenue streams, including charging high mark ups on items.
My statement was that I doubted that county jails were revenue sources in the sense of the county receiving positive net revenue on the operation of running the jail.
YD, I do not understand your comment: “If you don’t get the distinction wrt “for profit” educational institutions, I won’t pursue it.” What does “educational institutions” have to do with for profit prisons? Did you mean to say “correctional institutions?” Otherwise, I really don’t know why you would conflate the two.
WRT prisons for profit: " How a Private Prison Makes Money
A public prison is naturally non-profit. The end goal is to house prisoners in an attempt to rehab them or remove them from the streets. A private prison, on the other hand, is run by a corporation. That corporation’s end goal is to profit from anything they deal in.
In order to make money as a private prison, they receive a stipend from the government. This money from the government can be paid in a multitude of different ways. It can be based on the size of the prison, based on a monthly or yearly set amount, or in most cases, it is paid based on the number of prisoners that the prison houses.
Let’s suppose that it costs $100 per day to house a prisoner (assuming full capacity, including all administration costs), and the prison building can hold 1,000 inmates. A private prison can offer their services to the government and charge $150 per day per prisoner. Generally speaking, the government will agree to these terms if the $150 is less than if the prison was publicly run. That spread is where the private prison makes its money.
As in any business, saving money wherever possible increases the bottom line. Expanding also allows the business to bring in more money, but it needs capital to do that."
That is, a private company exists for one reason and one reason only: to make a profit. There is even a section in there about those companies being publicly traded! What I am having trouble understanding is your insistence that there is no such thing as a for profit prison. Whether you like it or not, it is a thing.
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I think it is a semantic issue.
In a for profit educational institution, the institution is freely setting the price it charges for tuition, and sets the price to maximize profits. It does not negotiate the price with anyone.
In the privately run prison, the prison is dealing with just one customer, the state, and the two entities arrive at a contract that the private firm will manage the prison for $50,000 per year per inmate. It arrives at that negotiated rate because it thinks it can run the prison for $45,000 per person per year in expenses to other suppliers.
I think of the $5,000 per prisoner as a “management fee” to compensate the firm for its management of the prison, rather than as “profit”. However, I can see how you could also interpret it as “profit”.
The distinction with private, for profit universities is that private, for profit universities set their prices unilaterally, while prison management companies negotiate the management contract with the state.
But if you want to think of the compensation earned by the prison management company as “profit”, that’s fine.
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The actual definition of profit is revenue over and above bona fife expenses, including salaries for staff so a “management fee” would be an expense reducing the profit to zero.
Renaming it something else doesn’t make profit into an expense, though.
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Actually, in economics, there is something called the “zero profit condition”, which says that firms enter the industry until profits are driven to zero in equilibrium, and it’s exactly because the compensation for management is considered as an expense. In the context of private prisons, different private companies would bid for the contract until the bid price was just enough to compensate the firm for its services.
If you want to call it profit, and call the firms “for profit prisons” it is 100% OK with me.
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YD purposely tries to derail all conversations - Moderator: I think you need to evaluate YD posts -
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LOL. This thread was asleep for two days until @IdahoRider, @Mondo, and @soloudinhere came on to revive the topic of private prisons.
If you want to flag my posts for the moderator, you should probably use the flag function.
Compensation to management != profit though. You are describing something similar to the concept of EBIDTA but reversed for revenues.
By your definition any business that makes more than $1 over their bona fide expenses is not for profit, because that extra is “management expense” which makes no sense.
I wasn’t talking about private prisons. I was discussing specifically the arrangements at Morris County.
As always, you still don’t get to decide who posts and what we talk about.
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Re bolded: No disagreement there. However, other posters (not I) took a segue into the topic of private prisons.
Whether a firm is considered “for profit” or “not for profit” for tax purposes depends on whether they are attempting to make profits, not on the dollar amount of the profit made in a particular year. Plenty of “for profit” firms make losses (negative profits). On the other hand, there are plenty of firms that do make profits in the economic sense (beyond compensation for management) if there is a barrier to entry that prevents other firms from entering the industry and competing equilibrium (economic) profits to zero.
But if you don’t want the thread mired in a discussion of private prisons, why keep bringing it up? Why not let the thread go back to sleep?
There is a difference in how the word “profit” is used by economists and by accountants and the general public.
It is and they do. They are paid for the various concessions that they grant to these companies. The more inmates they house, the more phone calls get made, the more Skype-type visits are done, the more commissary items are purchased. The bigger the profit for the concession holders means more money to the jail or prison.
We have incentivized the incarceration system.
Sheilah
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