Privatizing Government II

Yale Open Course <Power and Politics in Today's World>

Lecture 5: The Resurgent Right in the West

Notes

Privatizing gov functions in the US

• Bill Clinton Dec 1994 - “stop making govts do what they are not good at”

• Starts in the 1980s and continues throughout the 1990s (Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II)

• 1993 National Performance Review - “aggressive outsourcing of govt work” → 426K federal jobs eliminated

• By 2001, more contract workforce than civilian employees in the Pentagon

Privatizing the military

• Private contractors have always participated in wars in the past

• Iraq war - almost the same number of contractors & military troops

• Afghanistan war = contractors > troops

• Private contractors do all functions except for front-line/offensive fighting

  • G4S: 625K employees; routine security, heavily-armed security, etc

  • Erinys: mostly in Africa & Iraq; protect energy assets

  • Asia Security Group: Kabul HQ protecting officials

  • DynCorp: policing missions

  • Academi: notoriously aggressive tactics; incidents of uncontrollable contractors

    • Montreaux document: agreement on good military practices for countries employing private contractors

  • Afghanistan - heavy reliance on local populations for employees

• Host Nation Trucking in Afghanistan

  • US in 2001 in Afghanistan to support Northern Alliance (the losing side) in the civil war

    • But the losing side had no good prospect for governing

      • seen as an American puppet government; no real control over the country

  • How to move around the personnel & supplies in an unsecure regions?

    • Used increasingly more contractors than troops → didn't want a lot of American casualties (political costs)

      • For guarding convoys, the locals know the terrain better but also know how to take advantage of their situation

      • Paid the people (the Taliban) who would’ve attacked the convoys

        • Funding the guerilla movement that the US was fighting

Consequences of increased reliance on PMCs (private military contractors)?

• Assuming efficiency gains, it saves money

• Can fight otherwise unpopular wars → good or bad?

  • Undemocratic; gives incentives to fight more wars

• Republican Theory of the US founders

  • should have standing/professional armies (they encourage wars)? wars only if really necessary

    • if you can’t mobilize citizenry, maybe the war shouldn’t be fought

• Democratic peace theory

  • Democratic countries tend not to fight each other

    • and only fight wars they are going to win

    • difficult to get people to fight without a winning prospect

• If it’s easier to start a war with PMCs and pay the war with debt → democratic peace theory might no longer apply

The US prison industry

• the US a huge outlier: highest incarceration rate; accelerated rate starting in the 1980s especially for non-white males

• 60s, 70s - advances in treatment of psychiatric disorders

  • patients released from mental hospitals

    • Also coincides with govt fiscal crises

    • states saved money by de-institutionalizing mental health patients

      • Many of the released patients ended up in the criminal population

• what drove the increase in incarceration?

  • war on drugs

  • 1980s mandatory sentencing shifting power from judges to prosecutors (3 strikes law)

    • more punitive sentencing

• minorities disproportionally incarcerated

• political implication - felon disenfranchisement laws

  • ex. KY, VA - permanently disenfranchised if had felony conviction

  • Disenfranchisement of the black voting population

• Paradox: violent crime has been falling

• why lock up more people when violent crimes are coming down?

  • Locking up people for non-violent crimes

  • Demography?

    • As the baby boom bulge ages, fewer people to commit crimes

  • Roe vs. Wade?

    • Those likely to commit crime are not being born → controversial hypothesis

  • Education of women?

    • Education/labor force participation of women increase → decrease in violent crime

  • no consensus on the cause

• People are not aware that violent crime is actually decreasing

  • being tough on crime - cheap talk for politicians

• Decline of incarceration

  • due to cost

  • BUT private sector prison imprisonment increasing

Weber’s definition of state: monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a given territory

• Military / prison - contracting out government monopoly

• Creates ‘principle-agent problem’

  • Principle contracts out to the agent, the agent has more information that the principal needs

  • nested principle agent problem

    • solution: increase competition; prison industry low competition, currently huge cost to entry

      • military somewhat more competitive; but govts not going to switch contractors

    • Better alignment of interests of the agents with the state?

      • Difficult to do that; industries have very different incentives

        • Ex. need inmates to run prisons

        • increasing prison lobbying for:

        • lockup quotas

        • stiffer penalties

        • immigration enforcement

        • Ex. better for military industry to have long wars

    • monitoring?

      • difficult to do with no visibility and control over the doings of the contractors/subcontractors