Much is being made of the respective benefits and negatives of privatization. After having chaired the Florida House of Representatives Subcommittee on Prisons and Offender Rehabilitation, I had exposure to the concept over 35 years ago. The real story behind the movement is to eliminate the escalating costs of state employees and replace them with contract workers that require no benefits. Prisons are not the first–outsourcing of jobs became a panacea for lean business over 25 years with the boom in employee leasing. It is the same concept based upon the suggestion of bidding competing vendors against the public employee payroll. Unions have not countered with a very effective response other than public sympathy for the plight of the unemployed. But there are successes in countering privatization–mainly that it sometimes appeals to the unsavory and there is often fraud in the bidding process. The real question is not the cost, but the throughput–the final cost/benefit of everything at the very end of the analysis.
