More market-based prison management? An attempt at rehabilitation? I don’t know what to call this but I like it, a lot.
This guy on YouTube has video taped prison inmates in the Philippines dancing to Thriller and songs from Sister Act. There are about a dozen videos posted on the profile I’ll write more as soon as I get the bottom of exactly what the point is supposed to be.
Addendum:
Apparently, physical fitness is critical to rehabilitation. In order to get better cooperation rates from inmates the music and coordinated routines were added, awesome!

I believe that a restitution based system of justice (ala Randy Barnett) is the ideal to preserve both individual liberty and to efficiently protect property rights. One major logistical issue that remains for such a system to be feasible is: how do victims extract the debt owed to them from criminals who are unwilling to work or cooperate?
The first solace to this problem is the assumption that the population of these sorts of criminals will be small (compared to how many people are incarcerated under today’s justice system). The problem is not so intimidating when you think of it in these terms. The logistical question is nothing more than how to motivate ordinarily unwilling inmates to be productive in terms that the prison administrators could profit off of. The following news stories are what I would consider to be great examples of market-based prison management techniques that seem to have had great success.
1. Tattoo parlors in Canadian prisons.
2. Italian women’s prison and German prison begin high fashion lines.
3. Maine State Prison novelties shop.

Arnold Kling at Econlog, quoted and linked to Bernard Harcourt at Volokh Conspiracy. Prisons and mental health institutions seem to be substitutes for one another. Today and always in this country anyways.
My comment:
David Rothman’s The Discovery of the Asylum, is probably the most exhaustive history of incarceration institutions in America. He explicitly parallels the birth and growth of asylums with prisons in the US.
By the way, the functions of both institutions appear to have been achieved effectively by private means long before state, regional, or national provision.

In the case of prisons, concern that private providers hire unqualified gaurds to save costs, thereby undermining safety and security of prisoners why private contracting is generally cheaper, and why in some cases it may deliver a higher, while in others a lower, quality level than in-house provision by the government…
In contrast, if the provider is a private contractor, he has the residual control approval for a cost reduction. At the same time, if a private contractor wants to improve quality and get a higher price, he needs to negotiate with the government since the government is the buyer of the service. As a consequence, the private contractor generally has a stronger incentive both to improve quality and to reduce costs than the government employee has. But, the private contractor’s incentive to engage in cost reduction is typically too strong since he ignores the adverse impact on quality (Hart, Shleifer, and Vishny, 1997, pp. 1128 and 1129).

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Last night I went with the university Catholic student group (unusual for me I know) to the local Juvenile Detention Center. I’d recommend doing this to anyone who thinks that the public school system is doing a good job, or even someone who insists that public education is necessary. Watching these kids be ushered around the gym as though they were military cadets was surreal. Here’s a bet I’d be willing to make. Take a stop watch and a group of kindergardeners, time how long it takes them to make a circle when asked. Then time the juvenile inmates, when asked. I’ll bet you get something similar. When do the inmates fall behind on their time scores? When they are never asked to make a circle, instead they are marched by direction, a central planner, to line up in exactly the right places. It took almost five minutes.
Anyway, my impression of the kids was that it doesn’t take much to get them motivated and interested. You just have to try. These kids had no illusion about where they were and how much they disliked it, but they hated school as well. They said the learning environment in the facility was easier than outside. There was no choice but to pay attention and do the work. They hated school and when given the choice they weren’t going to go and all the choices that remained seemed to lead them here. These kids weren’t defective, they didn’t even seem to need much rehabilitation or anything. They needed motivation and inspiration. It all seemed like a big waist: a room full of talented and potentially motivated kids with no outlet.

Taken from Theory and History by Ludwig von Mises
Part Two: Determinism and Materialism
Chapter 5: Determinism and its Critics
Section 5: Determinism and Penology
Mises explains why state punishment cannot be retributive and is only motivated by deterrence.

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I got a fascinating and enjoyable delivery in the mail today. Prison Songs volumes 1 and 2 the Allan Lomax Collection. These are recordings from actual inmates between the 1930s and 1970s. The liner notes have historical footnotes, and full interview transcripts. In a word these discs are awesome.

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Here are three sources I recently came across that do a great job at visually representing the trends of incarceration across the country and around the globe.
1. Many Eyes, US Prison population by state (thanks to M. Thomas for the link). This shows the dominance of incarcerated populations by state from 1990 to today. I wish they had similar graphics going all the way back to colonial times.
2. Google Earth prisons around the world (download here). Need help visually understanding where the most prisons in the world are what countries operate them. Check out Ireland, the UK, California, and Texas. Once again I would live a full time series from the dawn of civilization till modern times that shows the facilities cropping up like this.
3. The global prison population by country. Not as visual as the previous two but thorough. I’m thinking of running a quick regression against the economic freedom index. Any suggestions?

Roderick Long recently applauded the mini rebellion going on in Chicago over the cities ban on foie gras. Rather than just taking it in stride many businesses are turning their violation notices into marketing signals, telling customers that they are more important to their businesses than the state. Roderick later blogged on a less inspiring story of civilian travelers made to wait 8 hours on plane. Why didn’t any one just stand up and leave? Well Mr. and Mrs. Brown seem mad as hell and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

To follow up the last post I wanted to point out this portion of Shapiro and Chen’s latest paper on prisons. They write,

For example, if upon release a low security inmate is subject to more frequent drug tests than his minimum security counterpart, our results may be picking up an increased probability of rearrest that has nothing to do with increased criminal tendencies…
While we cannot entirely rule out this explanation, we know of no federal parole policy that specifies a relationship between supervision intensity and security level of releasing facility, and we note that even the large differences in supervision intensity studied by Petersilia and Turner (1993) did not produce large enough effects to explain the majority of the effect we estimate.

I wonder if this data were available, how prevalent the effect would be derived from drug testing alone compared to other criminal behaviors. Their comment surrounds the scrutiny that ex-cons go through. I wonder if evidence would support the claim that drug use itself (rather than testing frequency) is correlated with harder prison stays. It seems reasonable to me that an inmate might pick up the habit to cope with being inside, or take up the habit when he gets out for any number of reasons associated with being released.