A self-interested contractor outperforms a well-meaning magistrate at prison management

Evidence

Nor was this all; for besides the vesting of the choice of the employments in committees of justices in the first instance, the same magistrates are called upon to exercise their judgment and ingenuity in dividing the prisoners into classes; in such sort, that the longer a man had stayed in the house his labour should be less and less ‘severe,’ exception made for delinquency, in which case a man might at any time be turned down from an upper class to a lower. But had the matter been left to a contractor and his prisoner-workmen, they would have been pretty sure to pitch upon, and to stick to, what would be most conducive to their profit, and by that means to the profit of the district; and that without any recommendation. Whether the effect of that recommendation would have been equally sure upon the above-mentioned magistrates, would have remained to be decided by experience. Understanding me to be speaking merely of a magistrate in the abstract, you will forgive my saying, that in this one point I have not quite so great a confidence in a set of gentlemen of that description, as I have in that sort of knave called a contractor. … You must, I think, before now have met with examples of men, that had rather a plan of the public’s, or even of an individual’s for whom they had a more particular regard, should miscarry under their management, than prosper under a different one. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 193

Categorization

• XREF: Bentham’s distrust of magistrates’ motives (love of power, display of wisdom) connects to the principal-agent trust problems in The Social Control of Impersonal Trust. — connects to: A contractor can extract profit from both prisoner earnings and spending — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 211

Related

• A contractor can extract profit from both prisoner earnings and spending (similarity 0.82)
• Profitability, not severity, is the surest test of prisoner reformation (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• A contractor can extract profit from both prisoner earnings and spending #expands (0.82) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 211