Isn it wrong for the government to contract out a core governmental responsibility?
It is important to remember that the government is not contracting away its responsibility for the safe, secure and humane incarceration of offenders; that responsibility always remains with the government. Rather, it is contracting out to a private company the performance of those tasks that comprise that responsibility. Many of the individual tasks within a prison have long been contracted out to the private sector – health services, food services, maintenance, to name a few. Contracting out the ‘complete package’ is a difference of degree, not of kind. For many years, the United States contracted out the operation of its incoming missile defense system, NORAD, to the private sector. It is hard to conceive of a more ‘core governmental responsibility’ than the alerting of one’s citizens to the imminent and calamitous attack of a hostile foreign government.
