[rayiner]

I agree that’s true in general. But people can be in Rikers for months and sometimes years (average is over 9 months). So the capacity for the government to abuse prisoners is demonstrated: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-...

I don’t think we should have private prisons, but the level of focus on them is about politics. It’s an issue that unifies the economic left, who support unions and oppose privatization but may or may not care about prisoner abuse, with the criminal justice movement.

But at the end of the day, most prisoners (over 90%) are not in private prisons, and there is little evidence that private prisons are worse than public prisons. The reality is that our government run, union-staffed prisons are really bad. But prisons are a major source of jobs, and public unions that represent prison employees are powerful—and Americans are punitive—so it’s difficult to tackle the real issues.