[manholio]

True in the absolute, but you would expect that if those flows and influence would be so large, that fraction would increase too.

What's stopping a large scale privatization of the penal system? Could it be that there are incumbent interests too that compete with the private prisons, such as party appointees and horse trading in local politics which see that flow of public money as a vital resource? Could it be - since they seem to be winning the competition - that those interests in the public system have an even larger lobby power on crime prevention policies?

Not trying to take the side of the godawful private prison industry here, just tired of this simplistic leftist dichotomy: capital bad, state good. Policies are decided with political influence and power, and money is one of the many forms political power can take. A bad political system, set up to ignore the interests of society, will be gamed by both private interests and political insiders; the west tends to suffer from the first problem, but for most of the rest of the world it would be "a nice problem to have".