[zeidrich]

A prison is a place where people are deprived of liberties. A society can justify depriving people of liberties. A private interest should not have the right to do so.

Yes, it's not the private interest who condemns the prisoner, but they run these facilities at a profit, turning what should be a rehabilitating environment into an environment that is designed to promote full prisons to enrich an individual.

A good prison should work at a financial loss because there should be a societal benefit to rehabilitating inmates. If a higher prison population turns into a financial incentive, there is no incentive to help inmates or even reduce recidivism.

This is especially true when you consider how many minor offenses can send people to jail in the US. It is also interesting to consider that when slavery was abolished, many plantations turned into for-profit prisons; or that the incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.

[Prophasi]

The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc. Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but implemented, by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable possibility.

You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important; but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.

Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the results weigh against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?

WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system itself.

Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a counterpoint.