[notdanariely]

I agree that this trend is disturbing, but am unable to reconcile your alarmist language with the numbers in the links you provided.

I do not support private corporations (or even public good -- yes, I think the chain gang days of old are similarly awful) making money off of prisoners. However, from the articles you linked, some data:

* 2 million (2,000,000) inmates in federal/state/local prisons.

* 100 private prisons, 62,000 inmates in them (6.2%)

* 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states (unsure how this relates to previous point, the article isn't very well written and doesn't connect these numbers)

* Forbes.com article says there are 6,000 prisoners in the US serving time while working for a private enterprise.

So on the one extreme, we're looking at 6% of the prison population being affected by this. At the other extreme, there are only 6k prisoners affected.

I believe there are a huge number of ethical and moral violations surrounding the prison side of the US criminal justice system. Private prisons are one of them, but hyperbole and extreme language do not serve any of the population.

[tptacek]

It's also not totally clear what the disadvantages of private prisons are, versus overcrowded public prisons. Whatever the case, it's almost certainly true that it's a subset of the 6% of inmates in private prisons who are harmed by prison privatization.

(I have no idea what I think about private prisons. I do not automatically assume that systems controlled by corporations are worse than those controlled by government bureaucracies. Public or private, US prison sentences are far too long for most crimes.)

[themartorana]

I think "hyperbole" is unfair. Waiting to be "alarmist" until after an "alarm" has the capacity to halt a terrible situation is rather pointless. It's so much easier to stop a bad practice than walk it back from significant implementation.

This may be small, but it's growing rapidly, and if it's 6.2% now, it's 15% by 2020, and so on.

[rayiner]

The problem with the argument is not that it's not worth raising alarm about 6%. It's alarming--that number was basically 0% 20 years ago. However, the argument doesn't explain how our justice system got to be the way it is. Private prison corporations didn't create extreme minimum sentences. They came along after the fact to profit from them. The core problem is a lack of virtue in the American people. We're unsympathetic, unforgiving, and unmerciful. our lack of virtue created the system that opportunists are now profiting from.

[kevinnk]

Ironically, painting broad swaths of people with labels like "non-virtuous" is how we got extreme sentences In the first place.

[harryh]

It's not, in fact, growing rapidly.