Private prisons aren't bad as a rule. That's just dumb. That's just rhetoric. Yes, some private prisons are bad. A lot of public prisons are bad. Railing against private prisons in general is just fucking stupid.
How many of you who haven't been incarcerated have ever voluntarily stepped foot in a prison? Multiple prisons? Multiple public and private prisons? How many of you have made honest and educated assessments of what you've seen? How many of you have had lunch with a confessed murderer who spent 25 years in prison? I have.
In Texas, SOP for a prisoner who is being released who doesn't have somebody to pick him up is to put him on a bus, drop him off at the nearest stop to where he was arrested, and give him $5 less than the cost of getting an ID. That's how the public prisons operate and we act surprised that there's massive recidivism in the state.
The Prisoner Entrepreneurship Program is a non-profit devoted to rehabilitation of prisoners and creating a path to reintegration. The only prisons that have welcomed them in Texas are private.
Again, I'm not saying that all private prisons are good. I'm saying that it's stupid to insist that they're necessarily bad. I'm saying that it's dumb to focus your ire on private prisons out of all of the criminal justice problems that really do exist that are created solely by the government.