The Justice Policy Institute, a criminal-justice-reform advocacy group, has a new report (pdf) with some eye-opening statistics on the lobbying strategies of for-profit private prisons. For instance, while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent respectively. J.F. at DiA homes in on the strongest arguments against private prisons:
[T]here are for-profit hospitals, and for them to do well people have to get sick. The difference is that for-profit hospitals tend not to poison people and break legs to keep their beds fully occupied, while for-profit prisons, as the JPI's report explains, tend to lobby for policies that serve them: harsher prison sentences and greater reliance on incarceration than on probation and parole. Admittedly, the report shows a great deal more smoke than fire, and its most damning intimation—that private-prison lobbyists were behind Arizona's immigration bill—overlooks the regrettable popularity of such measures. And, once again, companies are free to lobby for their own interests.
The problem is that their interests—imprisoning more people and keeping them in jail for longer periods of time—are not ours.
The Dish 