An alarming new trend is the privatization of prisons, and the rising number of Americans put in prison for longer and longer sentences as a result of this. Studies are starting to come out showing that these companies are exerting lobbying pressure to increase penalties for crimes, which in turn increases their profits since each prisoner is worth money to them. This is a sick system that needs to be gotten rid of very soon before we start to put people away for life for jaywalking. As long as money can corrupt politics, private prisons have no business being in existence.
The problem with for-profit prisons is that now the conditions are going to be the absolute barest minimum, and anything that could squeeze profits will be done away with. This might even leak over into security measures as staff hours are reduced and investment in new technologies is minimized. The other part that is troubling is that we now may have people more severely punished for their crimes than the average citizen would agree with. Unfortunately, there aren’t many people lobbying for prisoners’ rights, so it might take some kind of prison break before any public outcry to stop this is raised.