A Bear Market for Private Prisons?

Last year, the ACLU of Maine lobbied ferociously to defeat LD 1095, a bill designed to facilitate the creation and use of private prisons in Maine.  As usual, the justification for private prisons was based on the stale fallacy that governments can save money through private facilities.  

We focused on what lies at the heart of our skyrocketing incarceration costs: over incarceration.  Between 1970 and 2005, the U.S. prison population grew by 700 percent, far outpacing both population growth and crime. As a result, our country now has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's prisoners. 

We argued that the imprisonment of human beings at record levels is both a moral failure and an economic one — especially at a time when more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet and when state governments confront enormous fiscal crises.

This mass incarceration has provided a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.

Yesterday, a report released from a faction of the hacktivist group Anonymous concluded that the publicly traded prison operator Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is not an efficient, profitable free-market solution -- but actually a bad investment for shareholders.

This is a promising indication that America's reckless addiction to incarceration is beginning to wane.   CCA did not exist before this massive expansion of incarceration – and the company depends on it to survive.

Update: Bloomberg has this story of a private prison in Mississippi, and what goes wrong when we start locking people up for profit.