5 Bad Reasons to Scrap Private Prisons

If you’re in the business of running a private prison, you’ve had a bad couple of weeks. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the U.S. Justice Department would be reducing its reliance on private prisons after a report by its inspector general suggested they weren’t doing such a great job. Now the government is looking at ending the use of private facilities to detain illegal immigrants. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders called it “an important step in the right direction” and “exactly what I campaigned on as a candidate for president.” Investors weren’t such big fans; shares of prison corporations slid accordingly.

This is undoubtedly a victory for people who have campaigned against privately managed prisons. But is it a victory that the rest of us should celebrate? To answer that question, we need to know whether private prisons are better or worse than public ones — which is to say, we need to know what there is to dislike about private prisons. Here are the main candidates I’m aware of: