, Columnist
Private Prisons Are a Failed Experiment
For-profit lockups don’t save taxpayer money or improve outcomes for inmates.
The corporate look.
Photographer: Joshua Lott/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The U.S. has stumbled on a particularly inefficient form of providing services. Instead of having government employees do the work, or leaving it to the private sector, the U.S. sometimes combines government funding with private execution. This sort of pseudo-privatization generally fails to control costs, even as it reduces oversight and provides low-quality service.
There are many examples of this. No-bid contracting in the health-care, defense and infrastructure industries drives up costs. Expensive mercenary contractors like Blackwater (now Academi) were notorious for human-rights abuses during the Iraq War.