It pleases me that I can finally report some good news on a topic that has been near and dear to me for many years: private prisons.
Today, the Department of Justice announced that it would be phasing out the use of private prisons entirely within the next five years or so. There are many reasons I think private prisons are a very bad idea, and I touched on some of them in 2013’s post, A Deep Look into the Shady World of the Private Prison Industry. Here’s my introduction to that piece:
Private prisons are antithetical to a free people. Of all the functions a civilized society should relegate to the public sector, it’s abundantly clear incarceration should be at the very top of the list. Jailing individuals is a public cost that a society takes on in order to ensure there are consequences to breaking certain rules that have been…
