Re: You know your prison population is too high...
A little more math from that Justice Policy Institute paper. The paper declares that the two largest private prison companies had national revenues of $2.9 billion in 2010, while overall prison spending was $74 billion in 2007. Even assuming that the overall figure remained there until 2010, that puts the private revenues at about 4 percent of the total. With 8 percent of the prisoners. And this is supposed to be the "problem" with our prison spending?
Fact is that everything the private system is accused of doing, the public unionized systems are doing one hell of a lot harder. Any paper on general prison problems that completely ignores that - like this one - is selling an agenda.