When is the profit motive wrong?
This is a topic that often intrudes into my consciousness. Reading Meteor Blades' front page story on privatizing prisons thrust it forward to the point I decided to offer some mental ruminations.
Let's start with prisons. A prison is a place to which we send someone as punishment for having broken the social contract. Prisoners do not have the full rights of the rest of us - even the !3th Amendment banning slavery and involuntary servitude says of the ban
except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convictedthus in theory there would be no Constitutional bar for the government committing people to private prisons as is already the case around too much of the nation. But while prisoners and ex-felons lose some rights, they are not subject to absolute authority of those controlling their confinement: a sentence even of life imprisonment