The Missoula Independent has a long piece on the private prison in Shelby. The story doesn't break much new ground -- I suspect the reporter was hoping to find something that wasn't there -- but it does shed light on the paradox of private prisons.

I'm ag'in private prisons for two reasons:

1. The power to hold people under lock and key is among the most awesome powers any human can hold over another. Just as a matter of principle, people who hold that power ought to be held to the strictest possible standards and should be accountable directly to the people. It doesn't take an Abu Ghraib to understand what can go wrong in a poorly run prison.

2. The thing that makes free enterprise so great at grilling burgers and cranking out toasters is that the incentives are right. Businesses that mistreat customers and employees wind up with no customers and no employees. Free enterprise rewards good work. In a private prison, as the Indy points out, the incentives are all wrong: The customers (prisoners) can't opt out, and in a place like Shelby, it can be pretty tough for the employees (the guards) to opt out, too.

Moreover, it's in the stockholders' best interest to have more people serving longer sentences with less rehabilitation and less supervision. Prison is the one place where the most satisfied customers are the ones who are least likely to return.

The only way to keep these perverse incentives from doing real harm is by strict government control. And if you have to pay for that, why have private prisons at all?

UPDATE: In his comment below, JR seems to have missed the entire point of my post. Perhaps I wasn't clear, or perhaps he is being deliberately obtuse.

In the first place, agriculture is, of course, a heavily subsidized industry, from price supports to disaster payments to guaranteed loans to food inspections to government-mandated marketing, even to the farm-to-market roads that crisscross the country and that no private company would ever have dreamed of building.

Second, to the extent that it is allowed to, free enterprise works in agriculture because, again, the incentives are right. Producers who grow bigger and better crops sell them more successfully. Nobody has to tell anybody what to do, yet everybody wins. Those incentives don't exist in private prisons.

Third, Abu Ghraib is, in fact, a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Evidence is unclear whether private guards behave better or worse than government-employed guards, but what is clear is this: If a private company were accused of doing what government employees have done at Abu Ghraib, it would be stonewalling every step of the way. It would do everything within its considerable power to assure that not one word leaked out, and it would fight subpoenas and grand juries all the way into bankruptcy. Government can try to cover its tracks, too, but never as thoroughly as a private company.

For a truly chilling example of what can happen, read this Harper's piece from August 2003 about Correctional Medical Services, the nation's largest provider of prison medicine. Money quote:

"[P]rivate companies such as CMS feel no responsibility, and have no legal obligation, to account to the public for what goes on inside their facilities. So, while CMS receives about $550 million of taxpayer money each year, the company chooses not to provide any accounting of how that money is spent or even how much of it is spent--and how much unspent, to be pocketed as profit. And although lawsuits over the years have revealed discredited health-care professionals working in CMS facilities, the company refuses to reveal the names of its doctors and nurses for verification or to provide any account of how many have been disciplined or had their licenses revoked in other states. With CMS responsible for so many patients nationwide, it is fair to say that the practice of medicine in prison has reached an unprecedented level of inscrutability--indeed, secrecy."

SECOND UPDATE: Jackie Corr e-mails: Private prisons and what comes with them have no place in a free society. None!

Accountability comes first when it comes to the protection of the rights of all, including prisoners.

As one story after another has pointed out, the prosecution of contractors in the Iraq torture scandal will be much more difficult then if they were legitimate military personnel. It's unclear what laws can be used to prosecute a civilian contract employee.

For example: What we do know is the Justice Department sent Lane McCotter, former director of the Utah Department of Corrections,to Iraq as a "corrections advisor" with a private contract. He was was involved in the running of Abu Ghraib prison during the torture sessions. McCotter has since resigned and is no longer in Iraq.

McCotter was forced out of the Utah prison system in 1997 following the case of a schizophrenic inmate who died shortly after being strapped to a restraining chair for 16 hours. McCotter later became an executive of a private prison company whose Santa Fe, New Mexico jail was investigated by the Justice Department in 2003 for healthcare, sanitary and safety deficiencies. After New Mexico, McCotter showed up in Iraq as a private contractor.