Texas - and a handful of other states - have been privatizing prisons for many years now. Private providers of services are assumed to be able to do so more efficiently then the public sector. But some argue that private organizations should not be granted the coercive power that properly should only belong to a government whose powers rest on the consent of the governed.
Here are thoughts about that issue.
The author points out that: In 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that prison privatization
violates “the constitutional rights to personal liberty and human
dignity of inmates who are supposed to serve their sentence in that
prison. This is because of the actual transfer of powers of management
and operation of the prison from the state to a private concessionaire
that is a profit-making enterprise.”
This is likely also applicable to the increased tendency of private entities to carry out military and security functions.
2301s: we can talk this out next week when we start in on federalism.
2302s: this applies to our discussion of the ever expanding power of the executive.
