By Zachary Cohen:

The purpose of the prison system has never been less clear in contemporary America. Civilians dread what appears a brutal punishment for breaking the law: condemnation to life in grimy centers of toxicity and abuse that hardens and traumatizes the incarcerated. Even upon release, the ex-felon lives with a lifetime of perceived dishonesty, danger, and lack of education that jeopardizes the ability to work and reintegrate back into society. This begs the question, what do prisons even do? 

Plato discusses in his final dialogue, Protagoras, the nature of corrective justice. Protagoras describes the idea that punishment for the sake of inflicting evil on evil is “unreasonable fury.” That instead, “rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone… (the purpose is that) the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again… implying that virtue is capable of being taught.” In the text, Socrates adds onto the argument by affirming the necessary of teaching virtue as a response to injustice, further elaborating punishment to be moral therapy for the soul.

From this appraisal of punishment, we must consider that it is unethical to place offenders in jails solely because we wish to transitively inflict equal crimes onto their souls to the ones they committed. Rather, prisons should educate the individual to become a valuable member of society. In theory, more virtuous citizens is an objective net benefit to everyone in the country. The only opponents to successful rehabilitation are ignorance, and worse, greed. 

In the year 2025, private prison control has introduced a market consideration to American criminal correction that operates at the expense of true justice. Management & Training Corporation (MTC), GEO Group, and CoreCivic, the largest and most controversial actor, are just a few of the leading corporations maximizing the profits of incarceration at the expense of all else. Numerous lawsuits have alleged that their facilities employ few and inexperienced staff, neglect living conditions, and leave progressive programs (i.e. health and violence prevention) underdeveloped. These standards have observable consequences for inmates, such as the 65% increase in reported violent incidents when comparing private prisons to their state-run counterparts (Andijar & Levine Accident Attorneys). Judging by their business model, these atrocities are not surprising. Outrage for reform erupted after one of CoreCivic’s founders disclosed to the media that the market for selling prisons was ‘just like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers’” Prisons are very clearly different than cars, real estate, and hamburgers, denoted by the fact that they direct the moral content of the nation’s most vulnerable who rely on these facilities for rehabilitation. Management with such carelessness is disrespectful to the families separated by bars, the civilians paying their allowances, and the idea of justice itself. 

The reward for CoreCivic’s moral disjunction and misplaced priorities is record revenue in 2025 (2.2 billion, up 13% from 2024), especially as more of their facilities accommodate the expansion of ICE-related apprehension. When confronted with an approximation of daily ICE detentions failing to meet 100,000 immigrants, CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle responded with optimism that the number is yet to peak, a reassurance for his investors. 

Private prisons are filthy assumptions of justice, but where is does the blame lie? Is it the companies themselves for managing these faulty institutions? To some extent yes, but it is corporate nature for these entities to take advance of a fiscally advantageous venture. It would also be fair to point toward the government. Once the rightful heir of prison control, Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” quickly assimilated more substance offenders than public jails could handle. The first mistake in corporate incarceration could be the initial line of contracts, paying prison companies along quotas, rather than quality, diminishing human life down to a statistic and a dollar. The latest, possibly, is a component of President Trump’s executive order, “Initial Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,” issued on the first day of his second term, which reverses Biden’s ban on federal contracts with private prisons. Such legislation provides proof that the government is aware of the situation, yet chooses between neglect and encouragement for corruption to affect the very principles of our justice system. Therefore, given the infrastructure is continually provided by the government, how can we truly blame CoreCivic and its peers singularly for taking advantage of the opportunity? 

Justice is a construct built by philosophy and executed by government. It is part of our humanity that ensures crime will always occur. The best course of action we can attempt as a society to help the convicted become virtuous members, as life is short and humans deserve to be judged by more than an action (to some extent). Socrates and Protagoras, as well as some of our species’ greatest minds would agree that private prisons, markets, incentives, and profit have little place in determining justice, humanity’s most important purpose. We must call first for accountability, exampled in legislation such as the 2023 Private Prison Information Act (“PPIA”), demanding equitable records to public prisons: staffing, health and safety, and other replicable protocol. The next step is repossession, taking the avarice out of justice entirely as it once was before Reagan. Integrity is only achieved when our government works harder to dedicate itself to those ideals and not what is easy and accessible: outsourcing our incarcerated civilians to independent facilities that do not care for them. Public prisons perform better regardless and have proven a stronger alternative in almost all measurable outputs of success. This initiative should be carried out by first stopping new contracts and investing in facilities owned by the government, in order to gradually shift inmates out of their private confinements. We owe it to our civilians to provide them the best opportunity for rehabilitation. When crimes are treated with immorality at its best and arguably, more crime, at its worst, how can we expect our incarcerated to learn from their mistakes and emerge at the end of their sentences matured and honorable?