In some cases that’s easy to monitor: If a town hires a private company to provide garbage collection, voters can tell whether the trash is, in fact, being picked up. Sure enough, privately run prisons have a far worse security record than public prisons. Yet the number of inmates in private prisons has grown by leaps and bounds — especially in the area of immigrant detention. It would, I think, be going too far to claim that the private-prison industry — merchants of detention? As I suggested at the beginning, cruelty and corruption are intertwined in Trump administration policy.

Source: International New York Times July 08, 2019 22:30 UTC