Mike O’Hare already skewered the silly idea that private industries don’t profit from publicly-owned prisons (who after all makes the bricks, mortar, cameras etc?). At the justifiable risk of piling on, my piece in Washington Post’s Wonkblog today lays out further what a distraction the private prison issue is in debates about mass incarceration.

Here’s a taster:

The governors of 20 states are surely not going to heed calls to close private prisons, because to do so they’d have to open one first. Among those states that do house inmates in private facilities, many do so sparingly. For example, at the end of 2014, Alaska, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and South Dakota each held no more than 30 prisoners in private facilities. (That’s a number, not a percent.)

For the rest click here