Two weeks ago there was a riot at the Willacy County Correctional Center in south Texas.
The riot originally started as a protest against inadequate medical care. Willacy is operated by the Management and Training Corp., a for-profit prison company from Utah. The prison housed illegal immigrants and non-violent criminals.

Afterward it was determined that the prison was uninhabitable, so all 2,800 prisoners would be moved to other facilities.

This wasn't the first time the facility had been ordered shut down. The prison, nicknamed "Ritmo", was featured in a report by the ACLU.

Unlike public prisons, private prisons aren't required to provide educational and rehabilitation programs, so the prisoners sit around and get frustrated in the overcrowded conditions.

All the private prison contracts have minimum occupancy quotas, which guarantee payment for a certain number of prisoners, usually 90 percent of capacity. These provisions encourage incarcerating more people, since the spots are already paid for.

The complaints of the prisoners of Willacy are not unusual. A 2014 report by In The Public Interest found that health care contractors in Florida prisons often withheld treatments in order to cut costs. This led to a 10-year high in inmate deaths.
The report didn't stop there.

Underserving inmates. Maggots in and around food. Smuggling of contraband by Aramark employees, including cocaine and heroin. Sex with inmates in kitchen coolers, and even an Aramark employee accused of attempting to hire one inmate to murder another.
For many of these infractions, Aramark received a $98,000 fine, or so Michiganders were told. Months after the fine was levied in the spring, the Detroit Free Press reported that the administration of Governor Rick Snyder secretly cancelled the fine and it was never paid.

Many people forget that the privatization of prisons doesn't stop at just totally private prisons. There are nine different industries that benefit from this outsourcing trend. Many of them have local monopolies for their services, and are able to use that leverage to extract money from the families of inmates.

Debtor Prisons

Around the same time as the Willacy prison riot, CNN came out with a report concerning private debt collectors and how they are able to abuse the system in the name of the government.
In this case, how a poor person with a tiny government bill can get sent to a private prison by a private company.

In an industry already known for bad behavior, debt collectors that work for government agencies usually don’t have to work within the confines of consumer protection laws – opening the door for higher fees and even more aggressive tactics.
Their government bosses can give them the power to threaten debtors with the suspension of their driver’s license, garnishment of their wages, foreclosure and arrest to get them to pay up.

The article mentions how one person charged with not paying a $7.50 toll fee got $88 in administration fees, plus another $84 of fees from the private debt collector.
What's especially galling is that like private prisons, these companies don't have to play by the rules simply because they are working hand-in-hand with the government.

Thanks to legal exemptions, government collectors usually don’t have to follow the main federal law that regulates the debt collection industry. State consumer protection laws often don’t apply either. And when debtors have challenged Linebarger's government collections work in court based on other laws, the firm has gone so far as to argue it has immunity because it is an extension of the government.
"I had no defense whatsoever," said Houston Army veteran Harry Memnon, who says his unpaid $1.25 toll charges became a nearly $300 bill.

If that isn't the definition of fascism, I don't know what is.
And it gets worse, because while its possible to shame a public official, private debt collectors have no shame.

Grieving mother Laverne Dobbinson received a particularly horrifying letter from Linebarger in 2012 -- billing her recently deceased son for $710 in damage to the New York City police car that killed him.

Mercenaries and Private Police

There's been a lot of talk about private security contractors like Blackwater (now known as Academi), and a lot more talk about the militarization of our police forces.
However, missing from this discussion is where those two issues meet - private police in America.

“Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.”
— Ray Lewis, Retired Philadelphia Police Captain

In ever increasing frequency, areas of the United States are being policed by private police forces that wear police uniforms, carry police-grade weapons, and perform many of the same duties as public cops, including carrying out SWAT team raids, issuing tickets and firing their weapons.
But because they are private, they are above certain important rules.

Since it is a private police force, the department is not required to release those statistics, nor is it subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The UCPD, one of the largest private security forces in America, has the legal status of a private police force and the powers of a public one.

Since there are more private police in this country than public ones, this should be a general concern.
Some cities hard-hit by the Depression were forced to lay off so many public police officers that security in their cities has become precarious. This has led to a third-world trend - police for the wealthy.

On the streets of Oakland, budget cuts have made the beat cop a rare breed, and some of the city’s wealthy neighborhoods have turned to unarmed security guards to take their place.
After people in Oakland’s wealthy enclaves like Oakmore or Piedmont Pines head to work, security companies take over, cruising the quiet streets to ward off burglars looking to take advantage of unattended homes...
the private security industry is projected to grow by about 19 percent – from 1 million to 1.2 million guards – between 2010 and 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of that growth will come because private firms are doing jobs once held by law enforcement, according to the bureau.

We aren't talking about shopping mall cops. We are talking about cops on city streets.
In the small town of Foley, Minnesota, they have fired their entire police force and replaced them with a private police force.

Those that support privatization say that this is a step in the right direction because private cops that abuse their powers can be easily fired.
But read the fine print. Private cops are immune from transparency laws and are easily influenced by wealthy benefactors.

"You can see the public police becoming like the public health system," said Thomas M. Seamon, a former deputy police commissioner for Philadelphia who is president of Hallcrest Systems Inc., a leading security consultant. "It's basically, the government provides a certain base level. If you want more than that, you pay for it yourself."

That's not how law enforcement, and the justice system in general, is supposed to work. It means that certain abuses are to be expected.
What's more, private cops are all about cutting costs in the name of private profits. That means private cops are often poorly trained, inadequately screened, poorly regulated and heavily armed.

Make no mistake - we are talking about guns for hire, just like what we are turning the military into.
If you think the current police forces are out of control, wait until you get a load of the mercenaries we are hiring.

“There is no accountability,” said Fred Gittes, a Columbus lawyer who has handled several cases involving police and public records. “They have the greatest power that society can invest in people — the power to use deadly force and make arrests.
“Yet, the public and public entities have no practical access to information about their behavior, eluding the ability to hold anyone accountable,” Gittes said. “Who is regulating these people? You’re not reporting to a professional overseer with a board of trustees.”

At this point we should stop and realize that this trend is not something new. It's actually something very old. This is a throwback to the 19th Century Pinkertons.

Indeed one can't imagine the Carnegie's and the Rockefeller's of the past amassing the fortunes they did without first having hired their own private police force, the Pinkertons, to protect their interests. The Pinkertons, in fact, were this country's oldest and largest private police forces and because they were paid to protect those who hired them, not the broader public, they soon were reviled by ordinary working class and poor Americans.
Eventually this private police force's freedom to harass or hurt anyone their employers deemed a threat--be they a worker trying to get a fair wage or a poor person begging near the doorstep of a mansion-- was put in check with the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893. This piece of legislation not only put restrictions on who could hire private security agencies, but also regulated what such agencies could do when hired.

Anyone who's every read the history of the 19th Century would know about the dangers of private entities doing public business. Anyone familiar with 19th Century history would know that certain government services were created to curb abuses and protect the public.
Unfortunately most Americans are too ignorant of that history.

In America today it is possible to be arrested by a private cop, for a warrant issued by a private company, and thrown into a private prison, all the while being outside of public oversight.