55orolder

I find it fascinating that private prisons draw such ire while the prison guard union draws so little, when the prison guard union has all the exact same incentives and is drastically more powerful.

California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.

This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators that does very little to meaningfully address the problems with criminal justice in the US. Private prisons are a tiny little piece of a much bigger problem and there's still a lot of real work to be done.