Per capita the US employs more prison guards than any other country per capita, and 35% fewer policemen. No place in the world imprisons people at a higher rate than the state of Louisiana. And that incarceration pays handsomely for the profiteers who run the state’s private prisons.

For the incarcerated it is a totally different story. In 1998, the New York Times described one of Louisiana’s privately run facilities, the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, as possibly the worst such prison in the nation, a site “rife with brutality, cronyism, and neglect.”

Grace Bauer-Lubow saw her son incarcerated at Tallulah, and she would go on to become a leader in the grassroots drive that shut the facility down.

“My son Corey was sent there at age thirteen after breaking into a pickup truck. He went through a juvenile reception and diagnostic center, and the state of Louisiana decided that a rehabilitation treatment facility would be best for him. They showed me some very nice brochures about Tallulah.

“I didn’t know anything about Tallulah beyond the brochures. I didn’t even know it was a prison. But when we drove up, it was nothing like a treatment facility. It was obviously a prison, concrete walls, razor wire, prison guards.

“From the very first visit we had after his confinement, that he was being abused. He wasn’t receiving education and treatment. His face and ribs were black and blue with bruises. He wasn’t getting enough to eat. He was dirty with boils on his skin. He was getting no schooling, no treatment”.

The idea of privately owned and run jails is one of the most disagreeable outgrowths of so-called neo-liberalism, the belief that the government should be “squeezed till the pips squeek”, and that everything in sight should be privatized for gain. Along with this perverse doctrine goes a disdain for rules and regulations. Taken together, the incentives for prison companies are all totally wrong. Their priority is cutting the costs of supervision, food, education, everything. This results in a system rife with human rights abuses. The judicial/correctional system should be a function of government. Period. Its objective should be to rehabilitate inmates and help them restore their lives as useful and productive human beings. Fortunately, even some right wing Republicans now recognise that the system needs radical change. No decent person can support the status wuo.