The premise is that government is bad at doing things — like, really really bad, with terribly wasteful spending and little ability to correct it. If the govern

The premise is that government is bad at doing things — like, really really bad, with terribly wasteful spending and little ability to correct it. If the government pays $1B for a service and the private company can do it for $500M then they should be able to offer the services to the government for $750M, and both they and the taxpayers are better off. Sometimes this works better than others, particularly when the government group who makes the contract are held politically accountable for the quality of the services — e.g. private sanitation services are only going to get so bad before someone runs for office on a "fix the trash" platform. The UK has likewise managed to do a not-entirely-trash-fire job with train franchises, where there are several operators who bid on the rights to operate; if the trains don't run, you can replace one operator with another at the end of the contract. The Southern debacle of recent years is a bit of an outlier (the contract design there was quite unfortunate) and the year of strikes and service outages led to political pressure to do something about the state of affairs. Accountability is unfortunately rather absent for treatment-of-prisoner politics, though, so it's pretty much hit-or-miss just as regards the basic human dignity.