Sorry for the ridiculously late reply; DanBC pointed me here from my comment. > Only about 8% of prisoners are held in for-profit prisons: http://www.propublic

Sorry for the ridiculously late reply; DanBC pointed me here from my comment. > Only about 8% of prisoners are held in for-profit prisons: http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-g... That isn't quite correct. It's 8% as of 2009. As of 2012, it's actually ~17%. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4843 http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4843 > But CCA didn't create the massive U.S. prison population. Voters did This I absolutely agree with. > Frightened suburbanite baby boomers watching the news, shrieking "Just Say No!" at school events, voting for Three Strikes' laws and aggressive drug enforcement. I.e. NYT's core readership. In your haste to criticize the NYT, did you perhaps miss that such a target audience is precisely who they should be pointing out the deleterious effects of their voting patterns to? > Here's the thing. A few million is enough to let my mom know that there is a "tough on crime" proposition on the ballot and she should go out and vote. Ten times that much won't convince her that being "tough on crime" is a bad thing, that her granddaughter isn't in constant danger of getting kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking, etc. Agreed. But several million to get her to think, "Corporations are using prisons to needlessly jail people"? That could work.