The guards and the regulation are federally provided/mandated! The building itself is really the privately owned part! The owning corpo receives payment per housed inmate!

The idea was that the free market is going to find cheaper ways for inhabitation, but it really doesn’t! On average privately housed inmates cost just as much, or marginally more than the federally housed ones! And some pr. prisons have contracts with the state that x% of beds have to be filled or must be paid large, and I mean fuckin large fines; the pr. prisons that don’t have such contracts are blackmailing the state with such threats on a semi-regular basis! In result of private prisons non-violent well behaved criminals are rarely ever released parole!