America's obsession with short-term solutions has led us to where we are now. Private prisons reflect both our obsession with privatizing the public institutions without adequately considering the consequences, as well our frenzied and heartless tendency to incarcerate people.

But a society cannot be civilized if it profits off the imprisonment of its own people. This is incontrovertible. The fact that private prisons treat inmates deficiently is important, but certainly not decisive. Private prisons should simply not exist regardless of their quality or conditions.

Bernie Sanders is the first candidate to state this unequivocally.

He hits a number of critical points here, making an effort to illuminate the hardship and abuse that private prison causes—not just in theory, but in the lives of real people. That means not just individuals, but families, communities, and entire demographics.

He makes sure to identify how destructive private prisons have been to immigrants, who have been increasingly criminalized due to the explosion of private prison contracts, which require beds to be filled to a certain capacity (usually anywhere from 85 to 100 percent).

Sanders also underscores a critical point, which is that politicians nationwide have their hands dirty. Privatizing prisons means corrupting politicians—forcing a decision between what is good for constituents, and what is good for the campaign coffers. And on both sides of the aisle, politicians are wheeling and dealing with the bad guy, suppressing their gut instinct that profiting off of incarceration is inherently wrong.

Lastly, Sanders reminds us how serious our incarceration problem is: Take a glance at criminal justice systems in other countries and you'll be horrified to discover that we are vastly outpacing imprisonment in other countries. As Sanders points out:



"We have more people in jail than any other country on earth, including Communist China, an authoritarian country four times our size. The U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, yet we incarcerate about a quarter of its prisoners – some 2.2 million people.

There's a lot of good in this proposal, and it would be a major step forward to de-privatize the prison system.

Yet, it's not enough.

Sanders suffers from a common framing mistake here. As the call for criminal justice reform has gotten louder and louder over the past few years, most of the conversation has centered around mass incarceration. In other words, the consequences, pains, and abuses that a person suffers from the moment they get to jail or prison until the moment they get out. No doubt that incarceration constitutes the crux of the pain and suffering that people are subject to when we over-incarcerate and privatize.

But the American obsession with profit means that we will find a way to privatize anything.

In other words, its not just about private prisons anymore.

It's about privatized bail, and owing payments so outrageously high that it is better to just go to jail. It is about losing your job because you're sentenced to 30 days in jail for payments you can't afford—effectively a debtor's prison. It's about burdensome fines for small misdemeanors that add up to a handsome bonus for a city or a CEO on the backs of the indigent. It's about the collateral consequences of not just a jail sentence, but an arrest. When every step has become about profit instead of justice, the scope of concern grows infinitely wider.

If we just de-privatize prisons and don't de-privatize the rest of the system, we will be faced with many of the same burdens we find today. Honestly, the possibilities for privatization in criminal justice are endless. We will force a man guilty of a traffic violation to spend half his monthly salary on an ankle bracelet that tracks his every move. We will make money off of privatized probation or parole. We will exacerbate collateral consequences to punish for profit.

Until we remove profit from the criminal justice system entirely, we cannot have a fair system. We cannot have just laws. We cannot focus on rehabilitation or mental health or anything that costs more than throwing someone in a cell, even if a healthier and freer society is more profitable long-term. We cannot truly focus on a person's well-being if our motivation is increasing the dollar figure in our bank account.

As Sanders continues to talk about this issue, he should be applauded for his courage in standing up to what may be the most corrupt industry of our time. Private prisons make even the '90s tobacco industry look a little more humane.

But while he has a fairly holistic view of this part of the system, he must widen the scope even further. The truth is that we have to de-privatize criminal justice entirely. Any other choice is a denial of justice.