Unregistered guy, you seem to be confused. You think that the argument is that prisoners have the right not to go to prison, when in fact it's about whether they have the right to equal access to certain programs while in prison. Hope this helped!

The problem (and it's a very big one) is that we've made incarceration into a private business. The only real silution is to take private profit out of human incarceration, either by taking over the private prisons or shutting them down, and there's no way in hell that's going to happen.

This is a great example of how unfettered capitalism hurts the society that nurtures it.

@1: Let's assume that there's no bias in who gets sent to prison. (Probably not 100% true, but it's likely close enough and this is how we choose null hypotheses anyway.)
What are the odds that brownish people would BY CHANCE ALONE be this likely to end up in the inferior prison systems? Pretty low, I'd say; I'll hazard a guess that it's less than the 5% cutoff mark.

Sargon @5, can you afford the to pay for the criminals' needless return to the room and board of prison? For the cost of police, courts, and prosecutors to respond to the repeat crimes they might otherwise not have committed? For the global increase in insurance costs--health and property both--to clean up their later messes? For the gazillion other societal costs of increased crime?

You're so fixated on whether the prisoners deserve support that it's blinding you to whether supporting them is better for everyone else, including yourself.

venomlash @4, I'm fine w/your assumption for the sake of argument/forming null hypothesis, but in fact there is considerable bias (not necessarily the intentional kind, but the skewing kind) in the US criminal justice system. Blacks are far more likely to be arrested for exactly the same crime than whites. And after arrest, they are far more likely to be convicted than similarly situated whites. And upon conviction they receive longer sentences.

So the fact that folks of color end up in inferior penal colonies comes as little surprise.

@5: That's the same argument that the Teabaggers make against public healthcare. "I don't want to pay for THAT DUDE to get free services! It's his fault, not mine." The idea is that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you help people pay for regular checkups and preventative care, they're less likely to end up uninsured in the emergency room driving up costs for everyone. Similarly, if a burglar is educated and rehabilitated while in the pen, he's more likely to work a legitimate job and less likely to end up carjacking you.
Sure, it's not fair for you to pay it. It doesn't matter that it's not fair, though, because it's better for everyone. Don't cut your nose off to spite your face.

If you're interested in rehabilitation versus punishment in prisons, I suggest reading "Discipline and Punish" by Michel Foucault.

1. I want to see the data comparing rehabilitation and education programs in private and public prisons of the same type and security level.

2. California has decimated the rehabilitation programs in its public prisons because of the lock the prison guard union has on state government there.

3. The differences in white and minority percentages cited in the article are trivial.

Awwww. Doze po-po pwizoners...

How you s'pozd to survive "on the inside" wit-out no edju-be-cation? Man, dat shits straight-up RACIST !!

@10: Your ebonics still sucks.

The benefits of the market are only realized when you have honest competition. Realistically, there isn't going to be much of any real competition in the prison industry in any given state, so you get all the cons of private ownership and none of the benefits.

Why do we get the sense that the attacks on private prisons come from the public employee unions?

Venomlasik, why do hate brownish people so much? I suggest you read "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" by Michael Savage and quit worrying about my 'bonics yo.

Let's worry less about whether or not a prison is privately owned, and more about changing the culture of poverty and violence in the black/rap community.

@14: I'm really getting tired of your Stepin Fetchit act.
And I'm not going to take advice from a guy who invoked the 1st Amendment while complaining that the UK kicked him out. Also, a guy who claimed that autism is a big conspiracy for people to leach off the government.