While privatization of the criminal justice system is often regarded as bad due to the private prisons cutting costs to maximize profit, leading to low quality of life and safety for inmates, studies show that this is not always the case. In the below excerpt from a document prepared by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency and published by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, studies are shown that evaluate various levels of inmate quality of life in several state, federal, and private prisons, in which a lot of the findings prove either an indistinguishability or an improvement in the aforementioned aspects when comparing private facilities to their state and federal counterparts.
The below Time magazine article references the Department of Justice's decisions to transition away from a dependence on and use of private prisons. The article acknowledges that it is difficult to come up with a definitive answer regarding the benefits of private prisons due to conflicting data from various studies. Instead of providing examples to show the harms of privatizing prisons, the article discusses the inherent principles of privately run prisons that prohibit them from upholding the goals of the criminal justice system.
See below for more details