>> I don't think it's significantly the 'labor' part ...
>
> But I think that's the message people get.
Maybe I can understand how somebody would get that message*, and maybe that points to a problem with the phrase, but I have to believe that most people who'd read much on this subject would understand the issue is the commodification of prisoners as "inputs" to a business process, and the direct financial incentivisation of incarceration.
Arguments about the "social cost" of prison privatisation or the impact (or lack thereof) on local economies - however valid they may be on their own terms, and however valuable as arguments against it in some contexts, with some interlocutors - seem to miss completely this fundamental point, and thus the underlying capital-accumulation incentives that the phrase "PIC" seems intended to highlight, however imperfectly.
The fact that a private prison extracts money from the public purse in the name of "keeping bad guys off the streets" - and how sexy a slogan is that? You hand out t-shirts with that on them and I'm pretty sure you're gonna get people laid - is, well, frankly pretty sweet if you're on the receiving end of it. (Of the money, not the incarceration.) It's just another, potentially quite lucrative (at least in the medium term), internal frontier of state-subsidised capital accumulation.
Will it lead to another round of eventual crises in capital accumulation? You betcha! Put too many people in jail, there's nobody left to pay the taxes that you're bribing politicians to allocate into payments against your prison-management contracts. Is that going to stop the people who benefit in the meantime? Of course not.
What am I missing?
* Trying to model sympathetic - as opposed to opportunistically uncharitable - reading.