Seeking to profit from privatising prisons misses the point 

History is littered with examples of ideological dogma that privatisation will solve any problem. So it is that Ash Muller (Can Prisons be profitable real estate? Mail and Guardian 18 January 2026) advances the idea that privatising prisons will solve dysfunctional governance of South Africa’s prisons. She exhorts readers to accept that prisons should be regarded as profitable real estate which is good for South Africa.

Muller’s argument is to dispense with ‘morality’ and foreground the logic of markets as if, freed from dogma, privatising prisons will both achieve objectives required from the correctional system as well as make shareholders a handsome profit. 

However, there are numerous holes in her argument.

Firstly, as she admits, to privatise prisons will require an extensive system of oversight by the state to ensure that private prisons do not become places of abuse and corruption. Absent such checks and balances, private prisons become places of exploitation and horror. Even with such oversight, it is still not certain that private for-profit prisons will not be worse than state run correctional facilities, since the drive for profit is hard wired into the private-for-profit sector. As Muller quaintly puts it, the state should put in oversight systems to ensure that “profit never outruns dignity.” But if the state is able to develop the expertise and capacity to oversee private prisons, then it is reflecting a level of functionality that makes one wonder why it can’t run its own prisons. 

Ensuring proper oversight is not cheap and will require skills and capacities. Spending public money to do this might be better invested in solving the dysfunction in the first place. A more likely scenario is that private prisons are dysfunctionally overseen. And, as Muller admits, this was spectacularly illustrated in the Thabo Bester fiasco in Mangaung Prison in 2022.

Secondly, there are different models to privatisation of prisons and not all of them involve the treatment of prisons as ‘real estate’. For example, not all models involve the wholesale relocation of governance of prisons to an entity whose primary goal is to maximise profits. Seeking efficiency through public private partnerships is not the same as viewing prisons as ‘real estate.’

Thirdly, the only evidence Muller presents that “Prisons abroad are being run efficiently and humanely with much clearer accountability” are the examples of the GEO company and the unrelated privatisation of cemeteries. Let us be clear about GEO – it is an example of what we do not want our prisons to become. Its prisons have been associated with multiple allegations of sexual abuse of prisoners, labour rights violations, inadequate medical care, poor living conditions and even preventable deaths. It has profited immensely from Trump’s brutal and cruel crackdown on immigrants, which has bypassed any semblance of legality. It has done so in ways that are deeply corrupt, by being a major donor to Trump’s campaign in exchange for massive contracts. Yet Ash encourages us to follow a model where investors anticipate making massive profits from Donald Trump’s cruelty before his election. This is the cold logic of capital accumulation, when “a hedge fund took a positive view of the stock in the run-up to Donald Trump’s previous election.” Muller calls this “an original perspective” when others might regard it as expecting to profit from cruel and inhuman treatment of migrants in the USA. There is nothing ‘narrative’ or ‘original’ about this perspective . It is plainly profiteering at the expense of human dignity.

Fourthly, Muller argues that profiting from prisons is no different to privatising health care, since we do not baulk at considering hospitals as investible infrastructure. But this is a completely flawed comparison. In a private market, the consumer can shop around and choose alternatives that are cheaper or deliver better quality service. Without market imperfections, private hospitals will stand or fall in competition with other private hospitals.  But prisons are not hospitals serving individual clients needing a service. A prisoner does not shop around for the best deal for money on how they should be incarcerated. They have no choice, by definition.  It is the state who is the client, unlike a user of a hospital. Imagine the absurdity of the notion that a state might tell a private prison that they will choose another private provider over them as if the investment in ‘real estate’ prisons allows such market competition.

In any event, the Health Market Inquiry has shown how dysfunctional the private health sector is with bloated hospital costs, lack of competition and perverse incentives that are impossible to regulate effectively because of private sector power.  

Muller ends by arguing that the private sector can run prisons at a profit and more effectively than the state. When she encounters actual evidence that this might not be the case, in the form of the Thabo Bester fiasco, she does not flinch before blaming that fiasco on the state’s inability to regulate the private sector adequately.  The state is damned for being dysfunctional and then damned because it was not sufficiently functional to regulate the private sector actors who were supposed to solve the dysfunctionality of prisons.  This is not only illogical but deeply ideological.

At the end of the day, any service or capital item can be commercialised. The question of whether it should or should not be commercialised and, if so, how it should be commercialised, is not a matter simply for the market or for debating as an investment question. It is a matter of the kind of society we want and values we believe are important. If that makes us uncomfortable, then it is entirely appropriate because we must think with care, not with dogma.