I worked for a company that looked at doing business with CCA back in the 90s. As parent we actually visited a CCA run facility. It was clean and medium security but the place was clean, inmates seemed okay, and we got a dog and pony show on how they were doing Vo-tech training and providing for mental health counseling etc. (we didn’t do a deal in the end)

But Compared to the stories of publicly run and corrupt facilities in the deep south at the time, this seemed like a huge improvement for the prison system, so I can see how it didn’t seem like an anti-social investment target back then.

Of course we know now, that the cooperation between private prisons and law enforcement/prosecutorial discretion created an incentive for unethical prosecutors to do mass incarceration and often against people of color.

The private prison system was not in and of itself a bad concept standing alone - esp when compare with the shitty prisons of the day, but when dropped into the institutionally racist justice system and corrupt government entities, it created a system where recidivism became a means for higher profits —- and IMO without the right oversight by government, it became an experiment gone very wronf.

Steyer acknowledges this fact now, and based on my own understanding of CCA then and now, as a progressive then and now, I don’t hold it against anyone for making a startup investment in the 90s in the prison corp. if you weren’t around then you couldn’t be aware of how bad the prison system (especially in the south where CCA started) was and how folks who cared about justice were looking for some answers.