The price rise hit prisoners seeking bottled water as temperatures eclipse the 100 degree mark in unairconditioned facilities. The state vendor asked to raise the price and two state agencies signed off.
Americans have a punishment boner when it comes to the legal system. They don't want to prevent crime or improve society. They want the bad people to suffer.
I'm definitely no libertarian, but I do have one quibble with this - entirely private prisons are actually very little of the prison space in the United States. However, government run prisons do hundreds of millions of dollars in business with private vendors for things like the commissary and healthcare and phones &c., and all those businesses gouge taxpayers and inmates for substandard goods and services, because they're able to negotiate sweetheart contracts with government bureaucrats who don't give a shit and get lobbied like crazy (vendor salesperson: "Oh, your annual salary is only what? Ha, I've gotten commission checks higher than that! Let me get the tab for our lunch today.").
So it's a bit complicated but at the end of the day underfunding government services and throwing all of our responsibilities for things like taking care of our prisoners to for-profit companies is what's caused all of this, so the solutions to these problems aren't going to be coming out of a libertarian playbook imo.
I will admit that Texas has a lower percentage of private prisons than I thought, but I think any for-profit privatization of prisons is bad.
underfunding government services and throwing all of our responsibilities for things like taking care of our prisoners to for-profit companies is what's caused all of this
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so the solutions to these problems aren't going to be coming out of a libertarian playbook imo.
I mean, with how our system works I'd bet this company (Commissary vendor Royal Pacific Tea Company) and TM share some investors at least, but this sort of thing is not unique to Texas prisons or limited to commissary fees.