This, along with the private prison systems, creates perverse incentives in criminal justice.
I don’t think we should have private prisons, but the level of focus on them is about politics. It’s an issue that unifies the economic left, who support unions and oppose privatization but may or may not care about prisoner abuse, with the criminal justice movement.
But at the end of the day, most prisoners (over 90%) are not in private prisons, and there is little evidence that private prisons are worse than public prisons. The reality is that our government run, union-staffed prisons are really bad. But prisons are a major source of jobs, and public unions that represent prison employees are powerful—and Americans are punitive—so it’s difficult to tackle the real issues.
It's understood that the incentive for the private prison is to spend as little on the prisoners as possible, because the rest is profit; although I understand some contracts regulate this.
Prison is a bigger deal. A prisoner was convicted for something unambiguously bad, and there is this cultural expectation that they have become somewhat hardened or institutional in prison. A state or Feds would run a prison.
While I've known people to be in jail for longer sentences than prisoners, the expectation is that prison sentences are much longer.
I'm speaking only to the social meaning of the two concepts, which might help to understand the underlying understanding that Americans share about this difference, but the actual legal realities are no doubt quite different. Most of us are pretty naive about our legal system.
Having said that, the operating term is still "věznice" here; there's no word with different etymology for it. Colloquially, it's called "vězení" -- we have a form of limited diglossia in my country where you commonly wouldn't use formal names of things in normal speech without sounding weird, so some phrases are somewhat different in speech than they often are in writing. And additionally, while you would say "byl jsem ve vězení" ("I was in prison") after serving a sentence, if you were detained before sentencing, you'd say "byl jsem ve vazbě" ("I was in pre-trial detention"), NOT anything like "Byl jsem ve vazebním vězení" ("I was in jail"). So we don't really have this distinction you could make between "people who did unambiguously bad things" and "people who did some light infractions". Basically you have no way to make it sound like what you did was no big deal -- everyone convicted is a prisoner and that's it (if institutionalized, that is; not after a suspended sentence, fine, or community service of course). But in American English, you apparently do. Interesting.
If you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for criminals convicted of serious crimes.
(Perhaps most importantly, most private prisons are not federal)
That doesn’t at all follow from your previous statement that the executive orders of the last three presidents regarding private prisons have in fact been followed
> Among the immigrant detention population, 40,634 people – 81% of the detained population – were confined in privately run facilities in 2019. The privately detained immigrant population grew 739% since 2002 to 2019.1) Biden’s executive order does not limit private contracts with immigrant detention facilities.
Google is there for your further investigation beyond the first result.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. The system is working as intended. It is no accident that the US has #1 incarceration rate on the planet. A significant portion of the population and and even higher portion of those in government believe manipulation and control of certain groups in the population is more important than any notion of justice or law an order. Their love for their country pales in comparison to their hatred and greed.
What does this mean?
Wasn't long ago a twin engine Beechcraft was stolen, used, and confiscated. The owner never got it back because the DEA argued they needed it.
So, while you are more likely to come to grief in a private prison due to them under-spending on guards, health care, physical plant, etc, you will die in luxury as long as your family have money to send you.