It's an industry too large and widely utilized to ever hope shutting down now.
Almost any major US corporation you can think of off the top of your head is utilizing forced labor in private prisons to some extent.
IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target
I wouldn't be surprised if the rises in mandatory-minimum and Truth-sentencings legislation correlated directly with growth of the private prison industry. Earlier on, like late mid 90s-early 2000s you might even be able to draw correlations directly to the states built the first private prison's, but the network is too large to put a pin on now. People convicted of crimes in one state can get hauled off to serve any part of their sentence in any number of states now, so there's no real trail. It's fuckin brilliant when you think about it. Brilliant and evil. Or maybe it's all just an unfortunate coincidence that has gotten way out of hand idk.
Either way, it's the private-prison industrial complex now, and it's here to stay. Seems like a pretty fucked up situation that doesn't get discussed very often. Know what I mean?