The CCA logo (as seen on the flag) even looks vaguely OCP-ish, like something out of the particularly '80s vision of the corporate future as envisioned in the original Robocop.

"spending less on rehabilitation doesn't just save money now, it also brings higher recidivism and so makes for a healthier future market for these corporations..."

Exactly. And let's not forget that these same corporations who run prisons also lobby for harsher sentencing, mandatory minimums, looser prison labor laws, and so forth.

It's a sticky subject because nobody -- politician, man on the street, mother of children, or law-abiding citizen -- wants to come right out and say that he or she is advocating for prisoner's rights. Nobody's ever won an election being "soft" on crime (at least not to my knowledge). So the prison-industrial complex has it pretty easy, as far as built-in political incentives are concerned. Ultimately their agenda is self-fulfilling, and the social externalities are highly negative. Costs may be cut in the short run, but as you suggest, recidivism means nobody in the system is ever really going to escape it -- hence, we're shortchanging the future to save pennies in the present.

True, but part of the problem is framing. Since most people won't make political decisions based on careful reflection, you have to have an emotional pull of some sort. Language like "tough on crime" and "keeping communities safe" frames the debate as those who value enforcing the law and safety versus their opponents, who presumably don't.

Instead of playing that game, what aspiring policians will have to do is frame these kinds of things in terms of human rights, not prisoner's rights. Simply accepting the phrase "prisoner's rights" implies that rights can be doled out by government based on how it chooses to classify citizens. This kind of framing can work:

Political challenger, to incumbent: "Do you support human rights?"

Incumbent: "Of course."

Challenger: "Do you consider prisoners to be human beings?"

Incumbent (worried look): "Well...yes, though I would add that..."

Challenger: "Then why do you support things such as prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners--which is widely agreed to be a form of torture--and the outsourcing of our justice system to race-to-the-bottom private corporations that are held to lower standards and have far less oversight?"

The really sad part is that this is just as disingenous as the narrative supplied by the supporters of the prison industrial complex. But if you want to change things from within the political system you just have to convince voters the other guy is the bad guy.

It's not really clear that being nicer to criminals was the cause of the crime boom nor that getting tough on crime stopped it, but I think the majority of people who lived through this era see it that way. And right now they are also the majority of people who vote (older people tend to vote more often). I suspect that arguments like these won't work for another 20 to 30 years.

But if one wanted to do so for the practical matter of wasting less money on prisons and having more productive members of society and less crime, then it would behoove one to do so as well.