Arrested in Texas, dead in Louisiana: Private-prison transfers raise accountability concerns

[patphil]

2. Private, for profit, prisons must be either closed, or integrated into the state or federal prison systems.

Their reason for being is to generate a profit. and their contracts usually require a minimum occupancy rate. That's done either by longer prison sentences, fewer paroles, transferring inmates to the private prison from state or federal prison, or finding ways to prolong an inmates sentence.
I suspect a lot of this is to disappear people into the system like they do with undocumented immigrants.