If it's "immoral to introduce a for-profit motive into the incarceration of human beings," as a critic of private prisons asserted this week at the state Capitol, what about medicine, air travel and other goods and services on which human lives depend?

Is the profit motive "immoral" in those activities, too?

Perhaps the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition is under the impression that Frontier Airlines is a public utility. It certainly controls the fate of far more Coloradans each year than any private prison here does.

Private prisons are no more inherently inhumane or reckless in their treatment of prisoners than government-run facilities. It is almost ludicrous to insist otherwise given the squalid history of inmate neglect and abuse in prisons run by states and cities - treatment that has provoked riots, court interventions and consent decrees covering almost every aspect of prison management.

Nor do most serious studies back up the lurid accusation that private facilities entail special risks, although it's easy enough to cherry-pick the findings of a few to suit an agenda.

Private prisons have had their share of scandal, of course, including a CCA facility in Crowley County. Prisons are nasty places; bad things happen there. But as a 2001 study by the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance points out, "Management problems that have occurred with privatized prisons can usually be linked to poorly drafted contracts, lack of oversight by contracting agencies, and transferring inmates with classification level requirements to private prisons that do not have the resources and capabilities to handle these inmates."

That's certainly been the case in Colorado. A state audit released two years ago found abysmal state oversight of five private prisons; the state's critical post of operations manager, for example, had been left unfilled for three years.

If the state won't take oversight seriously, it shouldn't be terribly surprised if its contractors lose their focus as well. But it is not inevitable, and the profit motive is hardly to blame.

A plucky newcomer

Robert Stein told a Rocky reporter he's taking a "huge" pay cut in switching jobs from head of Graland Country Day School in Denver to principal of the redesigned Manual High School. Apparently he'll settle for the new job's psychic rewards - you know, the satisfaction of trying to raise a sunken ship whose sides are riddled with holes while half of the city stands on the shore ready to pelt him with abuse the moment the effort falters.

At the time the Denver School Board voted to close Manual last year, not one of its students rated "advanced" on the state's standardized tests. So let's welcome the plucky Stein to the public sector. You can't help but admire a fellow willing to stake his sterling reputation in an arena - urban education - in which so many others have been tarnished.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.