Privatized Prisons, Privatized Slavery?

From the New York Times book review of Fallen Times by Flannery

A future dystopia in which corporations have taken over America.

-- EKK’s new national director of offender rehabilitation, asked to develop a plan for “the criminal class transformed by legal means into the largest body of slave labor since the great emancipation.” This is resonant — and scary — because of the very real steps America has taken to privatize its corrections system: when a corporation controls law enforcement, incarceration, rehab and parole, what’s to stop it from making money at each stage by encouraging recidivism. --

Why not? After all the South did it with chain gangs for generation after generation.