What are difference between privately owned and publicly built jails

Question

how does it work?

Answer 1

Publicly owned jails are indeed funded with taxpayers money and built to serve the community.

Privately built jails are like any other business about making money. The more prisoners the more profit so it's not in their interest at all to prevent crime and thus also not to do anything about rehabilitation. Recidivism is good for business.  In the US this has gone very far.

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million - mostly Black and Hispanic - are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don't have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don't like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

Of the world’s 30 richest nations, which comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has the highest proportion of children living in poverty, 15 percent, and the most people in prison, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the whole population. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 24 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Answer 2

Privately owned jails are built from funds of an individual or a group of voluntary contributors.

Publicly built jails are done with funds collected from the taxpayers.  That is the main difference between the two.