Al Jazeera has a must-read report on the rise of for-profit probation companies — an often under-reported sector of the prison industrial complex. Private probation services exist in a dozen states across the nation, and thousands of people are subject to their forced patronage each year. According to a report from Human Rights Watch: Every year, US courts sentence several hundred thousand people to probation and place them under the supervision of for-profit companies for months or [Continue reading]