As private prisons become assimilated into the heavily underpublicized and obscure American corrections system, it is time the that society takes a first look at this relatively new form of a “peculiar institution” and raises the question: Are prisons really being used as rehabilitation and deterrence for crime, or have private interests started attaching price tags to lawbreakers’ heads and began to exploit their incarceration for profit? As the federal and state governments run out of money to build more prisons to house the growing population’s misfits, private prisons have stepped into the gap and provided a quick answer to the financial issue. However, private prisons cut down on costs the government’s inmates for profit, a which in effect makes money on the decreased welfare of the inmates and is in direct violation of their natural rights, but there is hope of fixing this problem by instituting a more civilized version that has been around since ancient Babylonian times: semi-punitive penal