Imprisoned by Profit "Out-sourcing," "privatizaton," call it what you will: The mania for transferring public responsibilities into private hands has multiplied geometrically in the last few years. The net effect has been to invite the kind of cynical abuse and neglect documented in this week's cover story, concerning the tragic near-death of a young man incarcerated in a local Corrections Corporation of America facility. If a case-related suit brought against CCA succeeds, it might begin to undermine the sloppy assumptions made by so many today that privatization is a way of sparing the public sector -- and thus the taxpayer -- generous quantities of time, trouble, and money. In fact, circumstances point to an opposite conclusion. Extension of liability -- and culpability -- for privately performed state functions is inevitable. And we have all seen the consequences recently -- social and financial -- to large municipalities like New York and Los Angeles of misdeeds performed under the rubric of public policy. Those were law-enforcement actions, to be sure, but, as a source in Ashley Fantz's well-documented article suggests, incarceration is on the same plane of activity as police and judicial functions. Justice is a continuum, and to auction off the responsibility for any of it to the lowest bidder is to invite disaster. Not only are the goals of rehabilitation scuttled by the profit motive; so is the aim of public safety. We also learned recently that Tennessee's private prisons have been importing carload lots of other states' most dangerous and depraved prisoners into facilities within our borders. When prison breaks occur -- as they inevitably have and will again -- our communities are put in needless jeopardy. But it isn't just in the area of public safety and in the provinces of crime-and-punishment that privatization threatens the fabric of society. To take another example, the difference between a university-operated bookstore and one out-sourced to a private, profit-motivated company is the difference between an open-minded, diversified pursuit of knowledge and one that is trimmed and limited to fit a market-based bottom line. Check the inventory out, folks; those with long memories can make the comparison at several publicly supported colleges in the Mid-South area -- including our own University of Memphis. The real problem with privatization of public facilities is not wholly, or even mainly, one of under-performance and lowered standards, however. The real problem is that hiring somebody else to perform our public functions leads to an ever-increasing alienation of citizens from the actions of their government. Democracy of the American sort demands constant citizen involvement in the affairs of the commonwealth. "A government of the people, by the people, and for the people": that was Lincoln's formulation, and it was a vision that sustained the nation through one of its darkest times of trial. These days the inclination is to let George do it -- and by that is not meant George Washington, whose last name has been converted into an expletive by the enemies of self-government. True enough, governments everywhere are saddled with rising costs and raised expectations. But turning over important public functions to individuals and private corporations is not the answer. As a society, we have already drifted too far from the premises of shared responsibility, and the case of CCA is just one more proof that we may be losing our way.