If outside bidders make a high enough offer, New Hampshire may be the first state with the dubious distinction of privatizing its entire male prison population.

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections recently put out a request for proposals that would contract out state penitentiaries to an outside contractor, and at least four companies have responded with their plans to build a new prison for all of the state’s male prisoners:

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has put out a request for proposal that would essentially hand over the keys to a future penitentiary to an outside contractor for 20 years. Though the RFP still has to clear several hurdles, four companies have responded with plans to build, and probably run, a new prison for all of New Hampshire’s male (and perhaps female) inmates.

Two of the firms interested are publicly traded — Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., with combined annual revenues of over $3 billion.

Although corporate-run prison systems are often touted as an effective way to cut costs, prison privatization — which has negative effects on prisoners and their families and impedes criminal justice reform as a whole — doesn’t actually end up saving taxpayers money. And, as ThinkProgress has reported, when companies profit by incarcerating people, they often spend millions on lobbying legislatures to put more people in jail simply to increase their profits.

Florida also recently proposed to expand its private prisons, a measure that was voted down in the state senate earlier this year. Unless New Hampshire also decides against their new for-profit prison plan, the state may be about to go down on the wrong side of history.

According to a recent lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Orleans Parish Prison is a hellhole. “Rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace. Violence regularly occurs at the hands of sheriffs’ deputies, as well as other prisoners . . . . People living with serious mental illnesses languish without treatment, left vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.” Which is why former inmate Josh Hobson says he went to the press while he was incarcerated on a domestic violence charge that was eventually dropped. According to Hobson, prison guards soon found out he was speaking to reporters, and they retaliated with violence:

The guards took him off his bunk in the middle of the night, he said, dragging him outside and viciously beating him, pounding his kidneys so hard he urinated blood the next day.

“The night they smacked me around and dragged me out, all I could think of in my head was, ‘Great, I’m a f—ing dead man.’ They were already telling me they were going to kill me so I figured that’s it. This is a wrap. Lights out. When I got the knee to the head, I figured it was a done deal.” . . .

When the guards were beating him, Hobson said they warned him between punches, “This will teach you to talk to people.”

Neither Mr. Hobson’s allegations, nor those in the SPLC lawsuit have been proved in a court of law, but there is good reason to believe that allegations of widespread abusive conditions in the New Orleans prison are credible. The U.S. Marshall’s service recently removed all federal inmates from the prison, and the Department of Justice released a report in 2009 detailing unconstitutional conditions such as widespread violence and neglect of the mentally ill.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported yesterday on an odd case of a California prison refusing to deliver a copy of the magazine he works for to an inmate at Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, California. Goldberg writes that the magazine received a letter from the prison saying that it refused to deliver the December issue of the magazine to an inmate because of a section in the California Code of Regulations that bars “warefare [sic] or weaponary [sic]” in the items mailed to inmates. (Read the full letter to The Atlantic here.)

The December issue featured photograph of a Pakistani militant on the cover. Here’s a snapshot:

Goldberg sent a letter back to the prison, defending the use of the photograph and the journalistic value of the article. The “photograph has great journalistic merit,” he wrote. “It vividly illustrates the challenges American leaders face in Pakistan and the surrounding region. The photograph and story do not glorify violence in any way. Quite the opposite: We published the article, and the accompanying images, in order to highlight the dangers of violence of South Asia.” When the Atlantic receives a response from the prison, they plan to publish it online.