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Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime. Edited by Alexander Tabarrok; published by The Independent Institute, 510/632-1366 (phone), www.independent.org (Web); 270 pages; $19.95.
Changing the Guard is an examination of prison privatization in the United States and several other nations. It is a story told through four essays by writers with academic backgrounds in law, sociology, economics, and criminology. Breaking the argument into four separate contributions adds strength through diversity of opinion, but it also creates redundancy-the writers often repeat each other's material.
A fierce privatization proponent, the editor states the book's thesis on the first page: "...we now have ample evidence to say that...