In an era of budget shortfalls and market-based solutions, the American penal system is quickly becoming a for-profit enterprise.

Private prisons, once an isolated and temporary solution meant to house low-level inmates, incarcerate eighteen times more people than they did just a couple decades ago. In certain states, private probation companies perform all of the work of an exhausted legal system — from levying fines to collecting payments for misdemeanors — without any need for a judicial authority.

But while the privatization of criminal justice may appear to be a recent development, it is more a reversion than an innovation, a return to the common — and blatantly corrupt — standards of the American and British legal systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.