On your second link, the first half is reasonable, but the second half utterly misses the point. The reason why the police wait in 'The Wire' and in real life is because they're gathering evidence. If they don't have enough evidence, the case won't stick. Similarly, they're trying to catch the kingpins. If you catch the front-line dudes you can fill your prisons with them, but there will always be more (in places where it's bad, like where the Wire is set).
It's weird that given the US already has such an immense problem with overincarceration that you think the solution is to lock people up over even more trivial issues. Where are those people going to be stored? Given the already clogged courts, aren't you going to have to abandon due process in order to get so many through?
It's pointless, really, because if you honestly don't think that overincarceration is 'actually a problem', then you're so one-eyed that nothing I say will sway you.
I mean, you're saying here that somehow the state would get more money back from the private prisons than they paid them, so they could spend this surplus on courts?
tl;dr: In the U.S. in only 20% of murder cases the perpetrator is found and convicted of murder, compared with (allegedly) 90% in Japan. At the same time, even if all non-violent offenders (that includes all drug offenses) were released from prisons in the U.S. tomorrow, the U.S. would still have double the incarceration rate of Western Europe.
I don't know enough to have an opinion either way, but intuitively this message has a true ring to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3696583