Think of it from the point of view of the (often for-profit) prison: The less of a chance of re-integrating with society the inmate leaves with, the greater chance he'll be back, which means more $$$ for the prison.

I assume the primary fear, whether justified or not, is that prisoners will use the service to coordinate gang or illicit activity.

>Think of it from the point of view of the (often for-profit) prison:

Less than 5% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons.

"Broken down to prison type, 19.1% of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison population is housed in private prisons." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#In_the_United_St...

Currently 1/3 of the US incarcerated population is neither in State or Federal custody.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Ad...

Even publicly run prisons have contractors and unions.

source?

According to page 10 of http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus12.pdf 128k out of 2.228m inmates were in private prisons in 2012.

What about inmates harassing victims though? Or managing ongoing crime?

Doesn't facebook already have policies in place that are inmate agnostic that cover both of those scenarios?

the laws are already adequate to prevent such abuse.

I could be applying it incorrectly but they just threw out a case of threats over facebook (http://time.com/3903322/facebook-online-free-speech/)

No, the reporting on that case has been terrible.

The Supreme Court's opinion didn't "throw out the case", or say that the guy goes free, or that what he did was OK. The Supreme Court's opinion just said that the prosecution did not meet the level of proof required by the law (specifically, the question revolved around whether it's enough to just show that the statement was interpreted by someone else as a threat, or whether it's also necessary to show the statement was intended as a threat by the person who made it). The prosecutors are free to hold a new trial and try to meet the higher level of proof.

Most legal scholars who I've read on this seem to think it is trivially easy to meet that higher level of proof, and so it won't make convictions for threats much harder to obtain.

there is often difference between a rant and a credible deliberate threat.

A pretty thin line I would argue.