We all know there's trouble with prisons run by the government, but are private prisons the answer?

Another incident of brutality captured on videotape has sparked an investigation against a Texas prison and a lawsuit against the county that contracted with it. A video surfaced depicting guards brutalizing inmates at the Brazoria County Detention Center who had been recently transferred from overcrowded prisons in Missouri. The detention center is owned and managed by a for-profit corporation, Capital Correctional Resources, Inc. (CCRI) under contract with Brazoria County. The video, which had been taped during a routine drug search, showed guards kicking the inmates, forcing them to crawl on the floor, sicking guard dogs on them and prodding a prisoner's buttocks with a stun gun.

The FBI has launched an investigation into alleged civil rights violations stemming from the incident, as well as other allegations of abuses at other facilities CCRI owns. Since the video came to light, it has been revealed that a number of guards and wardens at state-run and private prisons in Texas -- including a guard involved in the Brazoria incident -- were previously punished for abusing inmates under their charges. The state of Missouri has sued Brazoria County for failing to cooperate in Missouri's investigation of the alleged abuse. Missouri and other states have begun transferring hundreds of prisoners back to their own prisons in response to the incident. It was surely of small comfort to the abused prisoners to learn that the video, shot by a sheriff's deputy, had been made into a training program as an example for guards of "what not to do" during a prison uprising.