I've never lived in the USA so I'm kind of talking out of my ass here... but I wonder if the awful costs of healthcare might prevent changes in that mentality.
Here in Europe, if your income is about average or even a bit less, you might have some small trouble at some point of your life, but for the vast majority of people there will never be a single incident that sinks you into deep shit, financially speaking.
Compare to the US, where a sudden accident or illness might suck your savings dry. Even worse, a lot of people will start their careers with a lot of debt because of the overinflated tuition costs and student debt.
My point is: it seems there is a real incentive to accumulate a lot of money in the USA (which happens at both individual and collective level), and in order to remove those incentives, many things need to change. Private prisons may just be a particularly twisted product of those incentives.
From my perspective the country started on a bad path with Reagan. He popularized the notion that government is never the answer and he popularized the belief that lowering taxes is always the right thing to do. So now we have cities, counties, states, and federal government trying to lower costs and avoid having taxes raised to pay for services. We now live in a system in which fees, fines, etc. are used to generate revenue. Local police forces need to get a significant part of their funding from parking fines, speeding tickets, etc. I got a ticket a few years ago and the fine was $25. However, fees for court costs, administrative fee for processing ticket and other such stuff added $100 to the bill. But taxes are low so hurray!
We privatize prisons and say the cost per prisoner should go down. This comes in the form of lower services for prisoners, lower pay for staff, and cheap food, and skimping on amenities and on rehabilitation programs. All in the name of getting a low cost on housing the prisoner. We Americans tend not to look at long term costs or on external costs.
We thus end up in situations in which large numbers of poor voters rely on things like Obamacare and vote for people who actively want to dismantle it in the name of lower taxes. We are a money obsessed people always seeking the best deal. The most food for the cheapest price and that kind of thinking. It's weird that this is so because we have so many religious people and they seem to overlook or deliberately forget the Biblical admonition that the love of money is the root of all evil.
As you say, the vast majority of the country is one illness away from penury.
Tech is not exempt from this. Over the last 15 years, the ethical transgressions of companies like Facebook and Uber were allowed to slide, justified with arguments like "move fast and break things" or "they are just kids" or "making the world a better place". And the tech community by and large enabled it instead of pushing back against the shift.
Here in Europe, if your income is about average or even a bit less, you might have some small trouble at some point of your life, but for the vast majority of people there will never be a single incident that sinks you into deep shit, financially speaking.
Compare to the US, where a sudden accident or illness might suck your savings dry. Even worse, a lot of people will start their careers with a lot of debt because of the overinflated tuition costs and student debt.
My point is: it seems there is a real incentive to accumulate a lot of money in the USA (which happens at both individual and collective level), and in order to remove those incentives, many things need to change. Private prisons may just be a particularly twisted product of those incentives.