You're right. People scream bloody murder about "omg! This means a financial incentive for imprisonment" and then ignore how the exact same thing happens with public prisons, in particular how prison guard organizations pushed for Three Strikes to pad demand for their work -- same dynamic.
Wow bad faith all over the place... People do see problems with all of those, but the only solution to people making a profit from supplying prisons is for there to be no prisons (or for the government to make all the food and clothing soup to nuts, but that'd be crazy). Same with the others the issue with post prison jobs is that they're not enough so hiring them is good and a step down the road to a solution.
Reform is a step by step process, getting people used to the idea of thinking of rehabilitation and reintegration instead of the gut instinct to punish takes a lot of time and in the mean time address the worst abuses of the system. In the mean time make sure you're not setting up systems that will fight for their own survival and demand (in some cases by contractual obligations for the state to fill X number of best!) to be fed.
It's deeply confused to see a farm selling food to a prison as some kind of evil. It seems you've dove head-first into an anti-market position that sees any for-profit production as bad, which should be a big red flag.
Hiring a felon should not be regarded as evil, either; just the opposite.
I don't see how it's bad faith to assume activists don't advocate full abolition of markets. If you want to take the position that all profit is evil (or at least is evil if it ever touches any part of the prison system), that just makes your position harder to defend.
I'm an abolitionist* and agree with many of your points, but the political leverage to do a 'big bang' reform of the entire criminal justice/carceral system at once doesn't currently exist, nor are there neatly packaged answers for all of the complex problems. , so in the meantime we're still working within an incrementalist framework.
* as in that's the political position I hold, I wasn't involved in any way with this initiative or attempting to take credit or provide insider perspective on it.
http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/the_undue_influen...
And IMHO is bizarrely inconsistent outrage.
Want to make a profit from supplying prisons? Activists see no problem with that!
Want to make a profit from hiring felons, who are cheaper due to having limited options? Activists give you the thumbs up!
Want to make a profit for your private corporation from building a public prison? AOK!
But run it for profit? No matter how much oversight or regulation is applied, it's somehow inherently evil.
It feels like a distraction.