On November 19, 2009, Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) ruled, by an eight to one majority, that Amendment 28 to the Prison Ordinance (2004), which authorized the construction of the first privately-run prison in the country, was unconstitutional. The main reason given by the Court for its globally unprecedented decision was that the very fact of being incarcerated by a private, for-profit corporation, regardless of the quality of service provided by that private institution, was an excessive violation of the prisoners’ rights to freedom and to human dignity and thus contradicted the provisions of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom. The main opinion in the case, written by Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch, has been criticized as incoherent, in that it confused the institutional argument – based on the non-delegation doctrine – with the argument from human rights. Beinisch explicitly stated that the concern that prisoners’ rights are more likely to be infringed in a private than in a public prison was not sufficiently strong to warrant the finding that the amendment was unconstitutional. Still, she concluded that the very fact that the power to deprive a person of her liberty rested with a private for-profit entity was, in and of itself, an excessive violation of the prisoners’ rights to freedom and to human dignity. She also argued that this finding rendered considering the issue of the delegation of core governmental functions to a private entity superfluous in this case.1 The Court’s liberal critics have pointed out that the president failed to provide a persuasive argument for her decision. An argument from human rights, they claimed, should have been able to show some reason to believe that the prisoners’ rights were more likely to be infringed in a private than in a public institution. Alternatively, the president could have argued against the delegation of core governmental functions.2 Having declined to take either of these courses, her decision amounted to no more than an unsubstantiated assertion. Moreover, while the Supreme Court spoke its lofty rhetoric, prisoners were languishing in public prisons in awful conditions. To the extent that these prisoners may have preferred to be housed in a more comfortable private prison, the Court could also be said to have violated their rights of free choice and personal autonomy.3 In this paper, we argue that while Beinisch’s decision was indeed incoherent and unjustified when viewed from a liberal perspective, which was her avowed perspective, it is perfectly coherent and justified from a civic republican perspective. We further argue that, in general, a coherent moral argument against private incarceration must necessarily rest on civic republican foundations. The question of the relations between liberalism and civic republicanism, especially between their respective conceptions of freedom, has become salient over the last three decades following the renewal of interest in the civic republican tradition. An argument heard with increasing frequency in recent years, however, claims that the differences between the two conceptions of freedom are minor in reality and that every worthy moral position