The fact that Ghostbusters is so pro-Reagan that it has our heroes playing around with nuclear accelerators and damning souls to an eternity in their self made for-profit prison so that they can make a few bucks makes me want to see them face the reality of what they're doing, because they're clearly not doing this to be heroes, but to make a quick buck.
Okay, so, hypothetical here, but... What's the alternative?
Like yes, it's clear that they want it to be a business. Just like an extermination business. But there's a bit more than that going on here that I think is worth considering, when we consider the existence of ghosts/souls/ethics of ghostbusting.
In real life, I'm for prison abolition. I think we should only remove people from the public to the extent necessary to protect the public, we should regularly attempt to see if they can return to the public, and we should make their lives as comfortable as possible. But there's a problem here when it comes to Ghostbusting, which is that real people, in the real world, can be communicated with. I'd only be okay with putting someone in a box if that was the only way to prevent them from harming others, and most people (even many people IN PRISON TODAY) are not going to harm other people in the population at large. But the Ghostbusters only come when they're called - They aren't out patrolling the streets for ghosts, which means that the ghostbusters don't get involved unless someone is ALREADY suffering as a result of the presence of ghosts. Ghosts are only ghostbusted when they begin to harm others, and there seems to be no ability to safely move or remove them from where they are other than busting them.
After that, we should consider that the dead, in the world of Ghostbusters, do not appear to be fully 'themselves.' Let's start with the library ghost, for example. When the ghostbusters investigate, they find an absurdly large stack of books, followed by several unclosed card catalogs. They then encounter the ghost herself. After attempting to address her with no reaction, they finally get her attention... Whereupon she turns around, her face turns monstrous, and she starts yelling.
So... What the hell just happened here? How do we explain this? Let's assume the library ghost was either a librarian, or a library patron, since she seems to be doing things associated with that. But what she DOES is directionless. A librarian would stack books... But she would find a reasonable place to stack them, and would have some organization to the stacking. A librarian would check card catalogs, but she would close them as well. A librarian would react badly to someone making too much noise in the library, but she wouldn't do so by making even MORE noise. The most 'human' ghost is Slimer, and even he's not exactly behaving like anyone (even the real human he's based on) would in the real world.
The library ghost's behavior, then, doesn't seem to match up with that of a real human being. I'd compare her less to a ghost who is a full person, and more to the zombies in the anime School-Live, who replicate their actions in life, but do so in directionless, pointless ways utterly unrelated to their circumstances. For example, in School Live, a character who wrote a lot in a journal in life, starts scribbling randomly on the pages as a zombie. The zombified students start making a real rush on the school only when a heavy rain comes, when they would (in life) have made an attempt to get inside.
So I'm not too worried about the ghosts as people.
Furthermore, we should consider that, even in the world of Ghostbusters, Ghosts don't really... Exist. Like, yes, sure, you see them onscreen, there's ghosts all over the place... But in the world of Ghostbusters (and to be clear I mean the films and not the TV series) there's always some REASON that ghost activity is increasing. It's Gozer, or it's Vigo, or it's... Uh... Look, I forgot 2016 man's name, but he had some tech that activated psychic technology? Point is, there’s a reason that the ghostbusters were out of business between movies - They ran out of ghosts to bust.
I also have to add that I don’t feel too comfortable about comparing what the ghostbusters have to a for-profit prison. Much of what makes for-profit prisons so terrible comes not just from being a place people are, but things like the forced labor, and high fees charged for any attempt to communicate with the outside world. Also, you know, attempting to keep people in prison when efforts are made to free them - And the efforts of people who want sentencing reform or better probation rates aren’t really equivalent to what Walter Peck is doing. I feel like it triviliazes the suffering of real people to compare them to non-sapient uncommunicative monsters.
We see no evidence of sapience on the part of the ghosts, we see no evidence that the ghostbusters are intentionally trying to bust ghosts nobody wants busted (indeed, the fact that they’re a private group kind of implies that if you don’t want a ghost busted, it won’t be busted because you won’t pay) or that they could make the experience of ghosts (who don't even appear to be sapient) any more pleasant than it is. They appear to have neither the resources, nor even the technology, to do so, and we don’t really know what it would mean for them to do so anyway.
So when you get down to it, ghosts
1) Are only Busted when they harm others (nobody I know in police or prison abolition movements has an issue with forcibly removing someone actively causing harm to another person) and can't be relocated to anywhere but a busting storage.
2) Lack recognizable human intelligence and behavior
and
3) Don't even exist most of the time.
So... What's the alternative? Now, one might argue that the alternative SHOULD be that we have a better regulated group with some level of oversight. Which is fine, but ultimately, that group would still be busting, and we can't really implement that NOW. It's not like we should tell people 'Just live with the monster that attacks you until we get an Anti-Ghost Agency bill passed.'
Ghosts, in the world of Ghostbusters, do not have human intelligence, reason, or anything else that would qualify them as more than just pests. They seem to be less people, and more shadows and echoes of people's emotions and behaviors. Yes, we should have a better-regulated group that takes care of that for everyone, not only for those who can pay, but that's true for cockroaches and termites as well. The ghostbusters are based on exterminators, and they do what exterminators do - Which is not, in fact, run private for-profit prisons. They get rid of pests that become harmful to people, when those people call and ask them to do so. Is it bad? Well, yes, again, in the same way that it's bad that if you can't afford an exterminator I guess you just have to accept living with pests in your house in some places, but it's not like they're doing something truly ethically unjustifaible.
