All across the country, businesspeople are acquiring prisons and running them as private money-making ventures. Funds that governments used to spend constructing and managing prisons are now being funneled to these “investors”, and shares in for-profit prisons are now being traded on America’s stock exchanges. The more people get sent to prison and the longer they stay, the more money these “business people” make. And so, more and more people are now serving time for minor infractions – like the inability to pay traffic and other fines, for example.
What an indictment of 21st century America.
Prison was supposed to punish law breakers, scare the rest of society, and rehabilitate wrong-doers. Today, however, the owners of private prisons are convincing government officials to make what used to be misdemeanors into felonies; to arrest broadly and aggressively; and, most importantly, to send the “guilty” to private prisons and taxpayer dollars to prison owners’ pockets. Today, just two of these businesses alone – GEO and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)– enjoy revenues of some $3.3 billion a year.
Private prison owners like to say that prison privatization saves taxpayer dollars, and they often cite a Temple University study to corroborate their claim. What they often fail to mention is that that study was funded by three of their industry’s largest corporations. Indeed, a 2011 Arizona Department of Corrections study found that private prisons often actually cost the taxpayer more. Now, not satisfied with profiting from others’ incarceration, CCA will avoid $70 million in tax payments this year by becoming “a real estate investment trust” and designating its prisons as “residential”.
As a result of the Clinton-era “three strikes” legislation, the vast majority of America’s prisoners today are neither murderers, thieves, nor batterers but non-violent persons who were caught with small amounts of drugs or who committed a minor infraction. And although conditions in privately owned prisons are more brutal than in government-run facilities, many leading corporations still choose to avoid paying at least minimum wage to job-seekers “on the outside” in order to be able to pay prison labour cents per hour instead.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Methodist Church have condemned the perverse incentives involved in for-profit incarceration. And in light of America’s harsh racial origins and history, it is particularly troubling that blacks are far more likely to be sent to privately owned prisons than whites.
ColorOfChange has been waging a national campaign to have American corporations pull all investments from private prisons, and three major corporations, Scopia Capital, DSM, and Amica Mutual Insurance in April withdrew $60 million from GEO and CCA – the country’s two largest private prison companies.
Asha Rosa, a Columbia University student concerned that her school was “profiting from the incarceration of less privileged black people by investing in for-profit prisons”, spearheaded a campus campaign to have Columbia withdraw its investments from private prisons, and in July Columbia became the first American university to withdraw its investments from privately owned prisons.
Those on the frontlines of the private prisons divestment campaign and the institutions that have heeded their call need the support of Americans now. Yes, the civil rights movement enabled black Americans to achieve some degree of personal stability via education. Manufacturing jobs in urban centers did offer a path to working class stability for many more. And government assistance did provide vital relief for the many still hobbled by the inherited impact of enslavement and the twentieth century exclusions that followed.
However, the demand that males leave any home receiving welfare assistance dealt a major blow to impoverished black families. The exporting of jobs from America’s cities sent massively destabilizing jolts throughout America’s black working class. The laws that made the sentences for crack-cocaine use literally 100 times harsher than the sentences for powder cocaine use mocked the most basic precepts of equal justice since the former tends to be used by the urban poor, the latter by suburbanites. And the resultant throwing of more than a million black fathers, mothers, sons and daughters in jail since the 1990’s, for the types of infractions for which many whites go free, has wreaked havoc with families and communities throughout black America.
Now, against this troubling history, like some toxic mold, for-profit prisons are sprouting across America with the wanton arrest and imprisonment of blacks being key to making the dollars flow.
This is a scourge our democracy cannot long withstand.
Americans roundly condemned anti-Solidarity forces in Poland, the abuse of Refuseniks in the Soviet Union, and the brutality of apartheid in South Africa. Today, like Douglass, Garrison and Tubman two hundred years ago, we must now move without delay to scrape the pox of privately owned prisons forever from this land.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has introduced legislation to outlaw privately owned prisons in America. And on the pressing moral issue of prisons for profit, every presidential candidate should be called upon to take a stand.
Randall Robinson, professor at Penn State Law School, is author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks, the novel Makeda, and several works pertaining to human rights and foreign policy. He is a 1970 graduate of Harvard Law School.