It’s time to stop private prison profiteering by refusing to take
their profit: divest private prison company stock from personal,
pension, and church funds.

There’s no need to speculate that private prison companies have
incentive to keep more people locked up: CCA says so.
Kanya D’Almeida wrote for IPS 24 August 2011,

‘Profiteers of Misery’: The U.S. Private Prison Industrial Complex:

CCA’s 2010 annual report states categorically that, “The demand for our
facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation
of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards
and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain
activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws — for
instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances
or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested,
convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for
correctional facilities to house them.”

CCA continues, “Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions
that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and
make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behaviour,
(while) sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some
offenders on probation who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly,
reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce
crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences
requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.”

What’s this got to do with Georgia?

In May, when the governor of Georgia passed Senate Bill 87 — its version
of Arizona’s notorious anti-immigration law — rights groups were
quick to point the finger at for-profit prisons and their lobbyists
for sponsoring what many experts have called some of the harshest,
most racially charged immigration legislation in recent history.

At the time, Larry Pellegrini, executive director of the Georgia Rural
Urban Summit, noted that CCA had a strong lobbying presence in the
Georgia legislature. He added that passage of Senate Bill 87 was part
of a national effort brought together by the conservative American
Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a task force that included a
representative from a private prison company and was instrumental in
drafting Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070.

Meanwhile, the report [
Gaming the System by the Justice Policy Institute]
found that in 2010 alone CCA, GEO and Cornel
Companies — the third largest prison corporation —
doled out over two
million dollars on state politics, including monies to senators, federal
candidates and members of the House of Representatives.

So, what can stop this cycle of greed?

Enlace, an alliance of low-wage worker centres, unions, and community
organisations in the U.S. and Mexico that wage international campaigns
against “abusive transnational corporations”, is currently embarked
on a Prison Industry Divestment Campaign to break private prisons’
stranglehold on the justice system.

“We were initially fighting for the rights of economic refugees who
flooded the U.S. to escape the consequences of disastrous banking
policies imposed on Mexico by U.S. banks like Bank of America and Chase
in 1995,” Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, the executive director of Enlace,
told IPS. “By raising interest rates in Mexico to astronomical levels,
these banks essentially forced millions of people out of their jobs and
homes, causing them to flee to the U.S. only to find a huge anti-immigrant
movement fuelled largely by for-profit prisons — and behind them, the same
financial services sector that caused the crisis in Mexico to begin with.”

“Companies like Wells Fargo, General Electric, Fidelity Investments —
these are the major funders of the private prison industry in the U.S.,”
Cervantes-Gautschi said. “So we are now calling on all institutions
both public and private to divest support from this industry… There
is no need for it — incarcerating people for profit is simply not an
acceptable business.”

“Most people who have investments — whether through a pension or 401K
or church donation — have them in the private prison industry without
knowing it,” he added. “So people need to tell their investors to take
their money out of private prison companies.”

Divestment worked for apartheid in South Africa.
It can work against the prison-industrial-complex in the U.S.,
a country which keeps far more people locked up (total and per capita)
than South Africa ever did.

Meanwhile, we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq