Another Sunday, another church group against private prisons.
This time, it includes ex-prisoners, and it went to the lion’s den:
a CCA shareholder meeting.

Marian Wright Edelman wrote 13 December 2010,

Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry:

A few months ago a group of earnest and determined stockholders traveled
together by bus from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, to
attend a shareholders’ meeting for the Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country. The
group included ex-offenders who now each hold one share of stock in the
same prison company that once held them captive, and they attended the
meeting in the hopes of sharing their perspective on how the privatized
prison industry can better serve society by rehabilitating inmates,
rather than just serving its own profits by perpetuating the prison cycle.

The group, part of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour, is named
Strength to Love, after the title of one of Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s sermon collections. Members explain their mission this way:

“The privatized, for-profit prison industry is particularly plagued
by a conflict of interest at its core: On the one hand, the industry
is responsible to its shareholders to make money, and its income is
determined by how many beds are filled. On the other hand, its civil
responsibility to the inmates and to the whole of society is to help
incarcerated people become their intended selves, and to prepare them
to succeed upon release. It is well established that services and
programs like job training and education serve to lower the occurrence
of re-offense. But it is better for the company’s bottom line to
minimize staff and services, let the inmates succeed or fail on their
own terms, and reap the financial benefits of strict sentencing laws
and high rates of recidivism. It is this experience of exploitation,
frequently referred to as a modern day form of slavery, that many members
of Strength to Love have personally experienced, and which we have been
called to dismantle.”

They’re
on the web
and

on facebook.

People in Lowndes County, Georgia could do this.
It would be better than building a private prison here.

-jsq