While

a private prison is top of the news,
you’d probably never know what it has to do with this if you didn’t have the Internet,

8,000 Rally against Georgia Anti-Immigrant Bills,
by Gloria Tatum in Georgia Progressive News:

Over 8,000 activists rallied outside the State Capitol on Thursday, March
24, 2011, to show their outrage and disgust over Georgia’s Arizona-type
immigration bills.

As previously reported by Atlanta Progressive News, legislation, HB 87,
has already passed the State House. A similar bill, SB 40, has also
passed the State Senate.

While the vast majority of protesters at the Capitol were Hispanic,
opposition to the bills came from a wide spectrum of constituents
including immigrants, students, religious groups, peace groups, veterans
of the Civil Rights Movement, Asian groups, GLBTQI activists, labor,
artists, musicians, business owners, elected officials, and others.

What’s this got to do with private prisons?

Same as we reported

back when the VDT first bragged about VLCIA’s bad idea to bring
a CCA private prison to Lowndes County.
The AJC

did report on the rally, or at least carried an AP story,
(that’s the source of the pictures of the rally here),
but it did not make this connection.
The APN story continues:

Often overlooked in the immigration debate is the influence of the
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in lobbying elected officials to
support anti-immigration bills and in helping to draft Arizona’s SB 1070.
APN previously reported on these connections, with CCA lobbyists currently
working the halls of the Georgia Capitol.

“The private prison corporations that make money off of immigrants
are behind these bills,” Azadeh Shahshahani, Director of the National
Security/Immigrants’ Rights Project of American Civil Liberties Union
of Georgia, said. “Do we want Georgia to be known as a state friendly
to CCA or a state friendly to immigrants?”

CCA’s profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to
their for-profit private prisons.

How about do we want dirt-cheap private prison labor

to compete with local labor?


How about do we want to lock up more people when even

Gov. Nathan Deal says we can’t afford it to lock up nonviolent offenders
in a time when Georgia already spends

a billion dollars a year on incarceration?

To its credit, the VDT does occasionally print something somebody
locally says against private prisons,
such as Dr. Mark George in January:

“I think we can do better than a generator that burns human waste.
I think we can do better than a private prison….”

The AJC

quoted John Lewis
(picture from

the Florida Times-Union):

U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a leader of the 1960s civil rights
movement, encouraged the crowd to keep fighting. He noted that he was
arrested dozens of times while working alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

“I was beaten, left bloody, but I didn’t give up and you must not give
up,” he said to loud cheers.

To my anti-immigrant friends.
You don’t want immigrants competing for your jobs, you say.
Do you want prisoners competing for your jobs, being paid
far less than immigrants?

Yes, we can do better.
Si, se puede!

-jsq