Marian Wright Edelman wrote 13 December 2010, Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry:
Continue readingA 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:
That costs us more than a billion dollars a year in tax money,
5.9% of the state budget.
That’s up from $133.26 million in 1983, increased by more than a factor of seven.
Meanwhile, the correctional population swelled from around 100,000 in 1982 to more
than 550,000 in 2007.
And while other states have started decreasing their prison populations,
Georgia’s 