{"id":1547,"date":"2011-09-04T09:28:23","date_gmt":"2011-09-04T13:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/time-to-divest-from-private-prison-companies.html"},"modified":"2011-09-04T09:28:23","modified_gmt":"2011-09-04T13:28:23","slug":"time-to-divest-from-private-prison-companies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/time-to-divest-from-private-prison-companies.html","title":{"rendered":"Time to divest from private prison companies"},"content":{"rendered":"It’s time to stop private prison profiteering by refusing to take\ntheir profit: divest private prison company stock from personal,\npension, and church funds.\n

\nThere’s no need to speculate that private prison companies have\nincentive to keep more people locked up: CCA says so.\nKanya D’Almeida wrote for IPS 24 August 2011,\n\n\u2018Profiteers of Misery\u2019: The U.S. Private Prison Industrial Complex<\/a>:\n

\n\n<\/a>\n\nCCA’s 2010 annual report<\/a> states categorically that, “The demand for our\nfacilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation\nof enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards\nand sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain\nactivities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws — for\ninstance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances\nor illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested,\nconvicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for\ncorrectional facilities to house them.”\n

\nCCA continues, “Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions\nthat could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and\nmake more inmates eligible for early release based on good behaviour,\n(while) sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some\noffenders on probation who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly,\nreductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce\ncrime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences\nrequiring incarceration at correctional facilities.”\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat’s this got to do with Georgia?\n\n\n

\nIn May, when the governor of Georgia passed Senate Bill 87 — its version\nof Arizona\u2019s notorious anti-immigration law — rights groups were\nquick to point the finger at for-profit prisons and their lobbyists\nfor sponsoring what many experts have called some of the harshest,\nmost racially charged immigration legislation in recent history.\n

\nAt the time, Larry Pellegrini, executive director of the Georgia Rural\nUrban Summit, noted that CCA had a strong lobbying presence in the\nGeorgia legislature. He added that passage of Senate Bill 87 was part\nof a national effort brought together by the conservative American\nLegislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a task force that included a\nrepresentative from a private prison company and was instrumental in\ndrafting Arizona\u2019s Senate Bill 1070.\n

\nMeanwhile, the report [\nGaming the System by the Justice Policy Institute<\/a>]\nfound that in 2010 alone CCA, GEO and Cornel\nCompanies — the third largest prison corporation —\ndoled out over two\nmillion dollars on state politics, including monies to senators, federal\ncandidates and members of the House of Representatives.\n<\/blockquote>\nSo, what can stop this cycle of greed?\n

\n\n<\/a>\nEnlace, an alliance of low-wage worker centres, unions, and community\norganisations in the U.S. and Mexico that wage international campaigns\nagainst “abusive transnational corporations”, is currently embarked\non a Prison Industry Divestment Campaign to break private prisons\u2019\nstranglehold on the justice system.\n

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

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

\n“Most people who have investments — whether through a pension or 401K\nor church donation — have them in the private prison industry without\nknowing it,” he added. “So people need to tell their investors to take\ntheir money out of private prison companies.”\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a>\nDivestment worked for apartheid in South Africa.\nIt can work against the prison-industrial-complex in the U.S.,\na country which keeps far more people locked up (total and per capita)\nthan South Africa ever did.\n

\nMeanwhile, we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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, \u2018Profiteers of Misery\u2019: […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,140,1113,48,40,14,70,19,1381,72,21,22,178],"tags":[8744,1309,8817,3849,3847,1298,3845,77,3848,3850,3846,8701,3391,2002,8709,8830,8730,399,727,2490,75,3335,2489,218,2568,2867,2294,2690,82],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-alec","category-cca","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-economy","category-ethics","category-history","category-immigration","category-incarceration","category-planning","category-politics","category-vlcia","tag-alec","tag-apartheid","tag-cca","tag-conviction","tag-cornel-companies","tag-crime","tag-divestiture","tag-drugs","tag-enforcement","tag-enlace","tag-geo","tag-georgia","tag-greed","tag-hb-87","tag-history","tag-immigration","tag-incarceration","tag-investment","tag-jail","tag-parole","tag-prison","tag-prison-industrial-complex","tag-probation","tag-profit","tag-sec","tag-sentencing","tag-south-africa","tag-usa","tag-war-on-drugs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-oX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}