![](\"http:\/\/www.ajc.com\/multimedia\/dynamic\/00876\/GAJA107_876972l.jpg\")
<\/a>\nWhile\n<\/a>\nWhile\n\na private prison is top of the news<\/a>,\nyou’d probably never know what it has to do with this if you didn’t have the Internet,\n\n8,000 Rally against Georgia Anti-Immigrant Bills<\/a>,\nby Gloria Tatum in Georgia Progressive News:\n\nOver 8,000 activists rallied outside the State Capitol on Thursday, March\n24, 2011, to show their outrage and disgust over Georgia’s Arizona-type\nimmigration bills.\n\nAs previously reported by Atlanta Progressive News, legislation, HB 87,\nhas already passed the State House. A similar bill, SB 40, has also\npassed the State Senate.\n
\n\n
<\/a>\nWhile the vast majority of protesters at the Capitol were Hispanic,\nopposition to the bills came from a wide spectrum of constituents\nincluding immigrants, students, religious groups, peace groups, veterans\nof the Civil Rights Movement, Asian groups, GLBTQI activists, labor,\nartists, musicians, business owners, elected officials, and others.\n<\/blockquote>\nWhat’s this got to do with private prisons?\n\n\nSame as we reported\n\nback when the VDT first bragged about VLCIA’s bad idea to bring\na CCA private prison to Lowndes County.<\/a>\nThe AJC\n\ndid report on the rally, or at least carried an AP story,<\/a>\n(that’s the source of the pictures of the rally here),\nbut it did not make this connection.\nThe APN story continues:\n
\nOften overlooked in the immigration debate is the influence of the\nCorrections Corporation of America (CCA) in lobbying elected officials to\nsupport anti-immigration bills and in helping to draft Arizona’s SB 1070.\nAPN previously reported on these connections, with CCA lobbyists currently\nworking the halls of the Georgia Capitol.\n\n“The private prison corporations that make money off of immigrants\nare behind these bills,” Azadeh Shahshahani, Director of the National\nSecurity\/Immigrants’ Rights Project of American Civil Liberties Union\nof Georgia, said. “Do we want Georgia to be known as a state friendly\nto CCA or a state friendly to immigrants?”\n
\nCCA’s profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to\ntheir for-profit private prisons.\n<\/blockquote>\nHow about do we want dirt-cheap private prison labor\n\nto compete with local labor<\/a>?\n\n
<\/a>\nHow about do we want to lock up more people when even\n\nGov. Nathan Deal says we can’t afford it to lock up nonviolent offenders<\/a>\nin a time when Georgia already spends\n\na billion dollars a year on incarceration?<\/a>\n
\n\n
<\/a>\nTo its credit, the VDT does occasionally print something somebody\nlocally says against private prisons,\nsuch as Dr. Mark George in January:\n
\n“I think we can do better than a generator that burns human waste.\nI think we can do better than a private prison….”\n<\/blockquote>\nThe AJC\n\nquoted John Lewis<\/a>\n(picture from\n\nthe Florida Times-Union<\/a>):\n\n\n<\/a>\nU.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, a leader of the 1960s civil rights\nmovement, encouraged the crowd to keep fighting. He noted that he was\narrested dozens of times while working alongside Martin Luther King Jr.\n
\n“I was beaten, left bloody, but I didn’t give up and you must not give\nup,” he said to loud cheers.\n<\/blockquote>\nTo my anti-immigrant friends.\nYou don’t want immigrants competing for your jobs, you say.\nDo you want prisoners competing for your jobs, being paid\nfar less than immigrants?\n
\nYes, we can do better.\nSi, se puede!\n
\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[97,140,14,1381,72],"tags":[1011,1124,4803,4801,8817,1872,2858,8704,4805,8701,2002,4025,4800,847,4799,4804,2552,3330,4802,8742,8749],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-alec","category-economy","category-immigration","category-incarceration","tag-ajc","tag-arizona","tag-atlanta-progressive-news","tag-capitol","tag-cca","tag-civil-rights","tag-corrections-corporation-of-america","tag-economy","tag-florida-times-union","tag-georgia","tag-hb-87","tag-hispanic","tag-immigrants","tag-jobs","tag-john-lewis","tag-mark-george","tag-prisoners","tag-protesters","tag-sb-40","tag-vdt","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-Ac","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244","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=2244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}