The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System

The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative way to cash in on the incarceration surplus: private for-profit prisons.

While the implications of an industry that locks human beings in cages for profit is an old story, there is an important part of the history of private prisons that often goes untold.

Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison operator. Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up. Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money. In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly.

So why are they still in business? […]

New ACLU Report Documents Destructive Impact of Prison Privatization

runfromtheherd:

The report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past three decades and shows how private prison companies have capitalized on the nation’s addiction to incarceration to achieve gigantic profits. All the while, the report shows, mass incarceration wreaks havoc on communities by unnecessarily depriving individuals of their liberty, draining government resources and bringing little or no benefit to public safety.

“Our nation’s reliance on mass incarceration has bankrupted government budgets, torn families and communities apart, disproportionately impacted people of color, and provided no benefit to public safety,” said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project and the author of the report. “But it has been a bonanza for the private prison industry, which rakes in billions of dollars a year and dishes out multi-million dollar compensation packages to its top executives. For-profit prison companies are a barrier to the kind of criminal justice reform that is desperately needed in America.”

Spurred by criminal laws that impose needlessly steep sentences – especially for low-level, non-violent offenders – and curtail rehabilitation opportunities, the United States today imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The crippling cost of incarcerating increasing numbers of Americans has saddled government budgets with rising debt and exacerbated the current fiscal crisis confronting states across the nation. Yet the two largest private prison companies alone obtained nearly $3 billion in revenue in 2010.

While evidence that privatization saves taxpayers money is mixed at best, for-profit prison advocates continue to trot out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes confronting state governments.

I’m going to a dinner tonight to learn about law school. It’s basically just a Q&A session for people who are interested. While I know there are already too many lawyers in America, I’m still really interested in working for the ACLU or for victims’ rights firms. I would dearly love to see for-profit prisons declared unconstitutional. The inherent abuses & corruption are so obvious. This is not the kind of society we want. 

(Source: azspot, via foulmouthedliberty)