Prison Industries: "Don't Let Society Improve or We Lose Business" (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)One out of every 100 people in the United States is imprisoned.
Even though we are 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the prisoners in the world. We are number one in the world in the number of people we imprison - we even beat China. A normal reaction to this situation would be to try to reform our laws, our judicial system - including sentencing - our prison system and our society so that we would not have the disconcerting distinction of being the number-one jailer in the world. Instead, in the past decade, there has been a movement to privatize more and more of our state and federal prisons to save money (which has not materialized) and ease overcrowding under the pressure of the courts. This has led to a wide world of influence peddling, self-dealing and lobbying while preying on a captured group of people to fill prison beds.
And The GEO Group does do a brisk business, mainly through the federal and state governments. America's Top Prison Corporation: A Study in Predatory Capitalism and Cronyism. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Last week I wrote about the private prison company The GEO Group and how allowing private businesses to operate prisons can affect our justice system, our laws and the fate of our prison population.
This week, I will tackle the largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and its unprecedented proposal to buy prisons from money-strapped states, as well as how CCA has gamed the system with trips through the revolving door, self-dealing and influence peddling. Just to set the stage as to how large the prison population is in the United States: our prison population is the highest in the world; one out of 100 US residents are in prison. This number has grown dramatically since 1990, due to tighter crime laws and longer sentences. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "Between 1970 and 2005, the number of people incarcerated in the United States grew by 700 percent. CCA's general counsel, Gustavus A.
"Breathing While Latino" Laws Boom for Private Prison Profits. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)For the past two weeks, I have written two columns on the biggest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the Geo Group (GEO), to expose their efforts to elevate their profits by working to keep laws on the books that will maximize the number of prisoners in this country (one in 100 people, the highest in the world).
They were successful by making certain that they had well-placed lobbyists and former employees to keep their product (the number of prisoners) high to keep beds filled in public prisons that they managed and private prisons that they owned. It was even part of the business plan that they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although the number of privately managed immigration detention beds has grown drastically since 1996, corporations have actually dominated the field for more than two decades. The expansion of the immigrant detention system has benefitted the private prison industry.