After 9/11, A New Era In The Business Of Detaining Immigrants. This article has been updated On a conference call with investors less than two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Wall Street executive Steve Logan predicted a new era of unbridled growth for his industry: the for-profit prison business. "It is clear that since Sept. 11, there's a heightened focus on detention, both on the borders and in the U.S.
," Logan, the chief executive of publicly-traded prison corporation Cornell Companies, told analysts on a quarterly earnings call. "More people are gonna get caught. ... So I would say that's positive. " Logan's upbeat assessment of the post-9/11 world would prove true, as the federal government has embarked on an unprecedented campaign to round up, detain and eventually deport illegal immigrants under the guise of bolstering national security. Contracts are generally structured around the number of inmates housed in a facility on any given day. Since 2001, the amount of lobbying by the for-profit prison industry has skyrocketed. The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?
Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold.
They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells. There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country.
What has happened over the last 10 years? “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. . . . Prison labor has its roots in slavery. Who is investing? Private Prisons:Profits of Crime. By Phil Smith from the Fall 1993 issue of Covert Action Quarterly Private prisons are a symptom, a response by private capital to the "opportunities" created by society's temper tantrum approach to the problem of criminality. At Leavenworth, Kansas, within a perimeter of razor wire, armed prison guards in uniform supervise hundreds of medium- and maximum-security federal prisoners.
Welcome to one of America's growth industries- private sector, for-profit prisons. Here in the shadow of the federally-run Fort Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks and the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) runs a short-term detention facility for medium- and maximum-security prisoners. Under contract to the U.S. Marshal's Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the CCA Leavenworth facility is not an anomaly but part of a trend. Illustration by Eric Drooker Prisons for Profit Surprisingly, private prisons are nothing new in U.S. history. ACLU report blasts US private prisons. ACLU report blasts US private prisons A report released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union criticizes the private prison industry for profiting at the expense of a growing prison population.
The report, titled "Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," accuses private prison companies of lobbying for laws that result in higher incarceration rates. Higher incarceration rates result in more government contracts, which, according to the report, are the primary source of funding for these companies. texastribune.org The federal government is in the midst of a private prison expansion spree, driven primarily by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that locks up roughly 400,000 immigrants each year and spends over $1.9 billion annually on custody operations.
Two leading industry companies, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, received a combined $3 billion in annual revenue in 2010. State will seek private prison plans, but ... The Department of Corrections said Thursday it will solicit proposals from private companies seeking to operate 30 prisons and work camps in an 18-county region of South Florida. But the state won't award a contract until an ongoing lawsuit is resolved. A brief statement from the prison system, distributed to media outlets at 5 p.m., said the agency would "reopen the procurement process" because Attorney General Pam Bondi appealed a circuit court decision declaring the privatization plan unconstitutional. The statement said the appeal "had the effect of staying the circuit court's order in accordance with Rule 9.310(b)(2), Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure.
" An agency spokeswoman said the prison system's general counsel, Jennifer Parker, approved the action. Proposals are due at the prison system by 2 p.m. next Thursday, Nov. 10. The proposal is believed to be the largest prison outsourcing venture ever undertaken at one time in the U.S. -- Steve Bousquet. New AZ law mandates $25 fee for prison visits. Private prison. A private prison or for-profit prison, jail, or detention center is a place in which individuals are physically confined or interned by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in the facility.
Today, the privatization of prisons refers both to the takeover of existing public facilities by private operators and to the building and operation of new and additional prisons by for-profit prison companies. Private prisons in the United Kingdom[edit] Development[edit] Privately run prisons are run under contracts which set out the standards that must be met. Payments may be deducted for poor performance against the contract. A competition is in progress to run 9 prisons in England and Wales.
Private prisons in the United States[edit] Early history[edit] Development[edit] Cost/Benefit analysis[edit] Others[who?] Conservative legislation mill a driving force behind private prisons | Raw Replay. Privatized Prisons...Criminal in a Democracy. Ohio first for privatizing prisonsDayton Business JournalDate: Friday, September 2, 2011, 7:00am Ohio is about to become the first state in the country to privatize a prison, with the planned sale of the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Ashtabula County, according to the Toledo Blade.Corrections Corporation of America will pay more than $70 million for the prison, making it the only one of five originally put up for sale by the state to be sold.
The others did not have deals that could be worked out to make it beneficial for taxpayers if they were sold, according to the Blade. Kasich considers selling 5 prisons, newspaper saysWednesday, March 9, 2011 11:27 AM Associated Press DAYTON -- A newspaper reports that Gov. John Kasich is considering selling five prisons to private operators as part of the two-year budget he'll release next week. - -snip U.S. Democracy Now! Mobile. AMY GOODMAN: "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor" is our next segment. Lisa Graves, of the Center for Media and Democracy, in New Orleans. I wanted to turn now to the article I just referenced, which begins: "The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners.
" Mike Elk is our next guest. He’s a contributing editor to The Nation magazine and has done this exposé with Bob Sloan in The Nation. Welcome to Democracy Now! Continue on this story. MIKE ELK: So, one of the—by far, one of the most perverse effects that ALEC has had on American society is the dramatic increase in the amount of prisoners incarcerated in this country. Click here to support this global independent news hour today. AMY GOODMAN: And let me just remind people, ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. REP. California prisons: Hunger strikes reported at more California prisons - latimes.com.
Inmates in at least 11 of California's 33 prisons are refusing meals in solidarity with a hunger strike staged by prisoners in one of the system's special maximum-security units, officials said Tuesday. The strike began Friday when inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison stopped eating meals in protest of conditions that they contend are cruel and inhumane. "There are inmates in at least a third of our prisons who are refusing state-issued meals," said Terry Thornton, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The number of declared strikers at Pelican Bay — reported Saturday as fewer than two dozen — has grown but is changing daily, she said. The same is true at other prisons. Some inmates are refusing all meals, while others are rejecting only some, Thornton said.
Some were eating in visitation rooms and refusing state-issued meals in their cells, she said. sam.quinones@latimes.com. 21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor. This article has been updated. There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages.
This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight. They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century. Incarceration Nation It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. Incentivizing Incarceration Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it gets worse. After Troy Davis: End the Death Penalty or End the Prison Industrial Complex? - The ITT List. At a public lecture on the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement held at the University of Chicago on Monday, the audience was eager to discuss the recent execution of Troy Davis.
“How can we effectively seize this moment?” An audience member asked of the worldwide movement that converged around opposition to Davis’ execution by the state of Georgia, fueled in part by the substantial doubt surrounding his guilt. But scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—delivering a lectured titled “Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex: the World We Want is the World We Need”—was adamant about the need to move beyond the question of Davis’ guilt or innocence. Gilmore defined prison abolition—an intentional reference to historic anti-slavery movements—as “abolishing the world in which prisons are central.”
The issues of prisons and policing can be a powerful common ground for movements, Gilmore argued, because for many activists “the threat of prison is somewhere nearby.”