Page 37 - Provoke Magazine Vol3

Privatized Prisons and How They Make Money
By: Kenneth Marshall
Imagine living in a country where prisons are private cor- porations that profit from keeping their beds stocked at, or near, capacity and the governing officials scramble to meet contractual “lockup quotas.” Imagine that taxpayers would have to pay for any empty beds should crime rates fall below that quota. Surprise! You already live there. The prison indus- try is highly profitable. The two biggest prison corporations in the country made $3.3 billion in 2012 — profiting from government payments and prison laborers, who were forced to work for pennies on behalf of companies like Boeing and McDonald’s.
Let’s suppose that it costs $100 per day to house a prisoner (assuming full capacity, including all administration costs), and the prison building can hold 1,000 inmates. A private prison can offer their services to the government and charge $150 per day per prisoner. Generally speaking, the govern- ment will agree to these terms if the $150 is less than if the prison was publicly run. That spread is where the private prison makes their money. With so much money at stake, it’s not surprising that the for-profit prison industry is corrupt- ing our political process. According to National Institute on Money in Politics just one such company, the GEO Group, has given more than $6 million to Republican, Democratic, and independent candidates over the past 13 years.
OUR BLACKS SONS ARE BEING TARGETED & FRAMED
(USA has more people in jail than any other country on earth.
Truth, those imprisoned are minorities: 57 percent are black, 33 percent His- panic, 7 percent white and 1 percent Asian.)
The Department of Justice found that black motorists were three times more likely than their white counterparts to be searched during a traffic stop. African Americans are twice as likely to be arrested, and almost four times as likely to ex- perience the use of force during encounters with police. Fur- ther, African Americans are imprisoned at six times the rate of whites. If current trends persist, one in four black males born today can expect to be imprisoned during their lifetime. 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; more- over, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons re- ceive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, in- dependent of what it costs to maintain each one. Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. Murder In the Courtrooms” FOR PROFIT PRISONS MUST GO!!!
They aren’t just killing Black Folks in the streets. They are killing us in the “Courtrooms” daily and getting paid from it at the same time. The government receives at least 126.00 a day per inmate. There are over 2.2 mil- lion prisoners incarcerated (57% black, 33% hispanic) $126.00 X’s 2.2 million is $277,200,000 PER DAY!. Now multiply that by 365 days in a year and that comes to just over $101 BILLION,
Now do you see how much of your tax dollars the Government and HIGH RANKING UPPER MAN- AGEMENT Law Enforcement are pocketing? It’s all BIG Business. Now why would the government want to let NON-VIOLENT offenders that are no threat, out of prison to be with their families? Prison Lives Matter. Share this with someone and ask them to join this move- ment. We will be protesting U.S. wide in a few months.
Provokeusmag.com 37