One of the Darkest Periods in the History of American Prisons

Recent lawsuits and Justice Department investigations have uncovered grotesque abuses of mentally ill inmates at state and local prisons. Yet Washington refuses to investigate allegations of similar mistreatment at federal penitentiaries.

Andrew Cohen

It has been an extraordinary three weeks in the history of the American penal system, perhaps one of the darkest periods on record. In four states, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes, the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, has been investigated, chronicled and disclosed in grim detail to the world by lawyers, government investigators and one federal judge. The conclusions are inescapable: In our zeal to dehumanize criminals we have allowed our prisons to become medieval places of unspeakable cruelty so far beyond constitutional norms that they are barely recognizable.

First, on May 22, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department released a report highlighting the unconstitutional conditions of a county prison in Florida. Then, on May 30th, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit alleging atrocious conditions at a state prison in Mississippi. One day later, the feds again sounded out on behalf of inmates, this time against profound abuse and neglect at a Pennsylvania prison. Finally, last week, a federal judge issued an order describing the unconstitutional “brutality” of the prison in Orleans Parish, Louisiana.

There were many common themes in the reports. In each instance, the mistreatment of mentally ill inmates was highlighted. Prison officials have failed to provide a constitutional level of care in virtually every respect, from providing medication and treatment to protecting the men from committing suicide. In the Louisiana court order, one prison expert is quoted by the judge as describing an “extraordinary and horrific” situation with the prison there. In the Florida investigation, federal investigators noted that local prison officials “have elected to ignore obvious and serious systemic deficiencies” in the jail’s mental health services.

Taken together, these developments shed welcome light on some of the worst government abuses of our time and demonstrate vividly the need for enlightened policies and more human decency and accountability from prison officials. But these lawsuits and investigations and court orders also beg a critical question: If the feds are so concerned with the constitutional rights of mentally ill prisoners in state and local prisons, why is the Justice Department so unwilling to undertake an equally thorough review of the similarly dubious practices and policies now being forced upon mentally ill federal prisoners by the Bureau of Prisons?

The findings from the Florida and California investigations, and the evidence and allegations in Louisiana and Mississippi, are remarkably similar to the evidence and allegations that have been made in two federal civil rights cases about inmate abuse and neglect within the federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, the ADX-Florence facility that includes “Supermax,” America’s most famous prison. Yet the Inspector General of the Justice Department has refused to investigate those allegations against federal prison officials. Nor has the Civil Rights Division of the Department. Nor has Congress. This is unacceptable.

Continue Reading @ The Atlantic

 

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Public Schoolteachers’ Pensions Are Partially Funded by Private Prisons

Photo via Flickr user Rennett Stowe

By Ray Downs

Public schools and prisons are becoming increasingly linked—police officers are now a constant presence in many schools, which has led to students getting hassled and arrested by cops for what could be described as normal kid stuff, including performing science experiments on school grounds. There’s even a name for this phenomenon: the school-to-prison pipeline, which takes kids, mostly minority students who live in poverty, out of the classroom and into the legal system, shuffling them into the prison-industrial complex before they’re old enough to vote.

But there’s another, less obvious way schools are tied to prisons. Retirement funds for public school teachers (as well as other government employees) in several states have a combined $90 million invested in Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the largest private prison companies in the world. Though individual teachers didn’t decide to make their pensions partially connected to America’s gigantic, often abusive incarceration industry—many of them aren’t aware of all the investments made on their behalf—they are indirectly profiting from mass incarceration, thanks to choices made by their money managers who run public employees’ massive pension funds.

That $90 million figure is an estimate based on publicly-available NASDAQ data for public employee pension funds. Most of the money comes from three big states: California, New York, and Texas. Texas, through its Permanent School Fund and state employee retirement system, has about $13 million invested in CCA and GEO. California and New York, through their retirement funds for public school teachers and other state employees (which includes nonteacher school employees, like janitors and principals), each have about $30 million tied to private prisons.

These investments in the incarceration industry are piddling in comparison to these funds’ overall portfolios—the teacher retirement funds for California (CalSTRS) and New York (NYSTRS) are worth $167 billion and $96 billion, respectively—but they qualify as major shareholders in CCA and GEO Group.

If corporations are people, GEO Group shouldn’t be allowed within 100 feet of a child. In 2000, the company (then known as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation), was indicted by the Department of Justice for running a juvenile detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where boys were routinely beaten by guards. One kid who had to wear a colostomy bag because of a gunshot wound was beaten by a guard for not tucking in his shirt, which he couldn’t do because the bag was in the way.

It didn’t end there. In 2012, GEO was indicted again, this time for running a juvenile prison in Walnut Grove, Mississippi, where kids were frequently raped, beaten, and denied medical attention. The seediest detail might have been that Grady Sims, the 61-year-old warden who was also the former mayor of the town, took a young female inmate to a nearby motel and had sex with her, then later tried to get the girl to lie about it to investigators. He eventually got the sexual-assault charge dismissed and pled guilty to witness tampering. He was sentenced to a whopping six months of house arrest.

Despite this track record, the government is still handing over kids to GEO Group through Abraxas, the private prison conglomerate’s juvenile-detention arm. In addition to running prisons for kids, this subsidiary takes kids who have been expelled from public school and puts them in “alternative” schools, which are supposed to be designed for kids who have behavioral problems but in many cases are home for teens who have been victimized by a system that overreacts when kids act up.

Several teachers I spoke to about their pensions being invested in companies that engage in such morally questionable practices.

“Why?” said Darleen Guien, a retired adult ESL teacher who worked for several years in the LA Unified School District. “[The private prison investment] is just a fraction of the fund. Why do they need that?”

Guien said that due to the size of the teachers’ retirement fund, she assumed it would have a few ethically questionable investments, such as Walmart, but she was disappointed to find out it was making money from private prisons.

“Teachers provide a public service,” she said. “It’s troubling to know that they’re investing in things that are so much against the values many of us have.”

She also felt that teachers have no control over how their retirement fund is invested. “It’s not like we’re shareholders in a company and we vote,” she said. “I don’t think we have any say in anything. All we can do is maybe write a letter.”

Joe Martinez is a principal at Villacorta Elementary in South San Jose Hills, California. Although he wouldn’t comment on the private-prison investments in particular, he seemed to agree with Guien’s sentiments about there not being much that teachers can do about what provides the money for their pensions.

“More transparency could be a start, but even if teachers were given all the information about the investments, I don’t think there’s really much of a way for their voices to be heard, or even if it would make a difference,” he said.

I asked him if it really mattered in the end. After all, private prisons might be despicable entities, but they’re not illegal. In fact, they’re often very profitable companies and hence worth investing in from a purely capitalistic perspective. Is it OK to invest in ethically problematic companies if the profits go to teachers?

“I don’t think there necessarily has to be a choice,” he repilied. “The people who control these funds, which are basically a lot of other people’s money, could just be more conscious of what they’re investing in.”

When I reached out to spokespeople for the teacher-retirement funds of New York and California, both emphasized that the job of these funds is to make money so teachers can enjoy their golden years, and when you manage funds as vast as theirs, you might get into some ethically questionable territory. They also said that the private-prison investments are likely tied to index funds, which means they are part of mutual funds that mimic the ebb and flow of the market as a whole. In other words, no one is really deciding to invest in prisons, they just aren’t deciding not to invest in prisons.

However, a line can be drawn. John Cardello of the NYSTRS said they don’t invest in hedge funds. Everything else is OK, though. “I can’t think of anything else that we consciously stay away from,” Cardello said.

But CalSTRS, which is nearly twice as big as their New York counterpart, has made headlines for distancing itself from controversial corporations. In 2009, they stopped investing in tobacco companies, and shortly after the Newtown massacre, they announced they would divest from gun companies that make assault weapons considered illegal in California.

“There’s a moral component to our investing,” said Ricardo Duran, a spokesman for CalSTRS. He explained that the fund has 21 risk factors that go into deciding what to invest in. Those factors include respect for human rights, civil liberties, and political rights. It also includes racial discrimination.

By those standards, however, how are private prisons not unethical investments? Hopefully, these publicly financed funds will review what they’re making money off of soon and stop investing in companies that profit from America’s worst social problems.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

Previously on prisons and schools:

Who’s Getting Rich off the Prison-Industrial Complex?

Why Are We Arresting So Many Children?

Silent But Deadly

 

Via VICE

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Who’s Getting Rich off the Prison-Industrial Complex?

This is definitely worth a blog post and some thought people…..

By Ray Downs

You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.

But who are these people?

Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.

Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.

I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.

“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”

Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.

George Zoley
Another prison profiteer who presumably has no moral qualms about the business is George Zoley, the CEO of GEO Group and the second-biggest investor in the incarceration industry. In fact, he’s so proud of his business, which has committed a laundry list of human rights abuses, he tried to get a college football stadium named after it.

Zoley made nearly $6 million last year through salary and bonuses alone, but the real money is in stocks—he owns more than 500,000 shares in GEO, and he has made $23 million in stock trades during one 18-month period. But you can’t accuse him of not earning his pay, exactly. GEO saw a 56 percent spike in profits in the first quarter of 2013, and the company’s executives reassured investors that the incarceration rate wouldn’t be dropping any time soon when announcing its earnings. Zoley will be mega rich for years to come.

Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich
Both Wedell and Zoley are big donors to the Republican party, but that doesn’t mean those from the left side of the aisle can’t play their game. Matt Sirovich and Jeremy Mindich both donate to Democratic politicians and are involved with progressive-leaning organizations like Root Capital, a nonprofit lending company that offers loans to farmers in developing countries to alleviate poverty.

Their day job, however, is running Scopia Capital, a hedge fund that is the one of the largest shareholders of GEO Group. The fund owns about $300 million in shares in that company, which represents 12 percent of its entire portfolio. Like Zoley, they are good at what they do—their fund outperformed the market by 20 percentage points, and the State of New Jersey hired Scopia to manage $150 million worth of pensions.

I called them up to ask their thoughts about being politically liberal but heavily invested in private prisons, but Mindich refused to answer any questions and Sirovich was unavailable.

It should be pointed out that while being far to the left politically might seem incompatible with investing in prisons (or managing a hedge fund in the first place), the Democratic party is totally fine with the incarceration rate. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are largely responsible for the drug-war policies that caused the prison population to skyrocket, Bill Clinton was a “tough on crime” president who continued their ideas. And Vice President Joe Biden was a principal player in the Clinton era’s crime policies—he wrote the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which, among other things, called for $9.7 billion in increased funding for prisons and stiffer penalties for drug offenders.

Though the US prison population is shrinking slightly, the number of inmates in federal lockup is increasing, and while Obama keeps saying he’s ending the war on drugs, he’s also proposed budgets that call for increasing the amount of money spent on the Bureau of Prisons. So it’s not such a stretch that a Democratic donor would also be in the men-in-cages industry.

Retired People and Probably You
The Vanguard Group and Fidelity Investments are America’s top two 401(k) providers. They are also two of the private prison industry’s biggest investors.

Together, they own about 20 percent of both CCA and GEO. That means if you have a 401(k) plan, there’s a good chance you benefit financially from private prisons. And even if you don’t, there are many more mutual funds, brokerage firms, and banks that invest in private prisons—it being a growth industry and all—so if you have money somewhere other than your wallet or your mattress, it’s a good bet you’re involved in some way with companies that are locking up and probably abusing inmates.

This is especially true for government employees like public school teachers because their retirement funds are some of the biggest investors in private prisons. According to NASDAQ data, the retirement funds for public employees and teachers in New York and California together have about $60 million ($30 million each) invested in CCA and GEO. Teacher retirement funds in Texas and Kentucky have $8.3 million and $4 million invested in prisons respectively, and public employees in Florida ($10.3 million), Ohio ($8.6 million), Texas ($5.6 million), Arizona ($5.3 million), and Colorado ($2.25 million) are also connected to the industry. Except for New York, which has only one privately run detention facility, each of these states has several prisons run by CCA and GEO Group facilities. And it’s not just Americans who have ties to prisons. Foreign investors have money in them as well, including the pension fund for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which recently sold off its $5.1 million worth of GEO Group stock.

Most of these employees are probably unaware that their pensions are tied to prisons—and it’s hard to say that these are “bad” investments from a purely capitalistic perspective, since these prisons are making money hand over fist. The private prison industry is entrenched in our society. And the only way to make sure that we’re not individually and collectively profiting off of it is to close these things.

Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayDowns

Via VICE

 

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The Concept of Prisons for Profit….

from our friends at Beyond Bars

Private Prisons: The More Americans They Put Behind Bars The More Money They Make

How would you describe an industry that wants to put more Americans in prison and keep them there longer so that it can make more money?  In America today, approximately 130,000 people are locked up in private prisons that are being run by for-profit companies, and that number is growing very rapidly.  Overall, the U.S. has approximately 25 percent of the entire global prison population even though it only has 5 percent of the total global population.  The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the entire globe by far, and no nation in the history of the world has ever locked up more of its own citizens than we have.  Are we really such a cesspool of filth and decay that we need to lock up so many of our own people?  Or are there some other factors at work?  Could part of the problem be that we have allowed companies to lock up men and women in cages for profit?  The two largest private prison companies combined to bring in close to $3,000,000,000 in revenue in 2010, and the largest private prison companies have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade.  Putting Americans behind bars has become very big business, and those companies have been given a perverse incentive to push for even more Americans to be locked up.  It is a system that is absolutely teeming with corruption, and it is going to get a lot worse unless someone does something about it.

One of the keys to success in the private prison business it to get politicians to vote your way.  That is why the big private prison companies spend so much money on lobbying and campaign contributions.  The following is an excerpt from a report put out by the Justice Policy Institute entitled “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies“…

For-profit private prison companies primarily use three strategies to influence policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships, networks, and associations. Over the years, these political strategies have allowed private prison companies to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration and thus greater profit margins for their company. In particular, private prison companies have had either influence over or helped to draft model legislation such as “three-strikes” and “truth-in-sentencing” laws, both of which have driven up incarceration rates and ultimately created more opportunities for private prison companies to bid on contracts to increase revenues.

If you can believe it, three of the largest private prison companies have spent approximately $45,000,000 combined on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade.

Would they be spending so much money if those companies did not believe that it was getting results?

Just look at what has happened to the U.S. prison population over the
past several decades.  Prior to 1980, there were virtually no private
prisons in the United States.  But since that time, we have seen the
overall prison population and the private prison population absolutely
explode.

For example, between 1990 and 2009 the number of Americans in private prisons grew by about 1600 percent.

Overall, the U.S. prison population more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2007.

So something has definitely changed.

Not that it is wrong to put people in prison when they commit
crimes.  Of course not.  And right now violent crime is rapidly rising in many of our largest cities.  When people commit violent crimes they need to be removed from the streets.

But when you put those criminals into the hands of private companies
that are just in it to make a buck, the potential for abuse is enormous.

For example, when auditors visited one private prison in Texas, they “got so much fecal matter on their shoes they had to wipe their feet on the grass outside.”

The prisoners were literally living in their own manure.

How would you feel if a member of your own family was locked up in such a facility?

And the truth is that there seem to be endless stories of abuse in
private prisons.  One private prison company reportedly charges inmates $5.00 a minute to make phone calls but only pays them $1.00 a day to work…

Read more at http://marketdailynews.com/2013/03/11/private-prisons-the-more-americans-they-put-behind-bars-the-more-money-they-make/#xtGZj3iF91Kr3kw5.99



Prison Labor: Exposed

From Starbucks to Microsoft: a sampling of what US inmates make, and for whom

Tens of thousands of US inmates are paid from pennies to minimum wage—minus fines and victim compensation—for everything from grunt work to firefighting to specialized labor.

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. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

And Each month, California inmates process more than 680,000 pounds of beef, 400,000 pounds of chicken products, 450,000 gallons of milk, 280,000 loaves of bread, and 2.9 million eggs (from 160,000 inmate-raised hens). Starbucks subcontractor Signature Packaging Solutions has hired Washington prisoners to package holiday coffees (as well as Nintendo Game Boys). Confronted by a reporter in 2001, a Starbucks rep called the setup “entirely consistent with our mission statement.”

Texas inmates produce brooms and brushes, bedding and mattresses, toilets, sinks, showers, and bullwhips.

In Texas, prisoners make officers’ duty belts, handcuff cases, and prison-cell accessories. California convicts make gun containers, creepers (to peek under vehicles), and human-silhouette targets.

A stitch in time: California inmates sew their own garb. In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria’s Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace “Made in Honduras” labels on garments with “Made in the usa.”

Open wide: At California’s prison dental laboratory, inmates produce a complete prosthesis selection, including custom trays, try-ins, bite blocks, and dentures.

Constructive criticism: Prisoners in for burglary, battery, drug and gun charges, and escape helped build a Wal-Mart distribution center in Wisconsin in 2005, until community uproar halted the program. (Company policy says, “Forced or prison labor will not be tolerated by Wal-Mart.”)

On call: Its inmate call centers are the “best kept secret in outsourcing,” Unicor boasts. In 1994, a contractor for gop congressional hopeful Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. Metcalf, who prevailed, said he never knew.

Federal Prison Industries, a.k.a. Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers’ uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have “produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)” and “wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.” In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractor MicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.

Fidelity Investments (Fidelity). This “financial investment” corporation is involved in holding the retirement and 401(k) accounts of millions of Americans. Many of the largest companies in our country offer Fidelity Investments as the sole source of retirement investing for their employees.

Fidelity was previously identified as a funder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in an earlir Insourcing blog. ALEC is deeply invested in supporting Corrections Corporation of American (CCA) and Geo Group (Geo) – that are both corporate members of ALEC. ALEC has willingly accepted responsibility for enactment of laws authorizing and increasing the use of inmates in manufacturing of products as well as the housing of those inmates by private corporations such as CCA and Geo.

Unfortunately if your retirement savings, 401(K) or other investments are held by Fidelity, chances are some of your money is invested by Fidelity in either the use of prison labor or in other operations related to the prison industrial complex (PIC).

McDonald’s too, although they are not “directly” using inmate labor in their food service operations, they are dependent upon the use of inmate labor to reduce costs associated with those operations. The way they do this is by contracting to purchase their uniforms and some of the plastic utensils provided to customers from a company using inmate labor to make those uniforms and utensils. The uniforms are made by Oregon Inmates. Wendy’s has also been identified as relying upon prison labor to reduce their cost of operations – and they fund ALEC.

Two other U.S. companies relying upon prison labor for products sold in their stores are K-Mart and J.C. Penny. Both sell Jeans made by inmates in Tennessee prisons. The same prison in Tennessee provides labor for Eddie Bauer’s wooden rocking horses.

What about services such as Insurance? Banking? Utilities – gas, oil, electricity? Prescription drugs? Are all of these services or commodities tied to prison labor and the PIC? Unfortunately, yes. Many insurance companies are tied to ALEC…as are corporations involving utilities provided to you in your city or town. To name jut a few brand names you’ll recognize that are invested in prison labor or PIC through ALEC are:

BANKS: American General Financial Group, American Express Company, Bank of America, Community Financial Services Corporation, Credit Card Coalition, Credit Union National Association, Inc., Fidelity Inestments, Harris Trust & Savings Bank, Household International, LaSalle National Bank, J.P. Morgan & Company, Non-Bank Funds Transmitters Group

ENERGY PRODUCERS/OIL: American Petroleum Institute, Amoco Corporation, ARCO, BP America, Inc., Caltex Petroleum, Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil Corporation, Mobil Oil Corporation, Phillips Petroleum Company.

ENERGY PRODUCERS/UTILITIES: American Electric Power Association, American Gas Association, Center for Energy and Economic Development, Commonwealth Edison Company, Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc., Edison Electric Institute, Independent Power Producers of New York, Koch Industries, Inc., Mid-American Energy Company, Natural Gas Supply Association, PG&E Corporation/PG&E National Energy Group, U.S. Generating Company.

INSURANCE: Alliance of American Insurers, Allstate Insurance Company, American Council of Life Insurance, American Insurance Association, Blue Cross and Blue Shield Corporation, Coalition for Asbestos Justice, (This organization was formed in October 2000 to explore new judicial approaches to asbestos litigation.” Its members include ACE-USA, Chubb & Son, CNA service mark companies, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company, Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., Kemper Insurance Companies, Liberty Mutual Insurance Group, and St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company. Counsel to the coalition is Victor E. Schwartz of the law firm of Crowell & Moring in Washington, D.C., a longtime ALEC ally.)
Fortis Health, GEICO, Golden Rule Insurance Company, Guarantee Trust Life Insurance, MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company, National Association of Independent Insurers, Nationwide Insurance/National Financial, State Farm Insurance Companies, Wausau Insurance Companies, Zurich Insurance.

PHARMACEUTICALS: Abbott Laboratories, Aventis Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bayer Corporation, Eli Lilly & Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Inc., Hoffman-LaRoche, Inc., Merck & Company, Inc., Pfizer, Inc., Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
America (PhRMA), Pharmacia Corporation, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer, Inc., Schering-Plough Corporation, Smith, Kline & French, WYETH, a division of American Home Products Corporation.

MANUFACTURING:American Plastics Council, Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, AutoZone, Inc. (aftermarket automotive parts), Cargill, Inc., Caterpillar, Inc., Chlorine Chemistry Council, Deere & Company, Fruit of the Loom, Grocery Manufacturers of America, Inland Steel Industries, Inc., International Game Technology, International Paper, Johnson & Johnson, Keystone Automotive Industries, Motorola, Inc., Procter & Gamble, Sara Lee Corporation.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS: AT&T, Ameritech, BellSouth Telecommunications, Inc., GTE Corporation, MCI, National Cable and Telecommunications Association, SBC Communications, Inc., Sprint, UST Public Affairs, Inc., Verizon Communications, Inc.

TRANSPORTATION: Air Transport Association of America, American Trucking Association, The Boeing Company, United Airlines, United Parcel Service (UPS).

OTHER U.S. COMPANIES: Amway Corporation, Cabot Sedgewick, Cendant Corporation, Corrections Corporation of America, Dresser Industries, Federated Department Stores, International Gold Corporation, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Microsoft Corporation, Newmont Mining Corporation, Quaker Oats, Sears, Roebuck & Company, Service Corporation International, Taxpayers Network, Inc., Turner Construction, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

ORGANIZATIONS/ASSOCIATIONS: Adolph Coors Foundation, Ameritech Foundation, Bell & Howell Foundation, Carthage Foundation, Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, ELW Foundation, Grocery Manufacturers of America, Heartland Institute of Chicago, The Heritage Foundation, Iowans for Tax Relief, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, National Pork Producers Association, National Rifle Association, Olin Foundation, Roe Foundation, Scaiffe Foundation, Shell Oil Company Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Steel Recycling Institute, Tax Education Support Organization, Texas Educational Foundation, UPS Foundation.

As the foregoing illustrates, many U.S. companies and corporations not only fund ALEC’s activities regarding prison labor and PIC, they have foundations that also contribute handsomely to ALEC. Many are represented upon ALEC”s Private Enterprise Board.

Info from:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/12/14/928611/-INSOURCING-Identifying-businesses-involved-in-prison-labor-or-supporting-those-who-are

http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor#

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoners-make-victorias-secret

 

Profiting From Human Misery

By Chris Hedges

 

Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week. She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility’s gates every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation’s immigration policy and conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend Evelyn Obey.

Obey, 40, a Guatemalan and the single mother of a 12-year-old and a 6-year-old, was picked up in an immigration raid as she and nine other undocumented workers walked out of an office building they cleaned in Newark, N.J. Her two children instantly lost their only parent. She languished in detention. Another family took in the children, who never saw their mother again. Obey died in jail in 2010 from, according to the sign Villar had hung on her neck, “pulmonary thromboembolism, chronic bronchiolitis and emphysema and remote cardiac Ischemic Damage.’ ”

AP/Mel Evans

A row of beds inside the Elizabeth Detention Center.

“She called me two days after she was seized,” Marela told me in Spanish. “She was hysterical. She was crying. She was worried about her children. We could not visit her because we do not have legal documents. We helped her get a lawyer. Then we heard she was sick. Then we heard she died. She was buried in an unmarked grave. We did not go to her burial. We were too scared of being seized and detained.”

The rally—about four dozen people, most from immigrant rights groups and local churches—was a flicker of consciousness in a nation that has yet to fully confront the totalitarian corporate forces arrayed against it. Several protesters in orange jumpsuits like those worn by inmates held signs reading: “I Want My Family Together,” “No Human Being is Illegal,” and “Education not Deportation.”

“The people who run that prison make money off of human misery,” said Diana Mejia, 47, an immigrant from Colombia who now has legal status, gesturing toward the old warehouse that now serves as the detention facility. As she spoke, a Catholic Worker band called the Filthy Rotten System belted out a protest song. A low-flying passenger jet, its red, green and white underbelly lights blinking in the night sky, rumbled overhead. Clergy walking amid the crowd marked the foreheads of participants with ashes to commemorate Ash Wednesday.

Continue Reading @ Truth Dig

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New Plan Would Return Calif. Inmates to State Prisons by June 2016

California inmates currently housed in out-of-state facilities will be returned to state prisons in stages through June 30, 2016, according to a plan submitted to U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times‘ “PolitiCal” reports.

Karlton previously had directed state officials to explain in writing their plan to stop sending inmates to private prisons to reduce overcrowding (St. John, “PolitiCal,” Los Angeles Times, 2/6).

Background

About six years ago, U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson appointed federal receiver J. Clark Kelso to oversee the state’s prison health care system after determining that an average of one inmate per week died as a result of malpractice or neglect.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its inmate population to help improve prison health care (California Healthline, 1/30). The state responded by transferring certain prisoners to private, out-of-state facilities.

However, the Brown administration several months ago announced its intention to return the inmates to California.

According to state prison population reports, California had 8,852 inmates in four out-of-state prisons run by Tennessee-based Correction Corp. of America as of Jan. 30.

Details of Plan

According to the plan filed by Brown’s lawyer, 4,527 inmates will finish their prison terms at out-of-state facilities. The plan noted that an average of 110 inmates are paroling out of the prisons each month.

The remaining 4,325 prisoners will be returned to California facilities in stages through June 2016, according to the plan.

The filing said, “The gradual return of these inmates will allow the state to avoid bunking inmates in prison gymnasiums or other makeshift housing units again.”

However, it stated that the end of private prison contracts will have no effect on the delivery of mental health care to inmates.

More Time To Reduce Prison Overcrowding

On Jan. 29, a three-judge panel — which included Karlton — granted California six additional months to comply with federal orders to reduce prison overcrowding (“PolitiCal,” Los Angeles Times, 2/6).

According to the judges, California officials have said that they cannot meet the federal deadline of June 30 for reducing the inmate population by 137.5% of design capacity. However, the judges said that state officials believe they can make the reduction by Dec. 31.

The judges wrote, “Accordingly, this court modifies the June 30, 2011, order by granting defendants a six-month extension in which to comply with its terms and provisions”

Via California HealthLine

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Happy Birthday to the Corrections Corporation of America? Thirty Years of Banking on Bondage Leaves Little to Celebrate

Corrections Corporation of America (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project

Thirty years ago yesterday, two retired military officers and a former prison administrator founded the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the first for-profit prison company in modern America. Today, CCA is the nation’s largest owner and operator of for-profit prisons, with annual revenues topping $1.7 billion. On an average day, the company incarcerates 81,384 people – more than the states of New York and New Jersey combined.

CCA essentially admits that their current profitability depends on high rates of incarceration.  In their 2011 10-K report, filed publicly with the Securities and Exchange Commission, CCA stated:

“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws.”

Specifically, “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration” could “potentially reduc[e] demand for correctional facilities,” as would “mak[ing] more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior,” the adoption of “sentencing alternatives [that]…could put some offenders on probation,” or “reductions in crime rates.”

As detailed in a 2011 ACLU report, massive increases in overall incarceration rates from the 1970s onward created a fertile environment for the growth of for-profit imprisonment. From 1970 to 2005, the U.S. prison population increased by approximately 700% – far outpacing crime rates and the growth of the general population. Today, more Americans are deprived of their liberty than ever before – unfairly and unnecessarily, with little benefit to public safety. Many of them are in private prisons: the latest figures from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics show that for-profit companies presently control about 18% of federal prisoners and 6.7% of all state prisoners, and the most recent federal survey of correctional facilities revealed that private prisons accounted for nearly all of the new prisons built between 2000 and 2005.

Continue Reading @ ACLU Blog

 

30 Years Later, Private Prisons Have a Future to Secure

By Xander Pakzad

The thirty year anniversary of the founding of the Corrections Corporation of America marks an all-time high for the for-profit prison industry. An increase of immigration- and drug-related arrests have contributed to the growth of the CCA in recent years. But according to their latest 10-K, an annual performance report provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission, their profitability is threatened by many factors:

“Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitoring who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.”

The CCA speaks just as candidly about areas in which to capitalize. In a presentation to investors last year, the CCA attributes current economic factors in creating a “unique investment opportunity.” Increases in law enforcement and funding (due to recovery from the recession), high rates of recidivism (repeated imprisonment), and acquisition of government-owned correctional facilities are all cited as reasons for anticipated growth.

Continue Reading @ IVN

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