General Discussion

KamaAina

(78,249 posts) Wed Jul 15, 2015, 02:15 PM Jul 2015

Here are 6 Companies That Get Rich off Prisoners

http://www.attn.com/stories/941/who-profits-from-prisoners

There are currently 2.4 million people in American prisons. This number has grown by 500% in the past 30 years. While the United States has only 5% of the world's population, it holds 25 percent of the world's total prisoners. In 2012, one in every 108 adults was in prison or in jail, and one in 28 children in the U.S. had a parent behind bars....

Money is a huge reason we have so many prisoners.

Several corporations make huge profits off prisons. It costs an average of $23,876 annually to house a state prisoner for a year. To save money, cash-strapped states (aka, us, the taxpayers) pay companies to deal with their prisoners. Companies make money by running prisons as cheaply as possible and squeezing the prisoners and their families for money for basic necessities and fees. As a result, private prisons are a $70 billion industry.

Even crazier, 65 percent of private prison contracts require an occupancy guarantee. That means states must have a certain amount of prisoners -- typically between 80 and 90 percent of occupancy -- or pay companies for empty beds. Talk about bad incentives -- a state throws money away if it does not have enough prisoners.