Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

[polly7]

The Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an opportunity to become landlord, as well as manager, of a chunk of the American prison gulag

April 29, 2012 |

http://www.alternet.org/story/155199/private_prison_corporations_are_modern_day_slave_traders/

The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.

[Uncle Joe]

1. For profit prison corporations are a flat out evil industry that if allowed to remain legal will

surely take the nation down the road to perdition, that enterprise has no redeeming value.

Thanks for the thread, polly.

[usrname]

2. Privatization is the goal of the GOP

private prisons, private schools, private DMV, private road crews, private FAA, private....

From seeing what happened with private contractors in the Iraq War, the end game is even MORE expense to the government, less control and no recourse for the consumers.

It is exactly the nationalized socialism that the 1930s Germany wanted: the hybridization of government and corporations. Unaccountable and unstoppable.

[midnight]

3. The appropriate response to these private prisons is no. Keep the jobs and the ownership local and

public.