37 STATES ALLOW CORPORATIONS TO GET RICH OFF PRISON LABOR
Snip:
One out of every 100 American adults is behind bars. That’s more than 2.4 million people who have been taken out of the workforce and had their rights legally stripped away. That’s a lot of potential exploitable workers for a corporation to use.
The United States has a long history of forcing its prison population to work as part of their punishment, although by no means is it the only country to do so. The 13th Amendment, passed in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude for everyone but prisoners. In 1871, Virginia declared prisoners “slaves of the state.” In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that prisoners couldn’t form unions or make work demands [source]. This all led up to the 1980s and 90s where under both a republican president and a democrat, the prison population skyrocketed. Locking up people for lengthy minimum sentences is truly one of the last remaining bipartisan agreements.
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But with any easily disenfranchised group (and prisoners might be the most disenfranchised in the country, almost by definition), the opportunity for exploitation and abuse is extremely high. The probability of abuse becomes even higher for a group of people typically perceived as “deserving” of it. Prisoners fit that bill nicely.
Given the substantial profits that could be made by moving your labor away from legally protected workers and over to legally unprotected prisoners, it was only a matter of time before states and corporations got busy hashing out the exact business details:
All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month. [source]
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
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that benefit from this type of exploitation. Their growth is aggressively supported by both Republicans and the corporate Third Way, for one simple reason: Imprisoning human beings is a very profitable industry. But a government's complicity in attaching a profit motive to the imprisonment of human beings is nothing short of evil.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023368969
Government guarantees 90% occupancy rate in private prisons.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2569173
The Obama administration is aggressively growing private prisons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022568681
Obama's 2013 budget: One area of marked growth, the prison industrial complex
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1002392306
Obama selects the owner of a private prison consulting firm as the new Director of the United States Marshals Service (USMS)
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/mars-d03.htmlPoor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014158005
Private prison corporations move up on list on federal contractors, receiving BILLIONS
http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-s-incarcernation-1335274655
The Caging of America - Why do we lock up so many people
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002226110
Prison Labor Booms As Unemployment Remains High; Companies Reap Benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272036.html
Private Prison Corporation's Letters to Shareholders Reveal Industry's Tactics: Profiting from Human Incarceration
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022665091
Financial growth of private prison industry...Profiting from caging humans.
http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/BshteP8i282pcaeH8pdUsA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTUyMA--/
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime
This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall
—By Andy Kroll
| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 9:43 AM PDT MotherJones
We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.
Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)
All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.
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