Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders
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.
The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.
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The real criminals are not the pot smokers - they're in our nation's board profiting off of how to keep us oppressed. When we live in a society where everything is bought and sold ans treated like commodities - where do we go? Since the Bush administration - and arguably since Reagan - the über rich have been completely out of control. If we don't tax them - we wind up with private prison corporations who treat prisoners like slaves with no accountability whatsoever. 
except to visit family. I told an authority figure there once: "I know I will never be sent to hell, because I did my time in Georgia."
The people of TN are much kinder and more down-to-earth. I love a lot of them, just can't deal with their apathy and political laziness anymore.
I want to go back home to NY or to Vermont. Upstate NY has turned Teabagger so I've heard, so I'm looking toward Vermont.
I'm tired of people who think they're electing Jesus just because a politician flashes his solid gold cross in their faces and says something ugly about "homoseckshuals and fiminists." I'm tired of lazy people who don't even bother to register to vote.
Thanks for the kind words. I love to go off on a good rant....
and today my hands are cracked and swollen and numb from working like a dog, and when I saw how little they plan to pay me this Friday, I wanted to just weep.
I ranted here instead. Gotta love DU
