Private Prison Corp. Buying Up State Pens To Maximize Profits

Reform groups consider corrections industry the modern day slave traders

Think conspiracy theories about the prison industrial complex are fake?

The Black Agenda Report last week shined a spotlight on a private prison corporation that has pitched purchasing publicly funded corrections facilities in 48 states.

With $250 million at their disposal, the Corrections Corporation of America plans to buy the prisons, keep them “90 percent full,” and  demand 20-year contracts with the states, to maximize profits.

These institutions are infamous for jailing a disproportionate number of African American and Latino felons, spending less money per prisoner, and offering inmate labor at $2 per day wages.

[ALSO READ: Desmond Meade Pushes Felon Disfranchisement Reforms]

From the BAR report:

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money… 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.

To read more, click here.

The BAR report goes on to say, that the CCA’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Yes, it’s stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange!) read very much like the documents of a slave-trader.

Still think it’s just a theory?

[SUBSCRIBE TO LOOP 21 RSS FEED]