Preacher of freedom imprisons people for profit

Private prisons in the US can be a living hell for the powerless yet a booming business for some other. It is no secret that the US government and private prison systems profit hugely under the guise of justice – just another proof of US’ decaying system and hypocrisy of the its style of democracy.

Incarceration cannot be more common in the US. The transformation of slavery, colonialism, classism, and other things across time all have contributed to the high incarceration rate, a business booming so much that in 2018, the Sentencing Project reported that the US had the world's largest private prison population.

According to the Sentencing Project, the war on drugs and harsher sentencing policies, including mandatory minimum sentences, fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population beginning in the 1980s. The resulting burden on the public sector led to the modern emergence of for-profit private prisons in many states and at the federal level.

Modern slavery

In prison, it is easy to feel forgotten — by friends, by family and by the elected officials who so rarely set foot inside the razor wire. It is no exaggeration to say the private prison is a modern version of slavery.

Boasting huge investment, these private-owned facilities even then fail to meet necessary levels of safety and security for detainees. Forced labor, sex abuse, racial discrimination and other kind of human rights violation happen all the time in those private prisons.

For instance, prison labor, or penal labor, is performed by incarcerated and detained people all the time. Due to its inherent power imbalance, labor by those incarcerated behind bars becomes exploitative when there are elements of coercion, force, and threat of punishment against detainees.

According to the Center for American Progress, a think tank, due to negligence from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, detainees, especially women and immigrants, continue to face risk of sexual violence. And as for-profit prisons continue to play an outsize role in immigration detention while providing substandard care, the health and safety of vulnerable populations such as women and migrants remain especially at risk.

Things got worse inside the prison in the age of COVID-19. According to UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project, which tracks COVID-19 outbreaks in prisons, since the start of the pandemic, prisons and ICE detention centers across the US have reported 572,962 total cumulative cases among incarcerated people and 3,013 deaths. The Star News said in a recent report that people in prison are roughly three times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the general population, even after adjusting for the fact that the prison population skews younger.

Many detention centers are extremely overcrowded. Isolation, the key to stopping the spread of COVID, is simply not an option for detainees. Ever since the outbreak of COVID in the US, private prison operator CoreCivic has been accused of ignoring a COVID-19 outbreak, putting inmates and the community at risk. Other prisons have been blamed for shortage of mask supplies and vaccination for their detainees.

Business and politics behind the system

Although private prisons have been ineffective at providing quality detention services, they have been effective at supporting political allies. According to the USA Today, in the 2016 presidential election, for example, two of largest private prison companies, the GEO Group and CoreCivic donated $250,000 each to Trump’s inaugural committee.

Though the use of private prisons has long been contentious and the Obama administration sought to phase out their use on the federal level, the Trump Administration reversed the ban to robustly support private prisons in 2017, as reported by the New York Times. With Trump’s stricter immigration policy, number of migrants in detention increased to a record-high. Such policies around detention practices have led to an increase in the demand for detention space, which has resulted in record-high profits for private detention facilities. The expansion of prisons, in return, directly contributed to the rise in the migrant detainee population.

A waste of tax dollars

Another sad truth is that when US citizen pay taxes, some of their hard-earned dollars might be bundled into a massive payout to a private prison company that cares more about profits than public safety.

Private prison companies like CCA get contracts all over US by promising it can run prisons better and more cheaply. But time and time again, they've broken that promise as those private prisons turned criminal justice into big business. In 2017, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that the government pays private companies about $3.9 billion per year to operate prisons.

Actually, those mass incarceration waste tax dollars and cannot make US any safer. As the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution and a former federal prosecutor Miriam Aroni Krinsky puts it, churning people through jail and prison often leads to more crime. Keeping someone who has not been convicted of a crime in jail solely because they are poor cannot make the US any safer. Instead, it puts people at risk of losing employment, housing and other supports that may keep them from engaging in future criminal activity.

Hope the US could keep an eye on the truth inside those private prisons, and could create a justice system that truly lives up to its name. Otherwise, it would be a big joke for a country advocating freedom and democracy.