Hosted by Abolish Private Prisons executive director John Dacey, associate director Robert Craig, and Tank Johnson, former NFL player and…
IN PRIVATE PRISONS, humans
BECOME CORPORATE HOLDINGS.
IN FACT, STOCKING UP ON human beings improves THE STOCK PRICE OF A PRIVATE PRISON.
Giant private prison corporations rely on full beds and cheap labor, and they can spend enormous amounts of money lobbying for the status quo, or worse.
These corporations have every incentive to keep people in prison for longer, under worse conditions, and to make sure they return by offering fewer rehabilitative programs.
Need a reason to eliminate private prisons?
How about the 14th Amendment?
Private prisons are paid like hotels. Each person’s body in a private prison cell represents a unit of profit on prison corporation balance sheets. Stock values of publicly-traded prison corporations go up as forecasts of the number of people in private prison cells go up. People in private prisons are treated as commodities and often are transferred hundreds if not thousands of miles from their home communities to far-away private prisons so that prison corporations can make big profits (e.g., Hawaii sending prisoners to Arizona — and not surprisingly, a disproportionate percentage of those prisoners are Indigenous Hawaiians, an already disadvantaged community).
Learn MoreTogether we can end it.
Abolish Private Prisons is a non-profit organization founded for one purpose: using the United States court system to end the horrific practice of locking people up for profit.
Inspired by cases like Brown v. Board of Education, we will file multiple cases in federal courts across the country. We will bring the issue to the Supreme Court for a ruling that profiting off the backs of prisoners violates the United States Constitution.
Your tax-deductible contribution will provide vital funding for building the infrastructure necessary to win a fight of this scale. Every single dollar will bring us one step closer to our goal of Abolishing Private Prisons.
Donate NowTO PRIVATE PRISONS, EVERY inmate RELEASED IS profit LOST.
STATISTICS AND QUICK FACTS
Taxpayers spend as much to incarcerate one person for a year in prison as they would to pay a resident’s in-state tuition, room, and board at a state university, yet elected officials continue to use taxpayer funds to sustain the politically powerful private prison industry and its powerful opposition to reform.
Government spends billions of tax dollars each year on private for-profit prisons. These prison corporations have spent tens of millions of dollars on political campaigns and lobbying for laws that sustain mass incarceration. Such efforts help private prison corporations garner 20-year contracts with government guarantees of high occupancy rates. Private prisons seek not only more of the “prisoner inventory,” but also to increase the size of the “pie” — i.e., having more people in prisons and for longer periods.
WE ARE not ALONE
Large and diverse, the private prison abolition movement is without a single political ideology, faith, or system of beliefs. Within the criminal justice reform movement, we work with individuals and organizations that share our vision. Many groups, including churches, legal organizations, labor groups, and universities have passed resolutions calling for the abolition of private prisons.
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