New ACLU Report Documents Destructive Impact of Prison Privatization 
The report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past three decades and shows how private prison companies have capitalized on the nation’s addiction to incarceration to achieve gigantic profits. All the while, the report shows, mass incarceration wreaks havoc on communities by unnecessarily depriving individuals of their liberty, draining government resources and bringing little or no benefit to public safety.
“Our nation’s reliance on mass incarceration has bankrupted government budgets, torn families and communities apart, disproportionately impacted people of color, and provided no benefit to public safety,” said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project and the author of the report. “But it has been a bonanza for the private prison industry, which rakes in billions of dollars a year and dishes out multi-million dollar compensation packages to its top executives. For-profit prison companies are a barrier to the kind of criminal justice reform that is desperately needed in America.”
Spurred by criminal laws that impose needlessly steep sentences – especially for low-level, non-violent offenders – and curtail rehabilitation opportunities, the United States today imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The crippling cost of incarcerating increasing numbers of Americans has saddled government budgets with rising debt and exacerbated the current fiscal crisis confronting states across the nation. Yet the two largest private prison companies alone obtained nearly $3 billion in revenue in 2010.
While evidence that privatization saves taxpayers money is mixed at best, for-profit prison advocates continue to trot out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes confronting state governments.
“It is imperative that we halt the expansion of for-profit incarceration,” said Shapiro. “The private prison industry helped create, and continues to feed off, the social ill of mass incarceration. Private prisons cannot be part of the solution – economic or ethical – to our nation’s addiction to incarceration.”
(Source: azspot)
