“a conflict of interest at its core” —church group on private prisons

Another Sunday, another church group against private prisons. This time, it includes ex-prisoners, and it went to the lion’s den: a CCA shareholder meeting.

Marian Wright Edelman wrote 13 December 2010, Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry:

A few months ago a group of earnest and determined stockholders traveled together by bus from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend a shareholders’ meeting for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country. The group included ex-offenders who now each hold one share of stock in the same prison company that once held them captive, and they attended the meeting in the hopes of sharing their perspective on how the privatized prison industry can better serve society by rehabilitating inmates, rather than just serving its own profits by perpetuating the prison cycle.

The group, part of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour, is named Strength to Love, after the title of one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon collections. Members explain their mission this way:

“The privatized, for-profit prison industry is particularly plagued by a conflict of interest at its core: On the one hand, the industry is responsible to its shareholders to make money, and its income is determined by how many beds are filled. On the other hand, its civil responsibility to the inmates and to the whole of society is to help incarcerated people become their intended selves, and to prepare them to succeed upon release. It is well established that services and programs like job training and education serve to lower the occurrence of re-offense. But it is better for the company’s bottom line to minimize staff and services, let the inmates succeed or fail on their own terms, and reap the financial benefits of strict sentencing laws and high rates of recidivism. It is this experience of exploitation, frequently referred to as a modern day form of slavery, that many members of Strength to Love have personally experienced, and which we have been called to dismantle.”
They’re on the web and on facebook.

People in Lowndes County, Georgia could do this. It would be better than building a private prison here.

-jsq