You Should Be Outraged: For Profit Prisons Making Money By Creating Monsters [Picture]

 

For-profit prisons are making money by turning prisoners into cash machines.   They make no pretense of rehabiitating or educating  prisoners, or even adhering to basic human rights.  Their only reason for existence is to turn prisoners in to cash.  They don’t care about rehabilitating prisoners. They’d rather keep the prisoners coming back and generating more profit for them and their stockholders.

States are manufacturing monsters.  They look at the short term per day savings that for profit prisons generate, but not at the long-term cost to society in creating vicious human animals who prey on each other in prison.  And on other folk if they ever get released. muckracker

But remember, the goals of GEO and CCA are not to rehabilitate anyone. Those companies only make money if there are more prisoners, if they serve longer sentences, if they reoffend after release, or if the companies can keep costs so low by reducing money spent on food or medical care that they can then pass the savings and profits on to the stockholders.

With that in mind, what are conditions like inside America’s private prisons? I served 23 months in federal prison. Conditions were poor, with food and medical care at the bottom of the barrel. I saw three inmates die because they did not receive adequate medical care. But the federal system is supposed to be the best prison system in the country. I heard fellow prisoners talk about having been in private prisons during the transportation process to federal prison. They told stories about 200 prisoners with access only to one toilet, with a broken seat, no less. They talked about 150 prisoners with access to one television, with fistfights breaking out every hour on the hour over what show to watch.

There’s so much profit in the for-profit industry, that companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying off governors:

 Michigan Governor Snyder continues to stand behind failed food contractor Aramark, who spent $570,000 lobbying in recent years.

The fiasco in Michigan is only one example of a national trend of outsourcing failures documented in new report by the Center for Media and Democracy.Pay to Prey: Governors Facilitate the Predatory Outsourcing of America’s Public Services, contains many other cases of outsourcing run amok generating worse outcomes for the public, often higher costs, lawsuits and scorching headlines.  source

A former prisoner at a for-profit prison wrote:

everything posted about Geo Group is true

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