If you can’t financially support your municipality without harvesting profits from BIPOC folks’ bodies — whether through private prison payoffs or through medical monetization of vulnerable populations — perhaps you should raise taxes on ppl w vacation homes and side hustles.
Telling people you’ve refused to help support, educate, and empower that their best shot at economic opportunity is to be private prison guards (w none of the public pension benefits or rights) is an admission of failure.
Caging people for profit is not in line w Christianity.
If you’re at 100% free and reduced lunch and you’re twice the state unemployment rate, a private prison isn’t going to solve your revenue problem.
Many of your residents can’t even apply for the jobs because your cops have spent years criminalizing and fining them for $$.
You seem to think there’s some magic federal wand that insulates you from the risk inherent in operating a for-profit prison:
“The company will indemnify us, it says so right here in the contract.”
Ask Eloy, AZ and Davidson County, TN and Adelanto, CA how that worked out.
Worse: Your fancy prison is spreading a deadly pandemic through your tiny community that’s already under-resourced medically.
You traded short-term budget balancing for long-term public health.
It cost the guards you profess to care about their lives. What abt their families?
Don’t think for a fucking minute we don’t understand what you’re doing to juke the population & bring more federal funds.
Some of you have more people in cages than people who voted for you in your damn local elections.
Grant $$ on the back of captive population w/ no votes.
It’s a pernicious form of voter suppression akin to the at-large systems that ruled the Jim Crow South:
Dilute the votes of the majority so a rich and privilege few can call the shots.
The thing you can’t massage your way around with oblique, anodyne-sounding PR comments is the death:
You’re killing human beings with these prisons.
You’re extrajudicially killing people locked inside using #COVID19.
You’re killing guards you won’t let wear masks.
You.
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