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I've had enough of reading basically the same story year after year exposing the 'truth' about private prisons in the US. That the stories are sooo repetitive is annoying. That they repeat misleading or unfounded claims deceives & weakens the movement against prisons. 1/9
What are those deceptive tales? A) That donations from private prison corporations drive penal policy. Do they donate? Yes. Do they donate as much as unions of public sector prison workers or police? NO. Or have as much power to shape legislation as sheriffs or DAs? NO. 2/9
B) That because they are private, they are not transparent or lack oversight/accountability. I know people who've brought stories out of public prisons for decades. The violence routinely inflicted on incarcerated people is massively well documented. 3/9
There is rarely any meaningful response. How many head of state prison depts have been forced out because of scandals about violence against those incarcerated? How many county sheriffs? Prisons are not transparent or accountable, private or public. 4/9
C) Private prisons, they claim, "warp justice, because the company's responsibility is to its shareholders, not the public." What "justice" is being upheld in public prisons & jails and how is it being "warped" in private prisons? What "public" is served by public prisons? 5/9
That privatization 'warps' an otherwise (mostly) just system is the greatest lie of these exposés. Unfortunately the idea that if we removed profit from the criminal justice system, we'd have a more just system is central to most of the anti-private prison activism in the US. 6/9
The idea that profit explains the growth of US incarceration (false) or its brutality (false) or its racism (false) not only pushes activism into useless deadends. It implicitly legitimates publicly operated cages which hold 92% of those in prison and 99% of those in jail. 7/9
Most of these now clichéd claims were developed in the 1990s by an anti-private prison advocacy group that came out of Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), the collective bargaining agent for law enforcement, correctional & correctional probation officers. 8/9
The anti-private prison movement in the US, whatever its advocates say they're doing, is ultimately protecting public sector prison jobs, and therefore working to maintain mass incarceration. The problem with prisons isn't privatization or profits. The problem is prisons. 9/9
