I’ve read a few diaries on private prisons and think there is something missing in the stories. Of course it’s all about the money, but it is soooo much money! I compiled this little bit of info quite a few years ago. The articles are dated, and the data must have changed considerably, and I imagine information must be much harder to find…most of the links I’m sure are dead. Re-reading this after so many years, is surreal. The difference between my perspective then and now is weird. It’s depressing no matter when I read it, but I had much more positive energy then.
Captive Labor
America's Prisoner's As Corporate Workforce
By Gordon Lafer The American Prospect, 1 September 1999
http://www.postcarbon.org/node/2244
When most of us think of convicts at work, we picture them banging out license plates or digging ditches. Those images, however, are now far too limited to encompass the great range of jobs that America's prison workforce is performing. If you book a flight on TWA, you'll likely be talking to a prisoner at a California correctional facility that the airline uses for its reservations service. Microsoft has used Washington State prisoners to pack and ship Windows software. AT&T has used prisoners for telemarketing; Honda, for manufacturing parts; and even Toys "R" Us, for cleaning and stocking shelves for the next day's customers.
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But the attractions of prison labor extend well beyond low wages. The prison labor system does away with statutory protections that progressives and unions have fought so hard to achieve over the last 100 years. Companies that use prison labor create islands of time in which, in terms of labor relations at least, it's still the late nineteenth century.Prison employers pay no health insurance, no unemployment insurance, no payroll or Social Security taxes, no workers' compensation, no vacation time, sick leave, or overtime. In fact, to the extent that prisoners have "benefits" like health insurance, the state picks up the tab. Prison workers can be hired, fired, or reassigned at will. Not only do they have no right to organize or strike; they also have no means of filing a grievance or voicing any kind of complaint whatsoever. They have no right to circulate an employee petition or newsletter, no right to call a meeting, and no access to the press. Prison labor is the ultimate flexible and disciplined workforce.
All of these conditions apply when the state administers the prison. But the prospect of such windfall profits from prison labor has also fueled a boom in the private prison industry. Such respected money managers as Allstate, Merrill Lynch, and Shearson Lehman have all invested in private prisons. As with other privatized public services, companies that operate private prisons aim to make money by operating corrections facilities for less than what the state pays them. If they can also contract prisoners out to private enterprises—forcing inmates to work either for nothing or for a very small fraction of their "wages" and pocketing the remainder of those "wages" as corporate profit—they can open up a second revenue stream.That would make private prisons into both public service contractors and the highest-margin temp agencies in the nation.
http://www.postcarbon.org/node/2244
The Prison Industrial Complex in America: Investment in Slavery
by Venerable Kobutsu Malone, Osho
The United States Constitution Permits Prison Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
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The secure housing, minimal support, minimal medical care and feeding of 2.2 million people is a costly endeavor consuming billions and billions of dollars of taxpayer's money every year in America. Corporations are lined up to receive a portion of the public funds used to support the self-perpetuating incarceration industry. States such as California spend more public funds, tax dollars, your money, my money, on prisons than for education and schools
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The largest network of prison labor is run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons' manufacturing consortium, UNICOR. While paying inmate laborers entry-level wages of 23 cents an hour, UNICOR boasts of gross annual sales (primarily to the Department of Defense) of $250 million.
The correctional-industrial complex therefore relies on a sobering "joint venture" directly relating profits to increased incarceration rates for four kinds of "partners," only the first of whom are those seeking opportunities in prison construction. A second kind of partner stocks these prisons with stun guns, pepper spray, surveillance equipment, and other "disciplinary technology," corporations such as Adtech, American Detention Services, the Correctional Corporation of America and Space Master Enterprises. A third partner finds a state-guaranteed mass of consumers for food and other services in the prisoners themselves, such as Campbell's Soup and Szabo Correctional Services. The fourth partner can be any private industry or state-sponsored program that stands to gain from paying wages that only nominally distinguish captive forced labor from slavery. In this last category, an example of the former is Prison Blues and of the latter is UNICOR which uses prisoners to produce advanced military weaponary
http://www.engaged-zen.org/articles/Kobutsu-Investing_i…
FEDERAL BUREAU OF PRISONS
Pursuant to Federal statute, FPI's Board of Directors is composed of six members representing industry, labor, agriculture, retailers and consumers, the Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General. The board consists of a wide variety of accomplished individuals each of whom have been appointed by this President and serve without compensation.
the US has imprisoned a half million more people than in China which has 5 times the population.
California alone has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world. It has more prisoners than France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and Holland combined while these countries have 11 times the population of California .According to official figures, Iran
incarcerates 220 citizens per 100,000, compared to US figures of 727. Overall, the total "criminal justice" system in the US, including those in prison, on parole and on probation, is approaching 6,000,000. In the last 20 years, 1000 new prisons have been built; yet they hold double their capacity.
Prisoners, 75% of who are either Black or Hispanic, are forced to work for 20 cents an hour, some even as low as 75 cents a day. They produce everything from eyewear and furniture to vehicle parts and computer software. This has lead to thousands of layoffs and the lowering of the overall wage scale of the entire working class. At Soledad Prison in California, prisoners produce work-shirts exported to Asia as well as El Salvadoran license plates more cheaply than in El Salvador, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. A May/99 report in the Wall Street Journal summarized that while “more expensive private-sector workers may lose their jobs to prison labour, assigning work to the most cost-efficient producer is good for the economy.” The February/00 Wall Street Journal reported “Prisoners are excluded from employment calculation. And since most inmates are economically disadvantaged and unskilled, jailing so many people has effectively taken a big block of the nation's least-employable citizens out of the equation.”
-Some of Wall Street's largest investment houses, including Goldman Sachs & Co. and Smith Barney Inc., are competing to underwrite the bonds for the prisons. (See "Jail house stock," by Ken Silverstein, page 18.) Other huge companies also have a stake. American Express, for example, invested approximately $31 million in the $38 million Great Plains Correctional Facility in Hinton, Okla., according to the prison's warden, Tom Martin. Great Plains is a private prison that houses inmates from North Carolina.
-Private prison companies have some powerful allies in the fight for stiffer sentences and more prison spending. For example, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which has grown from 4,000 to 23,000 in the last decade, gave more than $1 million to various California state politicians in 1996. The prison lobby is also supported by the National Rifle Association. Armed with an agenda of deflecting public fear away from guns and toward people, the NRA successfully lobbies for prison construction and three-strikes-and-you're-out laws. (See "The NRA strikes Back." (By Chris Bryson)http://www.prop1.org/legal/prisons/970317itt.htm
Wackenhut
Historically, this bottom tier has been the locus of most of the publicized problems and abuses. But although these bottom feeders attract "60 Minutes"-style scandal of banal corruption, it is in the top tiers that the most serious potential for abuse exists. Wackenhut, founded by former FBI of ficial George Wackenhut in 1954, is the largest and best known, as well as the oldest and most diversified. From its beginnings as a small, well-connected private security firm, Wackenhut has grown to a global security conglomerate with earnings of $630.3 million in 1992. Prison management is only the latest addition to its panoply of security and related services. When the Coral Gables, Florida-based firm first entered the prison business in 1987, it had one 250-bed INS detention center. It now operates 11 facilities in five states housing nearly 5,500 prisoners. Wackenhut maintains two medium security prisons in Australia and boasts of "prospects for additional facilities in the U.S., South America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.'' While some of its competitors in the private repression industry have specialized-Pinkerton and Burns, for example, lead the "rent-a-cop" field-Wackenhut tries to cover all the bases. Its 1991 revenues reflect its corporate diversity: The private security division contributed 43 per cent; the international division, 22 percent; airport security services, 15 percent; contracts to guard nuclear installations and Department of Energy facilities, 10 percent; and, last but not least, private corrections contributed 10 percent. Given the high rate of return in its corrections division-10 percent compared to 1.8 percent overall-Wackenhut has indicated that it wants to see that area grow.
Wackenhut, repackaged and "innocently disguised"
Wednesday, 17 March 2004, 10:52 am
Press Release: Australia Human Rights News
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0403/S00233.htm
Wackenhut, repackaged and "innocently disguised" attempts comeback
Wackenhut, the parent company of Australasian Correctional Management or ACM, the detention company who lost last year its second bid to run Australian detention centres, has recently re-launched itself under another name on the New York Stock Exchange as a new company, with a new CEO and a new Executive team - and it now attempts a buy-out.
Global Expertise in Outsourcing, or GEO Group Inc. is the new name for Wackenhut Corporation, and its Australian company, formerly calling itself ACM, is now called GEO Australia Pty Ltd...this is one of my very favorite finds. I love spy stories
One of my favorite finds ...I love spy stuff...and the link works.
www.prop1.org/…
SPY MAGAZINE
SEPTEMBER 1992
By 1966, Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans…………………………
* Wackenhut's right-wing politics have not been confined to supporting U.S. administrations. In 1977, Wackenhut obtained special permission to operate in Belgium; according to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan's The Terrorism Industry, Wackenhut 'quickly got involved with right-wing terrorists who were themselves linked to state security agents." Wackenhut's local director in Brussels, Jean-Francis Calmette, was a rightist who had hired and given combat instruction to members of Westland New Post, a Belgian fascist group. Wackenhut left Belgium in the early 1980s, following accusations that its guards were luring immigrant children into basements and beating them.
* Tom Carpenter of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization thee protects whistle-blowers, considers Wackenhut a major oppressor. At many of the nuclear installations guarded by Wackenhut, the company works to identify and discourage whistle-blowers. Earlier this year, an investigation by the Energy Department's Inspector General's Office into the illegal use of electronic eavesdropping equipment at plants run by Westinghouse and other private companies in the nuclear-energy business found 147 different pieces of surveillance equipment; one could listen in on 200 phones at once. Many of the bugs had been planted by Wackenhut. The private companies agreed to dismantle the equipment, and sent the bugs off to a Department of Energy training center in Albuquerque. As it happens, the training center is operated by Wackenhut These are not the only complaints against the company. Robert Jacques of the Energy Department's Inspector General's Office told SPY "We have had hundreds of complaints about Wackenhut."
* This August a House committee was due to release a report on its investigation into the way Wackenhut's Special Investigations Division handled a job for one of its clients, the oil consortium Alyeska. The committee has been looking into allegations, reported on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, that Wackenhut had conducted illegal surveillance of an outspoken Alyeska critic, Chuck Harnel, who has funneled information about the oil consortium's safety and environmental abuses to Congress and the media for more than a decade. Wackenhut is accused of setting up a phony environmental-law firm and offering money to Hamel to discover his Alyeska sources. Wackenhut says it operated legally.
* While Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA in clandestine adventures, sometimes it just goes off on its own. That's what happened last year, when Wackenhut's dirty work on behalf of a client helped bring down a presidential aide and fueled unrest that led to an attempted coup against the democratically elected, pro-American government of Venezuela.
