PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

*Privatized Prisons Are A Booming Big Business*
by Ytzhak Friday, Sep. 08, 2006 at 7:00 PM
montfu65@hotmail.com

The United States of AmeriKKKa imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation on the planet. Currently almost two and a quarter million persons languish in local, county, state and federal prisons. Looking at the AmeriKKKan gulag we see some very disturbing trends aside from the disproportionate incarceration of people of color. Investments in the prison industrial complex, prison construction, privatization of prisons and public policies that encourage incarceration over intervention and treatment are fueling the rise of prison construction and incarceration at a time when even according to FBI statistics major crimes are decreasing! ...This, for example, is why longer mandatory sentences are worth so much to private prison stocks. A prisoner in jail for twenty years has a twenty-year cash flow associated with his incarceration, as opposed to one with a shorter sentence or one eligible for an early parole. This means that we have created a significant number of private interests — investment firms, banks, attorneys, auditors, architects, construction firms, real estate developers, bankers, academics, investors among them— who have a vested interest in increasing the prison population and keeping people behind bars as long as possible.

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*From The Ramparts*
Junious Ricardo Stanton
*Privatized Prisons Are A Booming Big Business*


/ “Prison stocks also are valued on a “per bed” basis — which is based
on the number of beds provided and the profit per bed. “Per bed” is
really a euphemism for people who are sentenced to be housed in their
prison. For example, in 1996, when Cornell went public, based on the
financial information provided in the offering document provided to
investors, its stock was valued at $24,241 per bed. This means that for
every contract Cornell got to house one prisoner, at that time, their
stock went up in value by an average of $24,261. According to prevailing
business school philosophy, this is the stock market’s current present
value of the future flow of profit flows generated through the
management of each prisoner. This, for example, is why longer mandatory
sentences are worth so much to private prison stocks. A prisoner in jail
for twenty years has a twenty-year cash flow associated with his
incarceration, as opposed to one with a shorter sentence or one eligible
for an early parole.[47] This means that we have created a significant
number of private interests — investment firms, banks, attorneys,
auditors, architects, construction firms, real estate developers,
bankers, academics, investors among them— who have a vested interest in
increasing the prison population and keeping people behind bars as long
as possible.” /Catherine Austin Fitts Dillon Read and Company And The
Aristocracy of Prison Profits http://dunwalke.com/introduction.htm

The United States of AmeriKKKa imprisons more of its citizens than any
other nation on the planet. Currently almost two and a quarter million
persons languish in local, county, state and federal prisons. Looking at
the AmeriKKKan gulag we see some very disturbing trends aside from the
disproportionate incarceration of people of color. Investments in the
prison industrial complex, prison construction, privatization of prisons
and public policies that encourage incarceration over intervention and
treatment are fueling the rise of prison construction and incarceration
at a time when even according to FBI statistics major crimes are
decreasing! Nothing occurs in a vacuum. Those of us who comprehend the
Law of Karma (cause and effect, sowing and reaping) know the large
number of prisoners especially of people of color are the direct effects
of causes put into action years ago by the ruling elites and their
flunkies. To glean a slice of how this happened and the board room and
public policy causes read Catherine Austin Fitts revealing piece
entitled *Dillon Read and Company And The Aristocracy of Prison Profits*
at http://dunwalke.com/introduction.htm. Her insightful and well
documented article reveals the causative factors in the private prison
boom as it relates to just one financial firm, Dillon Read a stodgy Wall
Street private investment banking firm.

From Catherine Austin Fitts' article we can easily extrapolate just how
the real criminals have rigged the game and structured a gulag system
that would make Stalin or Hitler blush with envy. Only in this case the
prime motive is not oppression or repression of dissidents; it’s money
with an underlying tincture of racism. This is nothing new. Collusion
between local and state governments, plantations, mining interests and
corporations has a sordid history in AmeriKKKa. Horror stories abound
about the dehumanizing conditions and suffering these business
arrangements between the government and monied interests created.
Unfortunately, these business arrangements between governments, for
profit private prisons and corporations are making a major comeback. “A
hundred years ago private prisons were a familiar feature of American
life, with disastrous consequences. Prisoners were farmed out as slave
labor. They were routinely beaten and abused, fed slop and kept in
horribly overcrowded cells. Conditions were so wretched that by the end
of the nineteenth century private prisons were outlawed in most states.
During the past decade, private prisons have made a comeback. Already 28
states have passed legislation making it legal for private contractors
to run correctional facilities and many more states are expected to
follow suit.” US: America's Private Gulag by Ken Silverstein, Prison
Legal News

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php

The article I just quoted was written in 2000. Since then there has been
a steady rise in the number of government and private prisons
constructed but the privatization of prisons is increasing at an even
more alarming rate. “At the start of Reagan's administration in 1980,
there were approximately 501,886 prisoners in the nation's prisons and
jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In June 2001,
there were 1,800,300, a nearly four-fold increase, according to the
agency's data. Of this number, 803,400 were Black males and 69,500 were
Black females. One of the effects of this boom has been the shifting of
federal funds from the minority and poor communities that export
prisoners to poor white towns, which started "hosting" prisons in the
1990s as a means of escaping from economic despair. In fact, new studies
are showing that in a society that ratcheted up its criminal penalties
to control crime and place offenders out of sight and out of mind, the
prison industry has begun to affect the political landscape.” Crime &
Punishment How the U.S prison system makes minority communities pay
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/news/crisis_july2002.shtml To the ruling
elites the clang of cell doors was also a big kaching for investors and
corporate types looking to get rich; but first they had to use their
pull with the politicians to pass laws to make more holding facilities
necessary. “The 'pop' is a word I learned on Wall Street to describe the
multiple of income at which a stock is valued by the stock market. So if
a stock like Cornell Corrections trades at 15 times it's income, that
means for every $1 million of net income it makes, it's stock goes up
$15 million. The company may make $1 million, but its 'pop' is $15
million. Folks make money in the stock market from the stock going up.
On Wall Street, it's all about 'pop.' Prison stocks also are valued on a
'per bed' basis — which is based on the number of beds provided and the
profit per bed. 'Per bed' is really a euphemism for people who are
sentenced to be housed in their prison. For example, in 1996, when
Cornell went public, based on the financial information provided in the
offering document provided to investors, its stock was valued at $24,241
per bed. This means that for every contract Cornell got to house one
prisoner, at that time, their stock went up in value by an average of
$24,261. According to prevailing business school philosophy, this is the
stock market’s current present value of the future flow of profit flows
generated through the management of each prisoner. This, for example, is
why longer mandatory sentences are worth so much to private prison
stocks. A prisoner in jail for twenty years has a twenty-year cash flow
associated with his incarceration, as opposed to one with a shorter
sentence or one eligible for an early parole. This means that we have
created a significant number of private interests — investment firms,
banks, attorneys, auditors, architects, construction firms, real estate
developers, bankers, academics, investors among them— who have a vested
interest in increasing the prison population and keeping people behind
bars as long as possible.

When you invest in stock, you make money if and when you sell the stock
at a higher price than you paid for it. This would be true for the
people who invested in Cornell stock, including Dillon Read and its
venture funds. Cornell was run by a board of directors that represented
the shareholders, particularly the controlling shareholders — in this
case Dillon Read. The board is the group of people who decides what
goes. Senior management officials, such as the founder and Chairman
David Cornell, who run the company day to day, are also on the board.
Most of the money they make comes from stock options that they get to
encourage them to get the stock to go up for the investors. That means
that what everyone who runs the company wants is for the stock to go
up”. Catherine Austin Fitts Dillon Read and Company And The Aristocracy
of Prison Profits http://dunwalke.com/introduction.htm
The dye had been cast and all that was needed was for the monied crowd
to make the connection with the politicians who would make public policy
that would make their bank accounts blossom and prisons a major cash
cow. “Much has been written about the use of the War on Drugs to
intentionally disenfranchise poor people and engineer the centralization
of political and economic power in the U.S. and globally, including an
explosive rise in the U.S. prison population. The purpose of this story
is not to repeat this fundamentally sound thesis. For those who are
interested in more on this topic, I would refer you to my article and
audio seminar “Narco Dollars for Beginners” as well as Michael
Woodiwiss’ book Organized Crime and American Power (University of
Toronto Press, 2001) and their associated bibliographies. What most
people miss is the extent to which the day-to-day implementation of this
intentional centralism is deeply pervasive and therefore deeply
bipartisan. It receives the promotion and support from all political and
social spectrums that make money by running government through the
contractors, banks, law firms, think tanks and universities that really
run the government. My intention for this story is to make clear how the
system really works. A system in which a small group of ambitious
insiders — who more often than not were educated at Harvard, Yale,
Princeton and the other Ivy League schools — enjoy centralizing power
and advantaging themselves. Paradigms of Republican vs. Democrat or
Conservative vs. Progressive have been designed for obfuscation and
entertainment. An endless number of philosophies and strains of
religious and ‘holier than thou’ moralism are really put on and taken
off like fresh make-up in the effort to hide from view a deeper, uglier
face.” ibid.

This is part of the ongoing class war in AmeriKKKa. These elites from
exclusive universities who have backgrounds in banking, law,
intelligence and politics make the rules and then initiate programs and
public policies designed primarily to fatten their portfolios and bank
accounts. As Catherine said, it is a bipartisan effort. Bill Clinton the
man our “Negro leadership” loves so much was a key figure in the prison
boom which led to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black
and brown folks across the nation. “The Clinton Administration took the
groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and Bush and embraced and blossomed the
expansion and promotion of federal support for police, enforcement and
the War on Drugs with a passion that was hard to understand unless and
until you realized that the American financial system was deeply
dependent on attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion of annual
money laundering. Globalizing corporations and deepening deficits and
housing bubbles required attracting vast amounts of capital. Attracting
capital also required making the world safe for the reinvestment of the
profits of organized crime and the war machine. Without growing
organized crime and military activities through government budgets and
contracts, the economy would stop centralizing. The Clinton
Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal prison
population. Whether through subsidy, credit and asset forfeiture
kickbacks to state and local government or increased laws, regulations
and federal sentencing and imprisonment, the supremacy of the federal
enforcement infrastructure and the industry it feeds was to be a Clinton
legacy. ” Dillon Read and Company And The Aristocracy of Prison Profits

http://dunwalke.com/introduction.htm

It was under our man Bill Clinton the one our sell out leadership likes
to call “the First Black President” that increasing numbers of Africans
in America were incarcerated compared to whites who committed far more
serious crimes, a fact which was pointed out to him by the Sentencing
Project but he elected to do nothing to rectify. “About three-quarters
of new admissions to American jails and prisons are now African-American
and Hispanic men. This trend, combined with an increasingly privatized
and profitable prison system run largely by whites, makes for what
Jerome Miller, a former youth corrections officer in Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts, calls the emerging Gulag State. Miller predicts that the
Gulag State will be in place within 15 years. He expects three to five
million people to be behind bars, including an absolute majority of
African-American men. It's comparable, he says, to the post-Civil War
period, when authorities came to view the prison system as a cheaper,
more efficient substitute for slavery. Of the state's current approach
to crime and law enforcement, Miller says, ‘The race card has changed
the whole playing field. Because the prison system doesn't affect a
significant percentage of young white men we'll increasingly see
prisoners treated as commodities. For now the situation is a bit more
benign than it was back in the nineteenth century but I'm not sure it
will stay that way for long.’” This pattern of creating policies that
criminalize and incarcerate increasing numbers of black and brown people
for longer periods will continue unless and until we do something about
it! Draconian laws, using government manufactured terrorism as a scare
tactic to usher in a burgeoning police state will swell the prison ranks
even more unless we take serious action. “Blacks have also been
disproportionately affected by the national ‘war on drugs’, carried out
primarily through the arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of street
level drug offenders from inner city communities. In 1996, for example,
blacks constituted 62.6 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state
prisons. In at least fifteen states, black men were sent to prison on
drug charges at rates ranging from twenty to fifty-seven times those of
white men. Blacks are prosecuted in federal courts more frequently than
whites for crack cocaine offenses, and thus as a group have felt the
effects of the longer sentences for crack versus powder cocaine mandated
in federal law. Racial profiling and other forms of unequal treatment of
minorities by the criminal justice system have further contributed to
the over-representation of minorities in the incarcerated population.
Minority youth are treated far more harshly compared to similarly
situated white counterparts within the juvenile criminal justice
system.”Race and Incarceration in the United States Human Rights Watch
Press Backgrounder http://hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/race/
A well informed community is the first step. Just knowing about it isn’t
enough, we have to take serious and co-ordinated action before it’s too
late! Link Catherine Austin Fitts’ article read it thoroughly and you’ll
see it not just about some super rich white boys making mad money off of
private prison construction and operation, it’s about political
corruption, money laundering, land acquisition and regentrification of
our neighborhoods on a national and international scale!! Get involved,
don’t allow the criminals to expand their gulag system here in AmeriKKKa
(Bu$h and Co. have already outsourced CIA prisons and torture chambers
overseas). Given the widespread practice and problem of racial profiling
and the need for the ruling elites to keep their private prisons filled,
none of us is safe!

-30-

www.positivelyblack.net/home.htm