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Thursday, November 17, 2011
News Occupy Private Prisons
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn on Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 10:49 AM
According to The Daily Beast, today, on the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, protesters in New York City are poised to go for broke.
Meanwhile, Occupy movements across the nation are gearing up for other occupations. One is Occupy Private Prisons, which plans to show up at Correction Corporations of America's Stewart Detention Center Lumpkin, Ga., tomorrow, Nov. 18.
That facility is where Charlotte-Mecklenburg sends undocumented immigrants to await deportation to their country of origin after a roughly 48-hour stay in the county jail, according to Grassroots Leadership.
The non-profit social justice organization explains its stance against corporate prisons on its website: "Nowhere is privatization more insidious than in the corporate takeover of our criminal justice system. For-profit corporations own and run hundreds of prisons, jails, and detention centers in this country. For these companies, every prisoner is a profit center, every crime a business opportunity, and rehabilitation is bad for business."
During a presentation at Covenant Presbyterian Church last year, the Rev. Les Schmidt and Grassroots Leadership's LaWana Mayfield (who was newly elected to the Charlotte City Council last week) explained more about the private prisons' Charlotte connections as well as the role of politics in the issue:
After a 48-hour stay in county jails, undocumented immigrants are moved to a for-profit prison in Georgia. There is one for-profit prison in North Carolina, Rivers Correction Institution in Winton. It is unclear why the county chooses to transport detainees to a Georgia prison instead of keeping them in state. But it is known that moving prisoners from county jails to prisons frees up space in local jails, however it also means taxpayers end up paying nearly three times more — $109 per day — to house inmates awaiting deportation.When an audience member asked why the federal government would pay more to house an inmate in a for-profit prison, the Rev. Schmidt said, "It beats us as well."
This method of dealing with undocumented immigrants is also under fire nationally and is being called unethical and inhumane. Mayfield believes there could be a direct connection between political campaign funding and the success of for-profit prisons, run by companies that sign 30- to 50-year contracts with the government. She encouraged the audience to investigate their representatives' campaign donations and their stance on immigration issues.
Read the rest of this post at Crossroads Charlotte.org.
Here's more on the Stewart Detention Center from Brave New Foundation:
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