Strength to Love: A Challenge to the Private Prison Industry

A few months ago a group of earnest and determined stockholders traveled together by bus from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend a shareholders’ meeting for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country. The group included ex-offenders who now each hold one share of stock in the same prison company that once held them captive, and they attended the meeting in the hopes of sharing their perspective on how the privatized prison industry can better serve society by rehabilitating inmates, rather than just serving its own profits by perpetuating the prison cycle.

The group, part of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour, is named Strength to Love, after the title of one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon collections. Members explain their mission this way:

“The privatized, for-profit prison industry is particularly plagued by a conflict of interest at its core: On the one hand, the industry is responsible to its shareholders to make money, and its income is determined by how many beds are filled. On the other hand, its civil responsibility to the inmates and to the whole of society is to help incarcerated people become their intended selves, and to prepare them to succeed upon release. It is well established that services and programs like job training and education serve to lower the occurrence of re-offense. But it is better for the company’s bottom line to minimize staff and services, let the inmates succeed or fail on their own terms, and reap the financial benefits of strict sentencing laws and high rates of recidivism. It is this experience of exploitation, frequently referred to as a modern day form of slavery, that many members of Strength to Love have personally experienced, and which we have been called to dismantle.”

The trip -- or as they called it, mission -- to the CCA shareholders’ meeting was a creative approach aimed at dismantling an industry that is the endpoint of America’s so-called rail to jail, threatening the social and racial progress of the past 50 years.

Reliance on punishment and incarceration too often as a first rather than last resort has given the U.S. the largest prison population in the world, with more than 2.3 million Americans behind bars. John Jay College of Criminal Justice President Jeremy Travis, one of the nation’s leading scholars on prisoner reentry, documented in his book, But They All Come Back: Facing the Challenges of Prisoner Reentry, that preparing ex-offenders for a successful transition benefits not just ex-offenders but society as a whole. But most often ex-offenders who have served their sentences get little help as they return to their communities. For the estimated 650,000 federal and state ex-offenders who have gone to prison and are released each year, he says, “the odds against successful reentry are daunting. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, two-thirds of released [state] prisoners will be rearrested for one or more crimes, including felonies and serious misdemeanors, within three years after they get out of prison. Nearly half will be convicted of a new crime.”

Ineffective prisoner rehabilitation and unsuccessful reentry have dire consequences for children. A recent report by the Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that 2.7 million minor children have a mother or father behind bars. That is approximately 1.8 percent of White, 3.5 percent of Latino, and 11 percent of Black children. Pew reports that on average, incarceration is associated with a 40 percent decline in family earnings. Before finding themselves behind bars, two-thirds of male inmates were employed and more than half were the primary source of income for their children.

As Travis and others have noted, there are public policies that can improve the chances of successful reentry. Most start by preparing people for a positive, productive life after prison while they are still incarcerated. Producing fewer ex-offenders who become “churners” by returning to prison for committing new crimes benefits all of us -- except, perhaps, those who profit from the prison industry. And the private prison industry is a powerful, fast-growing threat. NPR and other news organizations recently documented how prison lobbyists quietly helped write and pass Arizona’s strict immigration law, SB 1070, and are now trying to pass copycat bills across the country. A billion-dollar corporation like CCA has its own priorities—but we must stand for ours.

We must reverse the trend that has created an America with less than five percent of the world’s population but over a quarter of the world’s prisoners. And we must dismantle the pipeline to prison that places one in three Black and one in six Hispanic boys born in 2001 at risk of incarceration in their lifetime. It is completely unacceptable that in our rich nation the only thing we will guarantee every child is a jail or detention cell after s/he gets into trouble. It’s time to guarantee all of them health care, a fair chance to get ready for and achieve in school, and safe and stimulating summer and after school programs with quality caring teacher-mentors. We need to end the galloping poverty that leaves them hungry and homeless and hopeless. We need jobs in their future so they can see that school leads somewhere. It’s time for a critical mass of Americans to demand and work for a fundamental paradigm shift which prevents and breaks up the Cradle to Prison Pipeline and makes successful prisoner reentry a more likely by-product.

Photo Credit: Chris Devers