Prison for Profit Loses its Appeal
Students force divestment from a for-profit prison corporation.
By Sarah Haley, Yale University, and Bob Libal
Thursday May 25, 2006
On March 27 th approximately 200 graduate teachers, undergraduates, and community members rallied in protest of Yale University ’s investment, through holdings in the hedge fund Farallon, in Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
CCA has been criticized for prisoner abuse and has been suspected of helping to draft model mandatory minimum sentencing legislation through its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Private prisons make profit by taking a per diem rate for prisoners and cutting staffing costs and programs. Because of lower pay, staff turnover rates tend to be markedly higher in private prisons as well, creating a more volatile situation inside the prisons.
According to a study by criminologist James Austin, private prisons have 49% to 65% higher rates of violence than comparable public facilities.
Now Yale students and those at eight other schools where “Dump Farallon” activities took place can claim victory. Public filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission, released last week, reveal that Farallon has met student demands by fully divested from Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE:CXW).
At the March 27 th rally, protesters marched to the Yale School of Management to attend an open meeting of Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR). The ACIR advises Yale’s policy of ethical investment. Members of the ACIR had agreed to let organizers from the Graduate Employees and Students Organization present their case for divestment from CCA.
When the protesters arrived they found police at the door of the classroom where the meeting was to be held. The police were there to guard against the presence of “outsiders,” New Haven community members and experts such as Alex Freidman, co-editor of the leading prison legal journal, Prison Legal News, who hoped to attend the meeting to testify about CCA’s horrendous human rights record and other dubious practices, were barred from entry, despite protest by the graduate teachers and undergraduates who attended the meeting.
This decision to police the gates of an academic classroom was in line with the overall stance of the Yale administration up to that point, which was to dismiss the private prison industry’s destructive impact on poor communities and communities of color by increasing the political and financial incentive for mass punishment.
Yale’s president Richard Levin had even made public statements defending the investment. In February, Levin remarked to the New Haven Register about CCA: “This company is not causing grave social injury… while there might be some people in our society who are either ideologically or instinctively opposed to the idea of private prisons, outsourcing of government functions to private industries is happening all over.”
The rally at Yale kicked off the March 28 th National Day of Action to Stop Prison Profiteering. Started at Yale University by the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, the “Dump Farallon” campaign was replicated at eight other campuses around the country on March 28th, the National Day to Stop Prison Profiteering. Since October, students, graduate teachers, faculty, and community members led a campaign to divest their universities from the for-profit prison company Corrections Corporation of America.
Planning for the National Day of Action to Stop Prison Profiteering was launched when Not With Our Money a network of students, community activists, and faculty working to end the use of prisons for profit, joined GESO as partners in the fight against university investment in CCA. Over 25 universities that invest with Farallon Capital Management, the world’s fourth largest hedge fund, were potentially invested in Corrections Corporation of America.
A year ago, Farallon held almost $90 million in CCA stock, making it one of CCA’s largest investors. For the first time, higher education was investing in prisons on a mass scale. The symbolic and material significance of this predicament prompted outrage from graduate teachers, undergraduates, and activists across the country.
Students and faculty around the country have sent a message that investments in for-profit prisons are not in line with the values of higher education. Now they must use the precedent set here to keep their universities from investing in other immoral enterprises.
Sarah Haley is a graduate teacher in African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University and a coordinator for the Graduate Employees and Students Organization.
Bob Libal is co-coordinator of Grassroots Leadership’sNot With Our Money! campaign – a national network for students and faculty challenging for-profit prisons. He can be reached at (512) 971-0847 or bob@notwithourmoney.org.
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Comments
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Liberty requires constant vigilance. Police on campus sounds very familiar to us who were there in the sixties.
— Terry Robinson - May 25, 07:01 PM - #And let’s not forget. The “Land of the Free” has the highest prison population ON THE PLANET
Hmmm…connection to $$$$?
Naah
— marblex - May 26, 01:30 PM - #Everybody do the research on millions of dollars that being made from bond money that prisons get from foreign investors when especially high profile cases. Also, most colleges and universities are money machines for some private corporation. Check out who owns the federal reserve. I say repeal the federal reserve act of 1913 and abolish the irs. Go to NRST do away with all permits, licences, all form taxes except when you purchase a new product. They say go to a NRST and the price product will down 20 to 30 percent. We could afford 15 percent NRST then, right? If really want to help change the world to a world free people, contact me asap.
— Gary Brownfield - May 29, 06:06 AM - #