Resistance to Private Prison Industry Mounts Amid Debate Over Trump’s Immigration Detention Policies

By Lauren-Brooke Eisen, Counsel for the Justice Program at The Brennan Center for Justice.First published on Common Dreams

The private prison industry is under renewed scrutiny, and things are not going well for it. Prison companies were already under fire, accused of putting profits above the well-being of incarcerated individuals and staff at the dozens of federal and state prisons and local jails they run around the country. Currently, about 8 percent of state and federal prisoners are held in privately operated facilities across 27 states and the federal system.

But these companies aren’t only in the business of housing people convicted of crimes. As of July, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had almost 53,000 people in its custody, and private prison firms are responsible for detaining more than 70 percent of them. Now the industry is getting more attention because of President Trump’s immigration detention policies, such as separating children from their parents, and because of the terrible conditions in many detention facilities, many of which are run by the government and not private firms.

Ironically, because of the Trump administration’s focus on building a border wall and keeping immigrants out, a Republican administration thought to be a boon to the private prison sector has proved one of its biggest problems. As resistance to current immigration policies mount, here is a roundup of some of the high-profile actors targeting the industry.

Presidential election politics

At least 11 Democrats running for president want to eliminate private prisons. Sen. Kamala Harris of California recently tweeted, “One of my first acts of business as president will be to begin phasing out detention centers and private prisons.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts issued a sweeping plan to eviscerate the industry by attempting to phase out federal contracts for private prisons and by reducing states’ reliance on the industry through cutting federal funding to states that contract with these companies. Other candidates have expressed support for immediately canceling all federal contracts with the industry and phasing out the government’s reliance on private prisons.

Banks

Can Money Help Shrink Jail Populations? The MacArthur Foundation Is Betting $75M on It. via Yes Magazine

One surprising development in 2019 has been the banking industry’s withdrawal of financial support for two of the largest private prison firms, Geo Group and CoreCivic. These two firms restructured in 2013 to become Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), allowing them to benefit from a lower tax rate. But as I’ve written about in Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration, REIT status requires the companies to distribute a minimum of 90 percent of their profits to shareholders. This leaves them with little cash on hand to cover costs, which is why they rely on financial lenders to raise cash to operate.

So what happened?

The big banks started to distance themselves from a sector that received a lot of negative attention amidst an outcry over the Trump administration’s detention policies. It’s the latest example of big banks cutting ties with companies in response to activism, which we also saw when Bank of America and Citigroup announced they would limit business with gunmakers.

In January, Wells Fargo announced that it would roll back its relationship with the private prison industry. Two months later, JPMorgan Chase made headlines with its announcement that it would move away from financing private prison firms. The news came days after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, said that she wanted to hold banks “accountable” for their connections to companies that operate immigrant detention facilities.

JPMorgan Chase’s announcement was consequential because it was one of the first Wall Street banks to take a public stance on private prisons. As of March, the move was considered mostly symbolic, or at least until other lenders or investors in prison companies followed suit.

But that’s exactly what happened, and a domino effect ensued. In June, Bank of America announced that it would stop lending to the industry. A few weeks later, SunTrust became the fourth major bank to stop financing private prison firms. And on July 12, France's BNP Paribas became the first foreign bank to announce that it would no longer finance U.S. private prison firms.

Nevertheless, ties between banks and the private prison industry are not completely severed, as there are still outstanding loans to the companies (in the form of revolving credit that provides them with cashflow) that won’t be paid off for years.

State and federal legislation

Both federal and state policymakers have tried to rein in private prison industry this past year. In Congress, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) re-introduced a bill in June that would stop private prisons from qualifying as REITs and receiving tax subsidies unavailable to other corporations. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, recently opened an investigation into the accreditation process for private detention facility operators.

Currently, only three states legislatively ban private firms from operating state prisons: Illinois, New York, and Iowa. Illinois passed its ban in 1990. This year, the state went one step further by enacting a law that prohibits state and local agencies from entering into an agreement for the detention of individuals in a facility owned, managed, or operated by a private firm. The new law makes it difficult for private firms to build an immigrant detention facility in the state. The reason is that while ICE can still contract with private firms to manage facilities, these contracts tend to rely on local governments to serve as an intermediary between ICE and the corporations, especially if firms want to build a new facility.

New York state law prohibits private prison firms from operating state correctional institutions. The state legislature passed the law in 2007, partly out of concern about training and wages offered to private guards, and about how privatization would function at times of “crisis.” This year, state legislators focused their attention on banks funding the industry by attempting to prohibit New York-chartered banks from investing in or providing financing to private prisons. The state Senate passed legislation, but it failed in the Assembly.

Looking ahead

Despite the proposals to curb our government’s reliance on private prisons, the banks running for the hills, and legislators passing laws to make it challenging for the industry to operate, its future appears to be a mixed bag.

Geo Group and CoreCivic can still use their revolving credit for the next four or five years to build more facilities. And if a Democrat takes the White House, it’s even possible that banks reverse their position once the furor over Trump’s immigration policies die down.

Either way, shrinking the size of both our prison and immigration detention populations is the most effective and humane way to ensure that fewer people remain behind bars in America. That can only be done by changing state and federal policy.

Stars Align In Alabama: Emmett Till; Four Birmingham, Alabama Church-Going Girls; Doug Jones; Dana Schutz & Racial Reconciliation

Toyin Ojih Odutola, Representatives of State (2016/2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Nigerian-born, Huntsville-raised, U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola first got the attention of Vogue magazine when the poet Claudia Rankine published as essay in Aperture magazine, "A New Grammar for Blackness'. 

A year later, Toyin Ojih Odutola has mounted a solo show 'To Wander Determined' at the Whitney Museum in New York. Upon entering the show, visitors see a letter written by Odutola in the persona of the 'Deputy Private Secretary' for two aristocratic families in Lagos. 

artNet writes: "For Ojih Odutola, their images form a corrective to a Eurocentric art history that thinks of both court portraiture and genre paintings as belonging to a primarily white world, with black characters as footnotes—cast as servants, slaves, or left out completely.."

The topic of black identity, colonialism, and cultural appropriation have lived front and center in our national -- and international -- dialogue in 2017. 

Zanzibar-born, 2017 Turner Prize Winner, British artist Lubaina Himid also explores black identities in a historical and contemporary web of global prejudice.

On Wednesday Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta were named curators of the 2019 Whitney Bienniale. 

Panetta joined the Whitney in 2010 and has curated solo presentations by Willa Nasatir and MacArthur “Genius” Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Hockley, who was came to the museum in March 2017, co-curated the highly acclaimed Brooklyn Museum show “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85.” At the Whitney, she has so far co-curated “Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined,” , on view at the Whitney until February 25, 2018, as well as the ongoing group show “An Incomplete History of Protest.”

Linking the dots here, we have the backdrop of a year that comes at the end of a year marked by intense controversies around cultural appropriation in the art world. Among the most divisive arguments was the public maelstrom around Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till, Open Casket. The painting prompted open letters calling for the removal and even destruction of the painting, silent protests in front of the work, and demands that other works ALL of Dana Shutz's paintings be banned from a show in Boston as punishment for her offense of the Emmett Till painting. 

AOC has written extensively on this controversy, standing on the history of my own long-held commitment to civil rights. Note that I do believe the demands that Dana Schutz, white woman artist, not be allowed to show her artwork and be banished from painting are both chilling and absurd. That pov is expressed in my writing. (See Shutz controversy articles at end of this article.) 

The Whitney's appointment of Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta to curate the 2019 biennial seem to be a direct response to the controversy and a willingness to address the critical topic of activism in the age of Trump's America -- the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the art world, the questions of black identity, white power, cultural appropriation, racism and politics are grounded in the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi.  In 2017 Toyin Ojih Odutola's Whitney show 'To Wander Determined' opened against the political backdrop of Charlottesville and the Roy Moore/Doug Jones race for a US Senate seat in Alabama. 

I became deeply involved in this Senate race, both as a symbol of hope if we could beat back Republican theocrat Roy Moore, who believes that God triumphs the US Constitution and that America was happiest when America's families were rock-solid in a Confederacy built on the backs of slaves and women didn't have the right to vote. This is Trump's own idyllic vision for America, based on his embrace of white nationalism.

Tuesday night's Doug Jones upset victory in Alabama astonished all of America, and that includes me, who felt suddenly plunged into a Kentucky Derby race as the voter tide turned for Jones.

In the age of Trump and America's love affair with Trump buddy Steve Bannon's white nationalism, the good guy won. Alabama's new senator, Democrat Doug Jones has a long history with civil rights in the state of Alabama. 

There are many sad chapters in the history of slavery, racism and segregation in America, and especially in states like Alabama and Mississippi. The brutal lynching of Emmett Till shares the spotlight with another horrific crime in the state of Alabama: the September 15, 1963 Birmingham Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by white supremacists -- the KKK, who is much weaker today but very much devoted to the Trump presidency and the white men carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville, Va. 

Described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity, the church explosion killed four young girls and injured 22 others.  Those four girls were Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.

In 1965, the FBI concluded that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was the work of four known Ku Klux Klansmen and white segregationists -- Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry. 

At the time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his investigators knew the attackers' names and even had secret recordings to prove that the four men were behind the Birmingham church bombing. Because Hoover himself was a segregationist and white nationalist, he sealed those files away, making it much more difficult to prosecute the crime. 

While I write a separate article sharing all the details of how the cases proceeded -- when our focus is on the artwork of Huntsville-raised,  U of Alabama grad Toyin Ojih Odutola -- it was the new Democratic senator from Alabama Doug Jones who successfully prosecuted the two remaining living Klansmen Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., convicted in 2001; and Bobby Frank Cherry, convicted in 2002.

According to Sharony A. Green, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, Jones’ victory is particularly significant given the state’s racial politics: Jones, a man who made his name prosecuting the KKK, beat an opponent who, when asked when American was last “great,” replied: “I think it was great at the time when families were united, even though we had slavery.”

Against this political and artistic landscape, Whitney Biennial curators Rujeko Hockley & Jane Panetta have an outstanding and unique opportunity to use the highest level of artistic activism in years for the public good -- and to discuss public morality and American values.

Many hope that Trump will be impeached as a result of the Mueller investigation and Trump-family ties to Russia. I say "no" because such an action sets up the presidency of current VP Mike Pence, who is an even more dangerous threat to American values. Pence is a true theocrat -- Roy Moore made palatable to Republicans. 

“To Wander Determined” is on view at the Whitney Museum through February 25. 

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Excavations (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Wall of Ambassadors (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Winter Dispatch (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Surveying the Family Seat (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Installation view, “To Wander Determined” at the Whitney Museum. Left: The Missionary (2017), R: By Her Design (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Industry (Husband and Wife) (2017). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Newlyweds On Holiday (2016). ©Toyin Ojih Odutola. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Alt-Left Learns From Alt-Right, Demanding Dana Schutz Show In Boston Not Proceed

Dana Schutz's Shaking Out the Bed (2015). Collection of Vicki and Kent Logan, promised gift to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York. Photo: John Kennard.

Update: The exhibition of Ms. Schutz’s paintings did open at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The ‘Open Casket’ painting was never scheduled to be part of the exhibit, organized by the curator Eva Respini.

Read on: Outrage Follows a Painter From the Whitney Biennial to Boston The New York Times

Original Post

Now activists are demanding that the upcoming artist Dana Schutz show at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art be cancelled. Her controversial Emmett Till painting generated much controversy at the Whitney Museum this spring and is not included in the Boston Show.

Reading this latest news, detailed by ArtNet about Dana Schutz means that the Sanders wing of activists believe that they have the right to dictate not only what is acceptable in the art world but now the right of a person to be an artist at all -- if they don't like the art.

Just as I wrote last week that Linda Sarsour is driving me away from her as an activist, while causing me to question her own agenda, I feel the same way about activists who are dictating what art people can make in America.

HOW IS THAT ANY DIFFERENT THAN THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT-WING CONDEMNING ARTISTS? It's the same mentality, and it's dangerous. It's polarizing at a time when we should be uniting against the Trump agenda. It totally feeds the opposition, which is already on record saying that in 2018 they will paint ALL Democrats as socialist revolutionaries.

Art enjoys first-amendment protections in America. You can protest something you don't like, as happened at the Schutz's Emmett Till painting at the Whitney. But when you step out and say an artist can no longer show her art, you have crossed the line of all I hold dear.

I detest the KKK, but I accept that they have certain rights in America. The last time artists were jailed in America in large numbers was during the McCarthy era. Then it was only a right-wing drive. It seems that today, the far-left is ready to join forces with the far-right, as they plan what art is permissible in America.

You will have to walk over my dead body to claim that right, so let's agree that our sisterhood is limited. These fissures are opening wider on a daily basis, and they are hard to fight in the age of Trump. They gave us Trump in the first place, and they will give us 8 years and an America we don't even recognize if non-Trumpers aren't careful.

But then -- the alt-left and alt-right are far closer than most of us want to comprehend. ~ Anne