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.

Artist Dewey Crumpler Opposes Destroying 'Life of Washington' Mural For Very Good Reasons

One of 13 panels in Victor Arnautoff’s ‘The Life of Washington’ murals scheduled for destruction by the San Francisco Board of Education. Some students and their parents say the images are upsetting to young people who can’t escape their past.

The firestorm over destroying the California New Deal-era George Washington Mural by Victor Arnautoff has hit Politico today. I've shared 2-3 earlier updates on AOC. For a refresher, Politico summarized the situation:

"The San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously last month to paint over all 13 panels of the 1600 sq. ft. mural “Life of Washington,’’ a historic work commissioned during the New Deal that depicts George Washington as a slave owner. The move came after several vocal protesters demanded the move at a public meeting, saying their children were “traumatized” by depictions of the nation’s first president standing over the images of dead Native Americans."

Well, California Dems are so angry at the San Francisco school board that they sent out an emergency email alert seeking support for an effort to back a voter’s ballot measure to save the murals.

Dubbed the Coalition to Protect Public Art, the initiative aims to protect this art, “and perhaps other New Deal art in San Francisco’’ which may also be targeted.

I suggested last week on this site that they contact the super talented JR and get him to produce a counter mural for the teens. As the ad says "Nobody called me back." LOL I did not know then that already the school has an installation of murals that directly address the disruptive Arnautoff images

Earlier in July Professor Dewey Crumpler, who painted the black radical response to the George Washington murals, explained to ArtNet News why he stands against their destruction. Professor Crumpler, whose OWN MURALS are also painted at the high school to both answer and to expand the disruptive narrative in the original New Deal murals, hang in visual proximity to each other.

That counter narrative was created in response to San Francisco student activism in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now a professor at The San Francisco Art Institute, Crumpler explains that the Black Panthers were adamant that the murals be destroyed. Like Crumpler, early Black Panther member Emory Douglas belonged to an organization of African American artists put together by a woman named Evangeline [E.J.] Montgomery. Douglas became the minister of culture for the Panthers

After a series of confrontations around the Arnautoff mural when students became angry and threw ink on it, the board of education no longer resisted commissioning the young Crumpler to make new murals as part of saving the original ones.

In his video and also the excellent ArtNet interview, there’s discussion around the subversive message about Washington that was subtle yet recognizable in the original murals.

Before The Squad tars and feathers Democrats and demands that the art be destroyed, it's ironic that the murals' Russian-American artist and Stanford University art professor Victor Arnautoff was a committed Communist.

So the California Democrats are willing to stand for an avowed Communist on the matter of not erasing the murals. Note also that this fight is all going on in Nancy Pelosi's district. And it's going on at the moment we're screaming about the Republican Party lead by Trump as being racist.

Furthermore, Professor Crumpler explains that as a teenager, it wasn’t even taught in his school that George Washington owned slaves. “That’s one reason this was a horrible image for me originally: Arnautoff put slaves next to the president of the United States, and it was that contradiction when I was first saw the mural that threw me.”

I know it's not funny, but I sort of feel like I'm in lala land. I'm fighting every day on get Americans to 1) talk about what we did to the American Indians and 2) deal with slavery and racism. But the most progressive school district in the nation wants to destroy a historic reminder painted by an American communist artist.

It’s hard to believe that the current San Francisco school board didn’t even reach out to Dewey Crumpler on the subject of destroying ‘The Life of Washington Murals’. In reading Jennifer Wilson’s Black People Don’t Need Murals To Remember Injustice for The Nation, she doesn’t mention at all this entire episode around the murals launched by the Black Panthers. or the creation of Dr. Crumpler’s own murals. Talk about selective reporting!!!

Wilson’s point that black and brown people want a future and not just a past is valid. She writes: A future that is both daunting, but bright in that it exists when so many people, George Washington included, wanted otherwise. It reminds me of a line from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when Paul D leans over to Sethe and tells her, “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Her article would have been much richer, however, if she had discussed the history of the ‘Life of Washington’ murals, Black Panther activism around the murals, and the story of how Dr. Crumpler came to paint a new visual narrative in response. In fact, the story of how the young artist went to Mexico to study with renowned muralists Pablo O’Higgins and [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, is exactly the kind of Harlem Renaissance story Wilson bemoans is absent in the black culture narrative. It’s ironic that she either 1) didn’t fully investigate the mural controversy before writing about it or 2) decided to omit Crumpler’s views on destroying the murals, because it didn’t fit her own narrative.

Dewey Crumpler’s in front of the African American panel of Multi-Ethnic Heritage at George Washington High School.

MacKenzie Bezos Joins Gates & Buffett 'The Giving Pledge', Sharing Half of Her New Fortune

Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

There aren’t many solo images of MacKenzie Bezos out there. Even though the mom of four is a successful writers and played her own roll in the formation of Amazon, almost all images of MacKenzie include her husband Jeff Bezos.

Vogue US interviewed one of the world’s richest women in 2013 in advance of her “gripping new novel Traps”. The interview by Rebecca Johnson describes MacKenzie as a “bookish and she” girl who spent hours in her bedroom writing elaborate stories. She attended first Hotchkiss and then Princeton, a very deliberate choice that gave her access to writer Toni Morrison. One of America’s most important voices became Bezos’ mentor and called her in 2013 “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes . . . really one of the best.” It was Morrison who made the all-important recommendation of Amanda “Binky” Urban as a literary agent.

Now that she’s divorced, Johnson’s Vogue interview is even more interesting, describing the couple as two very different people who have created a sensational marriage. Enough said on that topic — except that Money Magazine says that MacKenzie made the first move, asking Jeff to lunch.

Shown from left are the speakers at the Nov. 2018 Princeton ceremony dedicating Morrison Hall: MacKenzie Bezos, Class of 1992, who studied with Morrison; Morrison; Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University who helped recruit Morrison to Princeton; and Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. Photo by Nick Donnoli, Office of Communications

MacKenzie Bezos made big news this week, taking an action very different from her ex-husband’s. Jeff Bezos is not known for his largess, his philanthropy or his civic activism. MacKenzie plans to live a different life. He was very outspoken about declining to sign the Giving Pledge, a commitment by billionaires to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back, The Giving Pledge was created by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010. Jeff Bezos joins them as three of America’s five richest people and the only one not to sign the Giving Pledge. Note that only 7 percent of the world’s billionaires have signed the Giving Pledge.

Mackenzie Bezos is not one of them, signing a pledge to give at least half of her $37 billion in assets to charity, writes ELLE US.

“We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” she said in her statement, obtained by Bloomberg News. “My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”

It will be interesting to watch Ms.Bezos bloom in her own right., joining Laurene Powell Jobs and Melinda Gates as yet another woman with a seat at the big boys table.