Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration?

This book includes Chapters written by Experts: Edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright. Tara is the co-editor of Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, and the author of numerous articles in the alternative press.

She is a public defender in the Portland, Oregon area. Paul is the founder and editor of Prison Legal News and co-editor of Prison Nation and The Ceiling of America. He lives in Brattleboro, Vermont. 300 + pgs. provide AN ALL INCLUSIVE EXPOSE of the astonishing range of industries, corporations, and individuals profiting from the imprisonment of over 2.3 million Americans that generate hundreds of billion$ from modern day $lavery, to wit: FROM A REPORT PRODUCED FOR THE PRIVATE PRISON INDUSTRY BY INVESTMENT ANALYSTS FIRST ANALYSIS SECURITIES CORPORATION.

Positive: "With the baby boomlet demographics, we foresee increasing demand for juvenile [incarceration] services."

Negative: "It is often difficult to maintain the occupancy rates required for profitability."

NOTE: Accordingly, they lobby with great success tougher laws with longer harsh sentences!

Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap.

Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance.

Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Contributors include: Judy Greene on private prison giants Geo (formerly Wackenhut) and CCA; Anne-Marie Cusac on who sells electronic weapons to prison guards; Wil S. Hylton on the largest prison health care provider; Ian Urbina on how prison labor supports the military; Kirsten Levingston on the privatization of public defense; Jennifer Gonnerman on the costs to neighborhoods from which prisoners are removed; Kevin Pranis on the banks and brokerage houses that finance prison building; and Silja Talvi on the American Correctional Association as a tax-funded lobbyist for professional prison bureaucracies.

Contact – http://www.prisonlegalnews.org/

{No personal affiliation, merely an appreciative lawyer /customer).

Editorial Review - From Publishers Weekly: In their follow-up to 2002's Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, prisoner rights activists Herivel and Wright, with 16 other contributors, follow the money to an astonishing constellation of prison administrators and politicians working in collusion with private parties to maximize profits at the expense of taxpayers, community health and, of course, the 2.3 million inmates nationwide. The overarching narrative, laid out clearly in the opening article by Judy Greene, finds a system increasingly dominated by select, minimally accountable private companies for whom profitability depends on the promise of more and longer convictions.

As such, investment in treatment programs, education and family assistance is diverted to organizations delivering substandard food and "health care" that allows hepatitis C to reach levels one doctor compares to "the Dark Ages with the plague"; corruption runs all the way down to prison phone contracts.

Cruelty and administrative stupidity come in many forms, claim the authors; guards earning $5.77 per hour beat the young inmates of a Louisiana juvenile facility while abuse schemes and political back- scratching trump efforts to police them, as evidenced by the growth of industry tradeshows and companies (such as International Taser).

This is lucid, eye-opening reading for anyone interested in American (IN)justice.

FREE: If anyone wants a .pdf scan of the Index of articles/chapters along with a sincere wish for many thereafter as motivated, to purchase copies along with many more for gifts, send an email off-line to Basker@Lawyer.com. Include "PRISON PROFITEERS" in the subject line so that your email won't be erased as spam yet. Thereafter please wait patiently.

David Mitchell Basker, J.D.

Alumnus: Univ. Tenn - College of Law, PRISONERS HEALTH CARE MINISTRY

Attorney at Law, Washington, D.C., P.O. Box 357426, Gainesville, Florida

http://www.murderthedeathpenalty.us/