PRIVATE PRISONS

Article by Jack Ververis Graphics by Andrew Edwards

In 1844, a factory opened. It was called the Louisiana State Penitentiary, though it was op erated by a private company. The product was clothing. The profit was people. The goal, as one prisoner wrote, was to “eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.”

In 1870, a mine opened. Convicts—poor farmers and freedmen, captured by debt— worked in camps with a more than 40% mortality rate. When they died, their bodies were sold to medical schools. “These convicts: we don’t own ‘em,” an operator said in 1883. “One dies, get another.”

In 1967, a farm opened. Black prison ers work in fields from dusk till day. A man named Tarrell Don Hutto runs it. Hutto hasn’t founded CoreCivic, the country’s largest pri vate prison corporation yet. He will.

Private prisons, also known as for-profit prisons, are corrections facilities licensed out to corporations under contractual agreements with state and federal governments. Private prisons have been widespread since the 1980’s, when Reagan-era tough-on-crime bills led to a ballooning incarceration rate that under funded government agencies were ill-equipped to handle. So, they outsourced; now, private prisons are implemented in 26 states, and hold roughly 8% of the 2 million incarcerated Americans (and majority of detained immi grants), according to prison reform group The Sentencing Project.

They are also an omen—of corporate greed, government negligence, and the dangers of privatization. Private prisons are not the cause of mass incarceration, but a cancer on it, one that constantly threatens to grow. Private pris ons are what happen when we measure justice against profit, and profit wins.

This is most graphically seen in horrible conditions caused by cost-cutting. Private pris ons are almost universally more crowded than public ones—with profit measured by bed, af ter all, every open spot is a missed opportunity. Guards aren’t exempt from the hunt for profits either—as the Pulitzer Center reports in 2020,

“The could ency sentencing America