Private Prisons in the United States Are Big Business › The World in Reverse › Granma

Private prisons in the United States are a steady source of economic income, which the owners of these prisons benefit from, while they commit human rights violations against the inmates.

The government pays prison owners or managers for each prisoner, which encourages companies involved in this activity to consider it “big business.”

Overall, the United States, the world’s largest prison population at about 1,767,200, has more prisoners than China, Brazil and India, which also rank high, in that order, according to Fact Protocol, a fact-checking system to combat fake news and misinformation.

At least 120,000 prisoners have been in prisons run by non-governmental companies since they were in the country, Raul Guillermo Benitez, an academic at the North American Research Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Xinhua. The law allows local governments to lease prisons to individuals and to manage them.

“This is a vicious circle, because many rulers communicate with the owners of these companies and agree on interests,” he said.

Guillermo Benitez stressed that the main victims are low-income people and ethnic minorities, making these practices discriminatory and a violation of human rights.

Data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) indicates that by the end of January 2022, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, more than 3,000 immigrants detained in non-state prisons had been infected, a fact that reflects the lack of medical care for these prisoners.

American prisons are a business in which the state itself allows its citizens to work in conditions close to slavery. On the other hand, prisoners are paid 0.23 cents an hour to work, according to Global Research, and if they refuse, they are locked in solitary confinement cells.

Other studies conducted by independent human rights organizations within the United States itself show that security in private prisons is lower than in public prisons, and that assaults or internal incidents have doubled in many cases.

In other words, they are not only imprisoned, but they will not be safe even while they wait for their freedom to arrive.

The problem is old. Since the early 21st century, the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunity has reported on its citizens’ concerns about many aspects of the treatment of prisoners.

Another example was in the early 2000s, when the National Prison Project and the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging that Virginia state prisoners held at Wallens Ridge were subjected to cruel and arbitrary punishments that violated the U.S. Constitution.

America’s prison policy is a major cog in its economic system. Prisons are the third-largest source of employment, while prisoners’ human rights are at the expense of their prisoner… not even the state. This is one of the paradoxes of a state that claims to be the guardian of universal human rights.