People Over For-Profit Prisons: a Social Movement in Gary, Indiana

April 8, 2016
People Over For-Profit Prisons: a Social Movement in Gary, Indiana

by Paul Street

It’s understandable that United States progressives have been caught up in the national quadrennial electoral extravaganza this year. This is no ordinary election season. On the right side of the two party system we have the bizarre, possibly dangerous Donald Trump phenomenon and a potential Republican meltdown at the GOP’s national convention this summer. On the left side we have a remarkable progressive insurgency in the name of the “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders. He has tapped the anger of young and white working class voters to challenge the depressing status quo neoliberal Hillary Clinton.

At the same time, however, the delegate math and the smart money still point to a dismal, imperial Hillary presidency and progressives would do well to remember that national, candidate-centered presidential politics isn’t the only politics that matters. Beneath and beyond the national, candidate-centered major party and big media election spectacle, whatever its outcome, there remains the arguably more important politics of grassroots popular organizing and movement-building around issues that matter within and beyond local communities.

The GEO Group: Turning Mass Incarceration Into Gold

One particularly inspiring and instructive example of such people’s activism can be found in the predominantly Black city of Gary, Indiana. A multiracial and multi-ethnic coalition there has been engaged in a remarkable struggle with a powerful private, for-profit prison corporation. The company, GEO Group (hereafter “GEO”) owes its name to George Zoley, its founder and CEO, once described by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) as “America’s Highest Paid ‘Corrections Officer.” Boasting an annual revenue of $1.7 billion, GEO stands in the odious vanguard of the global mass imprisonment state with a distinctively white-supremacist and English-speaking taste for locking down people of color. It manages 104 human warehousing and lock-up facilities, with 87,000 beds and 20,500 employees across four countries: the United States. the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. Nearly two-thirds (64) of its prisons are located in the U.S., the disparate mass incarceration capital of the world and home to roughly a quarter of the planet’s prisoners – most of them Black and Latino.

Formerly known as “Wackenhut,” the Florida-based GEO is the nation’s second largest private prison firm after Corrections Corporations of America (CCA). It describes itself as “the first fully-integrated equity real estate investment trust specializing in the design, development, financing, and operation of correctional, detention, and community reentry facilities worldwide.” Zoley “earns” $1.5 million a month on the backs of taxpayers, under-paid workers, and of course, inmates – the critical dehumanized raw material for “correctional” profits.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/08/people-over-for-profit-prisons-a-social-movement-in-gary-indiana/