Congratulations! The Taxes You Just Paid Might Be On Their Way to a Private Prison

Congratulations! The Taxes You Just Paid Might Be On Their Way to a Private Prison
04/15/2014
Private Prisons
By Hedy Weinberg, ACLU of Tennessee at 11:44am


Ah, April 15th. Tax Day.

When you pay taxes, you assume they'll be used to support education, health care, public transportation, and other programs that make your community stronger. That's true, but so is this: some of your hard-earned dollars might be bundled into a massive payout to a private prison company that cares more about profits than public safety.

That's right, taxpayers: for-profit prison companies are skimming off the top of taxes you pay ostensibly to create safer communities. And no company benefits more than the largest private prison company out there: the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA.

CCA gets contracts all over the country by promising it can run prisons better and more cheaply. But time and time again, they've broken that promise. That's why the ACLU and the ACLU of Tennessee are launching the "Who Is CCA?" campaign to expose the business tactics and egregious track record of CCA, which is headquartered in Nashville. Our aim is to deliver a petition with tens of thousands of signatures to Governor Bill Haslam asking him to walk away from his contracts with a company that has made massive profits off our country's overuse of incarceration.

Nearly 29 years ago, I stood before members of the Tennessee House of Representatives to testify against prison privatization in Tennessee. At the time, privatization was being hailed as the "cure-all" to numerous problems plaguing the Tennessee prison system. But ACLU-TN believed there were too many unanswered questions about the constitutional, financial, and ethical ramifications of a private, profit-driven corporation taking over custody of inmates. Today, we have those answers — and they aren't pretty.

More:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/congratulations-taxes-you-just-paid-might-be-their-way-private-prison