Have you ever seen a private nursing home, a private airport, have you ever seen a private prison?
In private prisons, criminals are treated differently depending on how much money they pay.
Sounds a bit magical. But in the United States, prisons can really open their own, and they are particularly profitable, and 8 years ago, the industry's total revenue easily got $5 billion.
▲ Private prisons throughout the United States
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="9" > profiteering in prison</h1>
How much money does it really make to open a prison in the United States? The answer is: a good deal.
The first is the overlord contract, although the detainees are in accordance with the official procedures to do things for the officials, but in this contract, the private enterprise is the ultimate beneficiary of the contract, and the US government is only a lamb to be slaughtered. The first overlord clause is that the government must guarantee occupancy rates in private prisons, which is set at 90% according to the agreement signed between the two sides in 2011, which means that the government has to send as many people as there are beds in private prisons;
The second overlord clause is that those who come in must also have consent, and those who have a serious illness or have a major violent crime do not;
The third overlord clauseififies that if private prisons fail to operate and go out of business, then the government is responsible for the backs and must unconditionally buy back the prisons.
The signing of the contract means that private prisons do not have to worry about no prisoners, and the more prisoners outside, the better the income of the prison will be.
Because this continuous stream of individuals is a "can't" tired slave on the production line.
In order to legitimize the production of these slaves, private prison entrepreneurs came up with a slogan that addressed the mission: to help prisoners better adapt to life in a free society, vocational training and prison reemployment were vigorously pursued. If you scare the pen of the media people, you will have a bright shell, and you can start work in a bright and upright manner.
As long as there is a single person who does not refuse, from the unknown small company to the well-known enterprises IBM, Microsoft, Boeing, can make McDonald's uniforms and make circuit boards. Profitable enterprises naturally have to pay taxes, and private prisons have thought of ways to first let the government exempt themselves from taxation and then use legal loopholes to become real estate investment trust companies, so that 90% of the company's income must be distributed to shareholders, of course, without paying taxes.
Because there is no trade union participation, the detainees have no voice, and the effect is to rise steadily.
A detainee relies on government subsidies for $18 in net income, and that doesn't include industrial income, so in just 20 years, the income of the industry leader CCA soared by 500%, and after the economic crisis, the major industries trembled, only the private prison industry continued to gain momentum, and in 2011 it received $5 billion in revenue.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="20" > private prisons and indispensable "partners" of the U.S. prison system</h1>
When it comes to prisons, most people realize that this is a government agency, and the staff in it are all civil servants.
But prisons in the United States are big fat in the eyes of private entrepreneurs, because there are too many people in the United States. The United States accounts for 5 percent of the world's population; 25 percent of the world's prison population; the population of the United States has grown by less than 30 percent in the past 30 years, but the prison population has grown by 800 percent; and 1 in 100 American adults has been in prison and one in every 38 American adults has been incarcerated. There are 2.2 million people in the United States who eat in prison, and if the prison is regarded as a city, this prison city can steadily enter the top five in the United States by virtue of its population.
How can there be so many people in prison in the United States?
This also begins with the era of drug lords in the 1980s. Colombia is the home of a generation of drug lordSprao Escobar, who was once named one of the seven richest people in the world by Fortune, and the American drama "Narcos" with the lowest Douban score of 9.1 is based on this person.
Thanks to the environment at that time, Colombia became synonymous with drugs, and the United States, which was close to Colombia, became a drug sales market.
The streets and alleys of the United States are semi-public drug trade, some drug dealers still occupy the neighborhoods of the United States, gun battles, murders are commonplace, and neighbors who may have laughed yesterday will be killed on the streets the next day, and people are afraid.
Statistics show an average of more than 250 cases per week.
In order to deal with the situation quickly, the government departments arrested suspicious people when they saw them, and when they were arrested, they locked them up, and for a while the prison was overcrowded, and there was no place to lock up people, but they absolutely could not let go of one. There is no way but to hurry up and build a new prison, but just applying will have to wait 4 years, which does not include the cost of building a building.
In this situation, Tom, the republican chairman of Tennessee at the time, was so distressed that he called in his friends, Docto Kronetz and Don Hetto, to solve the dilemma.
During the discussion, they found that as long as commercialization is introduced, it will not only solve the problem but also be very profitable.
On the spot, the three of them teamed up to form a CCA.
The first business was signed with the Texas Immigration Department, which was a good deal.
However, everything is difficult at the beginning, and the first problem in winning this order is that the problem of prison beds must be solved in 3 months. It is impossible to build a building at such a time, thinking about it, they decided to rent a hotel, the security personnel are also temporarily looking for, the basic living equipment is also in a hurry, but it is ok, this first single is the next. With the first order, there is the second order, the third order... nth order. Looking at this trend, the number of private prison entries in the United States has increased, and private prisons have become an important partner of the American prison system.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="35" > private prison where the more the merrier</h1>
When prison becomes a business, then profit is the biggest driver. Increasing revenue and reducing costs is the most basic requirement.
So they demanded from the government that prisoners be free of serious illness and strong violent tendencies, and that prisoners be paid extremely low wages, earning up to $20 a month, which was lower than the hourly wage of an American free man. There is a Chinese saying, "Fertile water does not flow into the fields of outsiders." Private prison operators in the United States have taken this phrase to the extreme.
They set up shops in prisons, where they have to buy their own meals three meals a day; they want to live a middle-class life and set prices; they open up the underground black market and the constant trade in guns and drugs; they manage loosely, eliminating unqualified "employees" in the name of violence, and the cause of death is mostly suicide.
Frederick Pierucci, vice president of international sales at Alstom in France, also went to U.S. prisons because outside of the U.S. system, after his release he exposed the "nightmare" of life in private prisons in the United States. On April 14, 2013, Pierucci stepped off the plane as usual, greeted not by former staff but by FBI agents who had been waiting for a long time.
Because of the malicious crackdown by the United States, Pierucci spent a difficult 5 years in a private prison in the United States. "I was wearing an orange jersey, my hands and feet were bound by chains, and the chains pressed against my chest made it difficult for me to breathe."
"At that moment, I realized that I had become an animal... There is no freedom, no resistance. ”
Pieruzzi mentions the model of private prisons in the United States in "The American Trap": in prisons, there is nothing that does not cost money, drinking water buys plastic cups, there are television sets, but it is silent, and you have to pay for headphones to listen to sound. Three meals a day is simple, two slices of bread and a paste that I don't know what it is, colorful, tasteless, no smell, and the cost will never exceed $1.
In order to ensure that the government can continue to send in labor, companies in private prisons have to have good relations with politicians.
The private prison industry giant CCA is a longtime and important donor to the U.S. Legislative Exchange Council, which is home to political leaders who can influence state and congressional legislation. In 2010, Arizona forcibly enacted the "New Illegal Immigration Act," which states that as long as police suspect someone of illegal immigration, they can be detained without trial. These injustices accumulate and explode at some point. In 2012, a riot at CCA's Adams County Correctional Center killed a guard and injured 20 others. The riots in private prisons have finally attracted attention, with the announcement of the phasing out of private prisons during the Obama administration.
But all of this was overturned after Trump took office.
Trump, who has made saving money a top priority, has decided to outsource prison operations to cheaper and more profitable private prisons, and Trump's vigorous policy of indefinite detention of illegal immigrants has led to a continuous source of prisons.
As a result, the situation in the private prisons that were in decline during the Obama era reversed after Trump took office. On the second day of Trump's presidency, shares in the two giants of private prisons, CCA and GEO, rose 43 and 22 percentage points, respectively.
Trump's move is very related to the long-term investment of CCA and GEO, both of which are Republican backgrounds and belong to the same party as Trump.
From 2010 to 2015, political lobbying alone cost $14.6 million, Trump gave $500,000 back at his inauguration, and CCA acted as Trump's loyal spokesman and follower for the immigration policies opposed by the people. As of July, U.S.C.I.S. had arrested 53,000 people, 1,000 a day in Louisiana alone, and 70 percent of them ended up in private prisons.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="50" > prison system that cannot escape</h1>
For these big people, the little people don't need to care at all. Some of those detained have been convicted by the courts, and some are trapped because they cannot afford bail, and the latter is the majority.
Two-thirds of prisons across the country are undefeated, and the criminal justice system makes $2 billion a year on bail, according to the data. Because she lost her job and didn't pay $545 in time for child care, the American mother has been in prison for more than 6 months and has not yet been released unless she can get assistance from the agency.
Every day at 1 a.m., Jessica, 23, and 35 "roommates" would be woken up by the guards, start busy work, prepare breakfast, prepare it at about 8 o'clock, and then start distributing meals and cleaning, although there was $3 a day, which was a full 3 times that of other people, but Jesica did not know how long to stay in this dark place, good work was deserved, it would not be released, but would do more.
Yazmin and her daughter Marie were locked up in a prison in South Texas, and the next day their daughter left this world because of a respiratory illness that did not receive timely assistance, perhaps before arriving they were full of hopes for the future, but they did not know that some beauty could only be imagined.
▲ A girl at the Adlanto Immigration Detention Centre
With 430 days to go until the next U.S. election, people from all walks of life are also busy, with Republican Trump continuing to shout "Make America Great Again" and Democrats shouting the abolition of bail and mass incarceration. Who will be elected, who will implement the policies, and who will be happy in the end?
Time will have the answer, it's just that some people can't afford to wait.
But do these really matter? After all, in the eyes of those powerful people, everything is just business (source: World Chinese Weekly).