opinion

David Person: Stop selling prison cells to the highest bidder

David Person

Our nation is numb, President Obama said this month while announcing his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. So numb that we are nonchalant about the overwhelming numbers of black and brown boys who end up in prison. “We just assume this is an inevitable part of American life, instead of the outrage that it is,” Obama said.

What should disturb us even more is that prisoners have become a commodity, thanks to the growing relationship between private prisons and state governments. The states that go into business with for-profit prisons sign contracts that essentially agree to maintain quotas on the number of prisoners. If they can’t keep the prison populations at the agreed upon levels, the states must pay the difference.

Often, private prisons also want inmates who are younger and healthier, which makes them less expensive to house. Older prisoners tend to be white, and younger inmates tend to be minorities, a fact supported by a recent study based on Bureau of Justice Statistics published in the Radical Criminology journal by University of California-Berkeley doctoral candidate Christopher Petrella.

In the nine states Petrella studied, the percentage of black and brown inmates is higher in the for-profit prisons than the state-owned ones. In Texas, for example, 69 percent of prisoners in these private institutions are people of color, compared with 57 percent in the public prisons. In California, 89 percent of private prison inmates are persons of color, compared with 76 percent in public facilities.

While private prisons currently house only 8 percent of the U.S. inmate population, its numbers are rising and the public prison population is declining. The two largest private prison companies are Corrections Corp. of America and The Geo Group. Together, they own and operate 132 facilities nationwide that generate $3.3 billion annually.

Michelle Alexander, author of the best-seller “The New Jim Crow,” told me that the process that matches what the private prisons want is already in place. “Our (minority) communities have been targeted in ways, particularly in the drug war, that would be unthinkable in white communities,” Alexander said.

In the 1980s, as the war on drugs escalated, prison populations exploded, in large part as a result of mandatory minimum sentences. But in recent years, bipartisan congressional and Obama administration efforts have begun to ease the negative impact of the war on drugs.

In 2010, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, closing the wide disparity between sentencing for possession and sale of crack (used and sold more by blacks) vs. powder cocaine (used and sold more by whites).

Last year, when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., co-sponsored the Justice Safety Valve Act to ease mandatory sentencing, he equated the war on drugs with racist Jim Crow policies.

Attorney General Eric Holder has urged shorter mandatory minimum drug sentences for non-violent offenders.

Hopefully, Petrella’s study will help states rethink doing business with private prisons. But it should also awaken our nation to the immorality of selling prison cells to the highest bidder, and then using controversial quota policies to fill them with younger inmates, who tend to be predominantly black and brown.

If we continue to ignore this trend, our modern prisons will look no different from the plantations of old.

David Person hosts “WEUP Talk” on WEUP 94.5 FM/1700 AM in Huntsville, Ala.