Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies
qz.com
qz.com
My own alma mater, Bard College, created a program called the Bard Prison Initiative. This program teaches college courses for college credit to incarcerated prisoners in the state of New York, ultimately awarding either Associates or Bachelors degrees from Bard College. Education for prisoners is important from both a moral and economic perspective, dramatically reducing recidivism as well as saving money (a $1 investment in prison education reduces incarceration costs by $3-$4 in the first three years of an inmate's release[1]).
This is a great first step but it is not enough to simply not support the prison industry. There are proven steps that can be taken here to reduce recidivism and help society. Despite this, the Bard Prison Initiative is chronically underfunded despite support by governor Cuomo due to politicians not wanting to appear soft on crime. Columbia is a much wealthier university than Bard College, so I challenge them to join Bard in their initiative.
[1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-and-education-departme...
In 1981, Boudin and several former members of the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink's armored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York.
After Boudin dropped her infant son off at a babysitter's, she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck.
She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices took another vehicle to a local mall where the Brink's truck was making a pick-up. They confronted the guards and gunfire immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his partner, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rejoined Boudin.
An alert college student called the police after spotting the gang abandoning their vehicle and entering the U-Haul. Two policeman spotted and pulled over the U-Haul, but they were expecting black males, and could only see Boudin - a white female - in the driver's seat. She got out of the cab, and raised her hands. Another police car with two officers quickly arrived on the scene.
The police officers who caught them testified that Boudin, feigning innocence, pleaded with them to put down their guns and got them to drop their guard; Boudin said she remained silent, that the officers relaxed spontaneously.
After the police lowered their guns, six men armed with automatic weapons emerged from the back of the truck, and began firing upon the four police officers, one of whom, Waverly Brown, was killed instantly. Officer Edward O'Grady lived long enough to empty his revolver, but as he reloaded, he was shot several times with an M16 rifle. Ninety minutes later, he died in the hospital.
Columbia's School of General Studies is targeted at students without a high school diploma, students with "nontraditional" backgrounds, and students who have taken more than a year off after high school before going to school. I went to Columbia, and while I wasn't in GS, a lot of my friends were.
A large number of GS students are veterans[0]. Of the rest, a surprising number are people with, well, backgrounds that typically disqualify a person from an Ivy League education.
I can't share their stories because they're not mine to share, but I had classmates who were caught (and incarcerated for) drug trafficking and other serious-but-nonviolent crimes[1]. I know this because they told me, and they felt comfortable enough in their academic environment sharing this knowledge. To me, that really says something about not only the admissions process, but also the community and support that they receive as students.
As a non-GS student, I really appreciated this setup. My education would not have been the same had I not been sitting next to these students in our discussion sections for class, or serving on the boards of student organizations with them. And at the same time, they were able to benefit from the structure of a school that was explicitly tailored to students with nontraditional backgrounds.
Columbia could do a lot more to support GS students[3], as well as support incarcerated prisoners who are not students, but this is something they've been doing for decades without any fanfare at all.
Columbia also has a very long history of accepting veterans who were discharged for being gay, even long before Don't Ask, Don't Tell (Stephen Donaldson was a Columbia student before joining the military[4]). IIRC, many of these discharges would have been dishonorable discharges, which in some states carries the same status as being a convicted felon.
[0] Partly because Columbia GS is so proactive about recruiting on military bases, and partly because their yellow ribbon matching is so generous.
[1] I mention nonviolent crimes because that's what (some of) my GS friends shared with me. I don't know of any who were convicted of violent crimes, and I don't know if this is simply selection bias or if there really weren't any.
[3] If anyone reading this has $100MM to spare, the General Studies school could benefit greatly from its own endowment to increase access to financial aid!
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Donaldson_%28activist%...
GS isn't some benevolent social program, they see the grant dollars and they take them. They've been experts at this for a long, long time.
The cynical part is that they use completely different diplomas, transcript codes and CEEB codes for the GS program. This is non-standard, where most other universities fully integrate their veteran and re-entry students across the board. (including financial aid)
Not exactly. The GI bill doesn't pay anywhere near $44k for New York State. The federal government is not picking up the tab.
I acknowledged the dearth of financial aid in my post, and that's something that they're desperately working on. GS is not as well endowed, which would be the solution to this. If you want to be cynical, fine, but the question of how much money GS has is different from how they're actually spending it.
This is the downside of being a separate school, yes, though with the aforementioned very notable exception of the endowment issue, GS students and faculty overwhelmingly favor this model.
In any case, the topic of this conversation was prisoners and convicts, not veterans. I merely mentioned them because they're a large part of GS and GS has a history of accepting disonorably discharged veterans, which is tantamount to convict status.
So that's $52k/yr to $64k/yr before you start adding in stuff like Pell grants.
Do I support federal dollars funding college education for vets? Yes, absolutely. Do I think this is some great act of benevolence by Columbia? No. Is that view reinforced by the simple fact that they use different diplomas, transcripts and CEEB codes for veterans? Certainly. Do I buy that Columbia's screwy internal administrative structure is a valid reason for this? Definitely not.
You serve your time and you are released to find out that you will be punished the rest of your life by not having access to the profession you've been doing all your life.
And then everybody wonders why people like that fall back to a life of crime. The system is pushing them that way they actually have to fight it to get out.
look here for a nice slide show and even a much larger list of jobs felons are prevented from holding because of government intervention.
Barber, roofer, athletic trainer, tattoo artist, architect, and more. So really? The attached spreadsheet to the article is depressing and this is just Illinois
[1]http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/17/tablets...
They are the same in 2010 because that's where the graph starts. The rest of the graph should be interpreted as "cumulative growth as of $DATE, relative to 2010".
This is actually a common way of presenting two stocks. I believe Google Finance does it. Search for any ticker symbol (e.g. GOOG) and then type in another where it says "compare" (e.g. TWTR). No matter how far back you pull the graph, the leftmost points on each line will always overlap.
I agree that it's a bit weird if you're not used to it.
Extremely high sentences do several bad things, first, they normalize giving extremely high sentences so relatively a 3 year sentence seems low, when in reality, that is nearly 5% of someone's life. Second, large sentences force otherwise innocent people to plea out of charges because the risk is simply too high.
"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."
Source: http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...
Until it becomes politically untenable to provide contracts to these companies or make laws that fuel the industry.
A moral stockholder can help drive the company in a moral direction.
Why would you hold stock in something if the morals you wish to champion will make it less profitable or non-existent? Better to drop that cash in something like renewables which are going to see growth for decades to come and give you warm fuzzies at the same time.
There's also the press angle:
Press: You invest in private prisons
University: But we do so with good intentions, we wish to improve the...
Public: Ugh, too many words. These guys are clearly jerks.
Really divestment is the no man's land between working for change and supporting the status quo. Instead of doing good, Columbia just decided to stop doing bad.
The 1980s pressure to divest from South Africa is sometimes credited with pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Afric...). University investment funds were in the vanguard, after student protests on campus.
But in that case, as would be true here, change came more from the awareness of the problem divestment brings as the economic effect. Private action can motivate public action.
Regardless, financing the activities of something you find immoral is immoral. Your logic--that if you don't do something, someone else will--is the rationalization for much wrongdoing.
Divestment campaigns are problematic in that people have finite reserves of outrage and if they write a letter to the local university president urging divestment they're less likely to go on to write their state senator urging them to stop using private prisons.
From http://www.iop.harvard.edu/does-divestment-work
>"The conventional wisdom is that divestment from South Africa was a success; public pressure lowered targeted companies’ stock prices and forced them to comply with the divestment activists’ demands. However, the true impact of divestment from South Africa is unclear. In a 1999 study, Ivo Welch and C. Paul Wazzan examined the impact of divestment from banks and corporations active in South Africa and found that these campaigns had almost no impact on public market valuations:"
And from the 1999 study they referenced:
>"Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of divesting companies, the financial markets’ valuations of targeted companies or even the South African financial markets themselves were not easily visibly affected. The sanctions may have been effective in raising the public moral standards or public awareness of South African repression, but it appears that financial markets managed to avoid the brunt of the sanctions."
And maybe the awareness around this issue will then lead to a discussion of the high human cost of the War on Drugs, the greatest burden borne by our citizens of color. And maybe that will cause us to revisit our criminal justice system and end the war on drugs.
Private prisons are a symptom, not a cause. For a better understanding of the forces leading to prison privitization and a myriad of other woes and injustices I _strongly_ recommend reading "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander.
I agree that the U.S. is badly in need of major reforms in its criminal justice system, but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?
Private prisons may do some regrettable lobbying on behalf of longer prison sentences, but I'm pretty sure that the corrections officers unions (most of whose membership works in publicly run prisons) is a far stronger political force.
It seems as though the students' activist energy would have been better used fighting the policies of mass incarceration rather than the private companies who do the government's bidding in applying them.
That is more or less the ACLU's opinion, as well.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-so...
Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.
http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-califor...
>> The problems stem from that.
This seems like a serious inversion of cause and effect. Our problems with prisons pre-dated the growth in private prisons and private prisons remain a small fraction of the overall prison industry so its hard to see how private prisons could be the primary source of the problem.
It's not about prison sentences. It's about the poor conditions of private prisons and the rampant abuse there.
Those incentives seem benign compared to a private corporation, which would be incentivized to increase the prisoner population (build more prisons, more revenue), and increase the prisoner/officer ratio (more profits). These changes would have a negative impact on prisoners, officers, and society at large.
There are a lot of companies that extract profits from what can be regarded as other's misfortune - from hospitals to computer security specialists. However that does not necessarily means that hospitals promote disease and computer security professionals routinely spread malware and deliberately compromise their clients' security, to boost their business. Something better than "they have motive to do so" would be required for that claim.
You don't honestly believe that, do you? For one, you're assuming that enough citizens will actually care enough to make this an issue. For two, you're discounting the number of people who think that anything other than a dank, dark dungeon where people are chained to the walls is "coddling" prisoners. Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."
So if we apply this to your argument, we see that you argue that (most) citizens do not care, so it is hard to gather clout to fire bad private company. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. How this makes government-run prison better than private? If citizens do not care, they also wouldn't care if prisoners were abused in government-run prison. Moreover, if some citizens care, what is easier for them to overcome - a lobby of one private company (which can be, ultimately, fired, its reputation destroyed, and in extreme cases, whole company bankrupt and dissolved) - against which other private companies and lobbies can be also used as allies, or the alliance of state bureaucracy and public employees unions, which can not be seriously hurt (most of their power is constitutionally protected or at least enshrined in the law so hard that you need truly exceptional clout to change it), which have access to vast amounts of budget money and control well-organized and battle-hardened political machine with national support? What is easier to fight - the ones that have the money or the ones that have the money, the law, the executive power, the people, the press and the human resources? I'm afraid the comparison doesn't come in the favor of your point.
>> Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."
You do not have to buy it. But if you intent to seriously evaluate it - as opposed to dismissing it without consideration because it does not fit your fixed ideological biases - you have to use proper tools. Such as actually comparing the benefits and disadvantages of both, instead of saying "this is crap, because it is". It is not about always, it is about really thinking about it as opposed to not even bothering.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/21/2193261/three-st...
http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2007-10-26/554296/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/race-multicultural/l...
Prisons are cesspools of abuse, that doesn't make private prisons worse than public ones.
In an ideal world society would not want people to go to prison because of of the cost to society. There are so many cost from physical, legal, emotional/behavior, health, recurrence, future generations and etc. So as a society we would want to avoid people going back to prison and we should support initiatives that lessen our incarceration rate. Now despite what some on reddit seem to feel no matter how much money you throw at this there will always be people you can't rehabilitate. But if we could rehabilitate lets say 10-20% more of people who would be repeat offenders how much would society save. Now the question we have there is would the people who enforce the law like that? If we have less crime that means less police, judges, DAs, jail guards, etc. I'm guessing they all want to keep their jobs so there is little incentive for them to change the system and if I have learned anything incentive is everything. They do have some incentive in the fact that they do want their communities to be safe and healthy.
However when you put in for-profit prisons you can take any incentive out of the picture. They get paid per inmate and often have agreements where their prisons stay at x% of capacity. They don't want to rehabilitate but actually have the opposite incentive which is to crate repeat offenders to keep their cash flow going.
So I'll say society/public prisons have some reasons to reduce prison populations and rehabilitate; private prisons have no such incentive and would actually prefer people to stay/return to prison.
Baby steps.
It's not so simple.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/h...
> Nearly two-thirds of private prison contracts mandate that state and local governments maintain a certain occupancy rate – usually 90 percent – or require taxpayers to pay for empty beds. In Arizona, three private prisons are operating with a 100 percent occupancy guarantee, according to Mother Jones. There’s even a lockup quota at the federal level: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget includes a mandate from Congress that at least 34,000 immigrants remain detained on a daily basis, a quota that has steadily grown each year, even as the undocumented immigrant population in the United States has leveled off.
A description of a Youth "correctional" facility in Mississippi:
"Federal Judge Carlton Reeves wrote that the youth prison "has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk." http://www.npr.org/2012/04/24/151276620/firm-leaves-miss-aft...
Also, there are things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal: "Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
Not to mention the that the private prison industry lobbies for harsher sentences and basically are a bunch of soulless vampires.
I understand that scandals happen in government managed prisons as well. However, the saying two wrongs don't make a right comes to mind. In this case the business model is morally wrong, plain and simple.
As a private for-profit prison employing what is effectively cheap slave labor, you have zero incentive to actually reform or to reduce the amount of people who become imprisoned or the amount of time they are imprisoned for. You are in fact financially incentivized to do the opposite; classic perverse incentive.
As someone else in here posted, The Corrections Corporation of America noted relaxation of drug enforcement efforts as a RISK FACTOR in their 2011 10-K filing:
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...
"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."
Does this not scream "conflict of interest not in the interest of the greater good" to you? It does to me.
For an example of what happens when you allow this on a larger scale, see North Korea. Not a country anyone should be taking after!
For what it's worth, I just so happen to have initiated a monthly $100 donation to http://innocenceproject.org/ just this morning after reading this article:
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/fbi-evidence-...
And ought to be outlawed for this very reason, IMO.
And when all costs (even extraneous societal ones) are considered in an all encompassing cost model, outlawing them would be the optimal course of action, anyway
The price of some things just seem severely disconnected from their actual value (or lack thereof)
>> And when all costs (even extraneous societal ones) are considered in an all encompassing cost model, outlawing them would be the optimal course of action, anyway
That would sound much stronger if it were backed by an actual consideration of the cost in an actual model, rather than a blanket unsupported statement of the outcome.
>> The price of some things just seem severely disconnected from their actual value (or lack thereof)
Or maybe their price reflects the actual value instead of the value you think they should have. How do you discover the actual value (not for you personally, but for the thing that concerns the whole society) anyway? Do you hold a vote? What if vote goes in favor of privatized prisons?
They have a profit motive to lobby for harsher penalties, and to do the absolute bare minimum for prisoner housing and health.
"but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?"
Yes. I, for one, do no buy the bullshit that says that private entities are always better than public ones.
I laud their efforts and there really should be more of these ethical decisions in investment by public organizations, but reality is those choices are simply a symptom of moral people compensating for the moral depravity of our own government.
The bigger impact is if no one buys newly issued equity.
The biggest impact is stopping them from collecting revenue, i.e. stopping the government from having privately run, for-profit prisons.