The Profit in Locking Up Our Kids (Multi Billion Dollar Industry)

17. November 2008 by Rev Young.

In September 2008, Lehman Brothers declared chapter 11 bankruptcy.  This major global investment company held many sub-prime and lower rated mortgages.  As a result of the mortgage and housing crisis, this major company was forced to sell $6 billion dollars in assets.  This effort was not enough to save the failing institution.

There is an even darker side to this company, that effects us.  Lehman Brothers was also the company that tried to pull off the biggest-ever private prison bailout by helping Corrections Corporation of America refinance a $1 billion credit agreement.  Lehman Brothers also helped Cornell Corrections, the number three private prison company set up stock offers and an Enron-esque “special purpose entity” that netted the prison company $217 million in additional capital.  Lehman Brothers is also one of the largest underwriters of private bonds.  Why is that interesting?  When Colorado voters denied the state funds to build another Supermax facility, the government turned to private gold bonds to  finance the new 900 + bed maximum security prison. 

There has been, and I hope continues to be, a grassroots movement that started on college campuses to stand against corporations that promoted prison expansion.  These organizations were quite effective against Sodexho-Marriott and Sodexho’s contracts with CCA.  They actually convinced Sodexho that it was in their best interest to sever their relationship with CCA or the campus activists would drive them off the campus.  Now that is a grass roots movement!  The name of the organization?  Not With Our Money!

These companies are just a small example of the corporations that are involved in prison expansion, prison labor or profiting in other ways from the enormous prison industry.  If you want to read more about this, I suggest (HIGHLY) that you read two books.  “The Perpetual Prisoner Machine” by Joel Dyer and “Prison Nation”. 

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