Elizabeth Warren proposes a ban on private prisons and immigration facilities

Elizabeth Warren has added another plank to her prodigious and admirable campaign platform of well-thought-through, progressive, sensible, popular proposals for a Warren administration: banning federal agencies (including ICE and the Department of Corrections) from contracting with private prisons. Warren also wants to stop contractors from charging inmates fees for essential services (including price-gouging on phone-calls, videoconferncing, mail, and email), and forcing contractors to comply with FOIA requests for information on their activities on behalf of government agencies.

However bad you imagine private prisons are, you're probably underestimating their awfulness. It's not just the slave labor, it's also the torture, the inhumane medical situation, the incredible violence, and worse. Private prisons are incredibly profitable, and some of those profits are used to draft laws that send more people to (private) prisons; the industry also pays out massive sums (we see you, Chuck Schumer) and their lobbyists are everywhere (looking at you, Beto O'Rourke); when all else fails, they're not above bribing judges to fill their cells with young, brown bodies.

When Obama tried to sunset federal reliance on private prisons, the industry responded by diversifying into immigration detention, halfway houses, and mental health and even though Trump reverse the Obama policy, immigration detention has ushered in a golden age of grifting for the industry, and the GOP #taxscam was especially kind to firms who earn their profits by imprisoning people.

The massive profits from private prisons have also been used to fund legislative initiatives to expand the industry at the state level, rather than improving the conditions in inhumane immigration detention centers, where things have been deteriorating for years. Read the rest