At its annual shareholder meeting next week, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) will celebrate thirty years of incarcerating people in its for-profit prisons. This gives the company the dubious distinction of being the oldest for-profit prison company in modern America. And it's why the ACLU is working with civil rights organizations, labor, faith-based groups, and immigrant rights advocates to organize anti-CCA events around the country from now through their May 16 shareholder meeting in Nashville. Our message is clear: Thirty years of for-profit prisons is nothing to celebrate!
By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project at 3:02pm
Across the country, cash-strapped cities and counties are throwing poor defendants in jail for failing to pay legal debts that they can never hope to manage. On Monday, the New York Times told the story of Gina Ray, whose $179 speeding ticket mushroomed into $3,170 in fines and fees and 40 days in jail when she couldn’t afford to pay it. Gina is one of many swept up in America’s new debtors’ prisons, a growing problem nationwide.
Earlier this week, PBS aired the documentary Perpetuating Stigma about the ongoing criminalization of women with HIV. Through the stories of several women impacted by HIV criminalization — the use of criminal law to target people diagnosed with HIV for prosecutions and imprisonment — the documentary movingly illustrates how such laws dehumanize and stigmatize women living with HIV. But because of the opposition of the Alabama Department of Corrections, the producers of “Perpetuating Stigma” never got to tell the story of Dana Harley.
By Carl Takei, ACLU National Prison Project at 3:12pm
New Orleans' incarceration rate is the highest in the country — the city locks up three times more people than the national average. The city jail, Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), holds nearly 3,200 prisoners and remains the largest per-capita jail in the nation. But Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman wants to use hundreds of millions of dollars in post-Katrina Federal Emergency Management Adminstration (FEMA) reconstruction funds to make it even bigger.
