American Civil Liberties Union

Today, the ACLU released Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, an in-depth examination of the private prison industry.

Check out this great opinion piece at CNBC.com by David Shapiro of the ACLU National Prison Project about the problems with the for-profit, private prison industry.

Says David:

Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.

David is the author of a forthcoming, comprehensive report on private prisons. The ACLU’s work on the issue will be featured in a CNBC documentary on October 18.

In 2009, a 39-year-old detainee at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, died after a heart infection was allegedly allowed to go untreated. Stewart, the largest immigration detention center in the country, is owned by the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA), which also manages four other facilities in Georgia.

As Florida considers a bill that would create the largest private, for-profit incarceration system in the nation, some of the nation’s leading criminal justice experts joined me yesterday at a press conference outside the doors to the Florida House of Representatives to share their research showing that locking people away for profit is the wrong answer to Florida’s growing prison population and budget woes.