A Cage Built of Dollars: Who Profits from the Prison Industrial Complex?

A Cage Built of Dollars: Who Profits from the Prison Industrial Complex?
An advocate's look at the private prison industry, mass incarceration, and the companies that profit from crime rates real or imagined

The human spirit is a resilient thing, a light that flickers in the deepest dark.

And yet, we, as a people, have become masters in the art of building cages. We have become architects of the shadow.

But I must ask you: What happens when the cage itself is a private (for profit) business? Not a place of somber reflection or rehabilitation, but a line item on a stock portfolio?

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We call it, in whispers, the prison industrial complex.

I have seen this shadow before.

It wore different clothes in 1870. It called itself convict-leasing. It took its justification from a crack in the 13th Amendment, that insidious little phrase: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime."

Ah, there it is. The except.

A loophole wide enough to build a new kind of plantation. A system that learned to criminalize…