My kid’s not here. He’s dead!
Because of him!
He ruined my fucking life.
In 2011, a judge in Pennsylvania was put on trial.
We turn now to the latest news
on the so-called kids for cash scandal in Pennsylvania,
in which judges took money
in exchange for sending thousands of juvenile offenders
to for-profit youth jails.
Judge Ciavarella was charged with
taking millions of dollars in kickbacks
for sending children away for crimes as minor as mocking a teacher online.
He said, “Well, I’m coming down to arrest her
for making a MySpace page about her vice principal.”
The scandal was one of many plaguing an industry
that has often sought profit over justice.
Many who served in private prisons
say officials had incentives to keep prisoners there
rather than rehabilitating them.
Today, the US imprisons more people,
both per capita and in terms of number of people incarcerated,
than any other country in the world.
African-Americans are being incarcerated
at nearly five times the rate of white Americans.
We have more African-Americans in this country
under criminal supervision right now than all of the slaves in 1850.
In a step to address racial inequity,
President Biden signed an executive order in 2021
banning all private prison contracts by the federal government.
This is the first step to stop corporations
from profiting off of incarceration.
But companies have found ways
to continue profiting from the multibillion-dollar industry.
As the Trump administration continues to crack down
on undocumented immigrants,
the majority of them will be sent to detention facilities
run by private companies.
This industry has started to shift
into what I like to call mass incarceration 2.0.
In Los Angeles County, for example.
in the last six years has increased the use of electronic monitors
by 5,000% .
I don’t really like that I have cameras in my house.
I don't like being recorded.
So will the private prison ban lead to a fairer justice system?
You’re outside your free zone. Do you have permission to be away?
I am not outside my free zone.
I was in bed, and you just woke me up.
Or has it provoked something altogether more sinister?
[SYSTEM ERROR]
We must wage what I have called total war
against public enemy number one in the United States—
the problem of dangerous drugs.
In the 80s and 90s,
the war on drugs and harsh sentencing policies
meant the US prison population skyrocketed.
Last year alone, over 10,000 drug criminals were convicted.
Overcrowding in this ten-year-old prison is already a problem—
two to a cell designed for one.
Private firms stepped in,
offering to build more facilities, and faster.
I think we’ll see the private sector
saving the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money.
But it wasn’t long before they had problems.
New questions are being raised tonight about
the wisdom of turning public prisons over to private operators.
It became apparent that, in many cases,
profits were prioritized over the care of those housed inside.
Private prisons raise a lot of the same issues
that are raised in publicly run facilities.
However, these issues are often exacerbated.
In many cases, their officers are wildly underpaid
and not paid benefits.
To save on costs,
private companies usually offer fewer staff incentives
and can struggle to retain employees.
On the day of this 2018 riot in New Mexico,
staff numbers were under 50 percent.
With keys to the entire 40-man cellblock and no guards,
the inmates take control.
There are only two ways to make money.
One is to increase your revenues, and one is to decrease your expenses.
And in the case of private prisons,
increasing revenues means more bodies behind bars.
And decreasing expenses means lower care
and quality of care for those people who are in your custody.
When Joe Biden became president in 2020,
many prison reform advocates were hopeful.
The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.
Biden promised criminal justice reform,
and his directive six days in seemed a step in the right direction.
He says he’s pulling America out of the private prison business.
It’s a break with what the Trump administration had done.
However, for decades, the private prison industry
has been finding other ways to fill empty beds.
After just a short time of the complex sitting vacant,
it has a new tenant: Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
What is happening is that these private prison industries
are turning around and filling these same beds
with people in immigration detention.
Open the door!
Come this way!
Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!
The 1980s, 1990s, you saw the war on drugs.
Now we are changing the laws as it pertains to marijuana,
we’re now seeing these prisons being filled by immigrants.
Eighty percent of undocumented immigrants
are being held inside privately run facilities,
generating over $1 billion for the largest prison companies in 2020.
The Trump administration
increased immigrant detention beds by over 50 percent in four years.
And what we saw was
the administration handed out sweetheart deals
to private prison companies.
There’s an incredible, I would say, financial incentive
not to reduce incarceration
but to change the population.
And changing the population hasn’t changed the problems,
which range from abuse of solitary to medical neglect.
Women in this privately run Georgia detention center
accused a gynecologist of carrying out surgeries on them
without their consent.
The facility was then closed under Biden.
At what point did you realize that you had had surgery?
When I woke up and I saw the incisions.
It turns out that I didn’t need the procedure that was performed.
The tragedies that we see
particularly in facilities that are run by private prison companies
means death.
It means unnecessary sickness and illness.
Their inactions are responsible for Carlos’s death.
What these private prison companies have in mind, of course,
are their bottom line,
and the abuses and the heartbreaks and the tragedies that we see
are the unfortunate result of that.
Expanding immigration services
is a new source of income for private companies,
but there are others, too.
Many of the for-profit firms that manage prisons and detention centers
have also diversified.
The reality is that
private interests have permeated our correctional and carceral system
across the country.
From food and phone calls to healthcare,
these companies have monetized all aspects of crime and punishment.
Now, they’re moving into a new frontier:
electronic surveillance.
I told county that if they put two beacons up
that the signals would interrupt each other,
and that’s exactly what’s happening.
The violations have just gotten worse.
Mohawk Johnson has been on an ankle monitor for nearly two years
after being arrested for alleged battery
at a Black Lives Matter protest.
He is still awaiting trial.
I don’t really like that I have cameras in my house.
I don’t like being recorded all the time.
He’s placed cameras in his bedroom to capture how often he’s woken up
to be told he’s not in his house.
You’re outside your free zone. Do you have permission to be away?
I am not. I’m in bed. You just woke me up.
Please stop waking me up.
They call my actual leg monitor.
It starts to vibrate and make a really loud noise.
Mr. Johnson, did you move your beacon?
The sheriff told me to move my beacon because I relocated.
The issues with his monitor
have placed him in a constant state of anxiety.
May I ask why I keep getting called at work?
This has happened, like, six or seven times.
It’s gotten bad to the point that when my phone vibrates,
I get scared because I think I’m in trouble.
I’m literally standing under my beacon.
We’re really extending the boundaries of of incarceration—
some people incarcerated in their homes,
some people incarcerated in the jail.
These firms don’t just collect money from the government.
They charge people for their own incarceration.
In many cases, you’re paying a daily fee
to be on electronic monitors.
And those would be $5, $10 a day, up to the highest I’ve seen is $47.
“Ankle shackles” has emerged as a term for these devices.
I’ve interviewed many Black people who have been on electronic monitors,
and they repeatedly talk about when they look at their ankle,
they think of a slave shackle.
Space allowed for each man,
six foot by one foot six.
For each woman, five foot by one foot four.
It’s definitely a shackle.
They always frame it as that they’re trying to rehabilitate people,
but you can’t really trigger somebody’s PTSD nonstop
and then say that that’s rehabilitative.
We have never asked these firms to focus on rehabilitation.
Our experiment with private prisons in the US has been a massive failure.
Following the US’s lead,
in recent decades, other countries around the world
have begun to experiment with privatization.
Scores of refugee and migrant children
were held for months and even years by the Australian government
at one of their refugee detention centers.
Dozens of children still live in the camp’s moldy tents.
I think one thing that always concerns us in the United States
is the international precedent that it sets.
They’ve spread in a number of ways,
particularly in the English-speaking world,
in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
But as the US starts to question the influence of these companies,
what happens if other countries don’t?
My main concern going forward is not so much in developed countries
but in less developed countries,
where they might be persuaded to go down this road
and end up regretting it later.