The New Capitalistic Venture Meets the Old Slavery Business

by Vanesia Johnson

I was immediately sickened, nauseated, and disturbed after hearing at the The Shooting of Michael Brown: Now What? forum held at Texas Southern University on October 9, 2014 that an investor could buy stock and profit from the rapidly growing prison privatization industry. It’s big business! Persons held captive are commodities for wealth. Yes, I said persons! The captives are real, alive, breathing human beings that despite their position in life have rights. Yes, I said rights! Although they are imprisoned, they are not slaves to be sold and purchased for capitalistic gains and profit. Our criminal justice system is not just broken but undoubtedly corrupt when increase in incarceration means wealth and prosperity for the stock market.

My disdain for this economic idea has grown to disgust, anguish, and insult. Insult fueled by unresolved resentments of my ancestral past. I cannot believe legislators have not found this practice of buying stock and shares in the privatization of prisons unlawful. How this idea ever came to practice baffles me? To think that even today, over a century after the abolishment of slavery, decades after the Civil Rights movement, and what so many claim as progress, we find ourselves once again profiting off humans in captivity. Not to mention that African Americans and Hispanics make up the largest percent of the incarcerated population. Have we no shame?

Let’s take the blinders off America! Our country has not changed but shifted slavery, an old economic framework, to subjugating person who commit crimes to the age old slavery business model. Profiting off the backs of humans in captivity is all too familiar in this country but intolerable for me as a fellow American. How can I trust police officers to make lawful arrests, judges to fairly enforce the law, or jurors to fairly try a man in a court of law without checking their stock portfolio? Buying stock and shares in the criminal justice system through privatization fuels corruption.

Our leaders must stop this act of inhumanity. It is a real threat to liberty and our democracy.