Prison Profiteers: New Book by Prison Legal News

Our friends at Prison Legal News have released the third in their series of anthologies on mass incarceration in the U.S., Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration? This time the focus is on who benefits from mass incarceration, including a look at the private prison industry. From the publisher:

Prison Profiteers is unique from other books on the market because it exposes and discusses who profits and benefits from mass imprisonment, rather than who is harmed by it and how.

Why is sentencing reform dead on arrival in every state legislature and congress? What is the biggest transfer of public wealth into private hands in recent history? Read Prison Profiteers and you will know! Hint: It has to do with prisons.

Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

The book features contributions from our TPB's own Judy Greene on private prison giants CCA and the GEO Group, as well as pieces on privatized prison health care, prisoner transportation, and pieces on how mass incarceration affects urban neighborhoods and rural economies. I'll be ordering my copy from Prison Legal News' bookstore.