New York Daily News

The big private prison break

- ERROL LOUIS Louis is political anchor at NY1 News.

Kudos to Controller Tom DiNapoli for divesting state pension funds from the morally abhorrent private prison industry. Honorable mention to Sen. Brian Benjamin of Harlem and activists including the ACLU and Randy Credico for raising the issue months ago and finding creative ways to keep it in the public eye.

There’s no shortage of things to complain about in the state capital, but it’s important to celebrate the times that Albany gets it right.

Private prisons rank among the most morally abhorrent industries in America, an ugly outgrowth of the madness of mass incarcerat­ion over the last three decades.

The misguided War on Drugs and ever-higher prison sentences caused an explosive 800% increase in the federal prison population between 1980 and 2013. Facing a shortage of prison beds, the government began paying private companies to house human beings.

The companies that responded have grown tremendous­ly: Two of the biggest players, CoreCivic (formerly Correction­s Corp. of America) and the GEO Group, are traded on Wall Street.

It was a morally dicey propositio­n from day one: Imagine a prosecutor who got a cash payment every time she won a conviction, or a judge who earned a bonus tied to the number of years he sentenced a defendant to serve behind bars. We’d rightly fear that key players in our court system were motivated by money rather than the pursuit of justice.

Private prisons do exactly that, spending millions on political donations and lobbyists in support of tougher sentences and ever-more incarcerat­ion. At the end of 2015, there were over 22,000 inmates in private prisons, according to a federal Justice Department investigat­ion, and the report found they were less safe and secure than in regular prisons.

Now, the industry is hoping to strike it rich off the Trump administra­tion’s policy of arresting and detaining millions of undocument­ed immigrants: On the day after Trump won the election, the stock price of CoreCivic jumped 34% and GEO soared 18% within the first hour of trading.

DiNapoli, as sole trustee of New York’s state pension funds, sold off a relatively tiny $9.6 million stake in the two companies, and good for him. While for-profit prisons have been banned in our state, most New Yorkers would be horrified by the idea that their retirement was financed, in part, by money from locking up human beings for profit.

Jennifer Freeman, a spokeswoma­n for DiNapoli, told The News’ Ken Lovett that the divestment was a business decision.

“The current immigratio­n situation is creating even more risks in their business model, which has consequenc­es for their long-term value,” said Freeman.

That is finance-speak for the notion that the political controvers­y over mass incarcerat­ion and the Trump administra­tion’s immigratio­n policies could lead to a political backlash — including state bans on the use of private prisons — that would lead to losses for those invested in prison companies.

That’s somewhat beside the point, compared to Sen. Benjamin’s call for a law flatly banning investment in prison companies.

“By their very nature, private, forprofit prisons drive the inhumane practice of incarcerat­ing low-income people of color,” he told The News last December. All too true. The industry has been a strong backer of the Trump White House. One division of GEO Group donated $225,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC, and the main company gave another $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee — and after the election moved its annual retreat from its usual location to the Trump National Doral, a golf resort owned by the President.

While the industry is crawling into bed with the administra­tion, New Yorkers should thank DiNapoli for severing links with purveyors of a nasty business.

N.Y. is making a strong statement against companies that profit off incarcerat­ion

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