The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Despite pandemic, prisons pay for some
As factories and other businesses remain shuttered across America, people in prisons in at least 40 states continue going to work. Sometimes they earn pennies an hour, or nothing at all, making masks and hand sanitizer to help guard others from the coronavirus.
Those same men and women have been cut off from family visits for weeks, but they get charged up to $25 for a 15-minute phone call — plus a surcharge every time they add credit.
They also pay marked-up prices at the commissary for soap so they can wash their hands more frequently. That service can carry a 100 percent processing fee.
As the coronavirus cripples the economy, leaving millions unemployed and many companies on life support, big businesses that have become synonymous with the world’s largest prison system are still making money.
“It’s hard. Especially at a time like this, when you’re out of work, you’re waiting for unemployment, and you don’t have money to send,” said Keturah Bryan, who transfers hundreds of dollars each month to her 64-year-old father at a federal prison in Oklahoma.
The coronavirus outbreak has put an unlikely spotlight on America’s jails and prisons, which house more than 2.2 million people and have been described by health experts as petri dishes as the virus spreads.
Masks and hand sanitizer often aren’t provided. Testing is rarely carried out, even among those with symptoms, despite fears that surrounding communities may be affected. And in some parts of the country, those sickened by the virus languish in sweltering buildings with poor ventilation.
The concerns extend to outsourced prison health care, frequently accused by experts of offering substandard treatment even in the best of times.
Sheron Edwards shares a dorm with 50 other men at Chickasaw County Regional Correctional Facility in Mississippi. Given his past experiences with the prison’s medical provider, Centurion, he worries about what will happen if the coronavirus hits.
“I’m afraid they’ll just let us die in here,” he said.
More than 20,000 prisoners have been infected and 295 have died nationwide, according to an unofficial tally kept by the COVID-19 Behind Bars Data Project run by UCLA Law.
On Wednesday, officials in San
Diego announced the first death of a detainee in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center.
When incarceration rates soared to record highs in the 1980s and ’90s, some corporations saw a business opportunity. They promised lower costs and, in many cases, profit-sharing agreements. Prison and jail administrators started privatizing everything from food and commissary to entire operations of facilities.
In 2019, criminal and immigration justice advocates successfully moved nine major banks, including J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, to stop lending money to private prisons.
Today, some of corporate America’s biggest names, and many smaller companies, vie for a share of the $80 billion spent on mass incarceration each year in the U.S., roughly half of which stays in the public sector to pay for staff salaries and some health care costs, according to the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative.
A new report released Thursday by New York-based advocacy group Worth Rises detailed some 4,100 corporations that profit from the country’s prisons and jails. It identified corporations that support prison labor directly or through their supply chains. The group also recommended divesting from more than 180 publicly traded corporations and investment firms considered to cause the greatest harm to people behind bars and the communities that support them.
“The industry behind mass incarceration is bigger than many appreciate. So is the harm they cause and the power they wield,” said Bianca Tylek, the group’s founder and director.