February 23, 2017

The Department Of Justice Announced It Will Start Using Private Prisons Again

The Obama DOJ vowed to stop using them last summer.

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Last summer, the Obama Department of Justice announced it would no longer use private prisons. Shortly after the DOJ announcement, the Department of Homeland Security also said it would reevaluate its use of private prisons. The stocks of companies like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now CoreCivic) and GEO Group promptly tanked. But then in November this thing no one thought would happen actually happened, and suddenly the private prison industry turned that frown upside down.

If the presidency of Donald Trump was an unexpected gift to the private prison industry, and Jeff Sessions’ confirmation as attorney general was a bow on the box, then today is Christmas morning for for-profit corrections companies:

Shane Bauer spent four months in a private prison working as a guard, and his article detailing that experience in the pages of Mother Jones should be read by anyone who has ever wondered what hell might actually look like.

 

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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