Who’s Counting on Blacks to Fill Prisons? Those Making a Profit

By: Tonyaa Weathersbee

Black men who shrug at incarceration as the cost of doing business in struggling communities might want to know that some folks are counting on them to cling to that warped notion.

I mean, literally counting on them.

Just the other day, I received this investment e-mail titled “Turning Prison Into Profit (Without Going to Jail).” In it, it comes breathtakingly close to extolling the prospect of unemployment hitting 10 percent and ratcheting up the crime rate.

And it advises investors to bet bucks on that dismal future.

“Readers might want to capitalize on this nascent trend by looking into shares of commercial jails,” it reads. “Florida-based Geo Group [a prison-management corporation] comes to mind as a prominent up-and-comer in this field of endeavor, with some 53,144 ‘beds under management…’”

Now, the definition of capitalism isn’t lost on me. Yet when I see unemployment and mass incarceration coldly reduced to a matter of dollars and cents; when I think of how someone may be putting his or her child through college with money made on speculating that someone else’s child will wind up in jail, I get angry.

I just wish more black people would get angry – because the people who’ll invariably make up a disproportionate number of the inmates who’ll fill those jails and prisons and fatten the pockets of private investors will look like them.

Who’s Counting on Blacks to Fill Prisons?....