Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies

http://qz.com/434984/columbia-becomes-the-first-us-university-to-divest-from-private-prison-companies/

by shill • 11 years ago

278 72 11 years ago

Blackthorn• 11 years ago

While this is great news, I challenge Columbia to do one better.

My own alma mater, Bard College, created a program called the Bard Prison Initiative. This program teaches college courses for college credit to incarcerated prisoners in the state of New York, ultimately awarding either Associates or Bachelors degrees from Bard College. Education for prisoners is important from both a moral and economic perspective, dramatically reducing recidivism as well as saving money (a $1 investment in prison education reduces incarceration costs by $3-$4 in the first three years of an inmate's release[1]).

This is a great first step but it is not enough to simply not support the prison industry. There are proven steps that can be taken here to reduce recidivism and help society. Despite this, the Bard Prison Initiative is chronically underfunded despite support by governor Cuomo due to politicians not wanting to appear soft on crime. Columbia is a much wealthier university than Bard College, so I challenge them to join Bard in their initiative.

[1] http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-and-education-departme...

JesperRavn• 11 years ago

It's not mentioned in the article but Columbia also has a very progressive hiring policy to help people get jobs after prison. For example, they hired convicted murderer and terrorist Cathy Boudin as an adjunct professor[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Boudin

afarrell• 11 years ago

I cannot tell from your comment if that was snarky or genuine because I know nothing about Ms. Boudin.

chimeracoder3• 11 years ago

In a way, Columbia already does!

Columbia's School of General Studies is targeted at students without a high school diploma, students with "nontraditional" backgrounds, and students who have taken more than a year off after high school before going to school. I went to Columbia, and while I wasn't in GS, a lot of my friends were.

A large number of GS students are veterans[0]. Of the rest, a surprising number are people with, well, backgrounds that typically disqualify a person from an Ivy League education.

I can't share their stories because they're not mine to share, but I had classmates who were caught (and incarcerated for) drug trafficking and other serious-but-nonviolent crimes[1]. I know this because they told me, and they felt comfortable enough in their academic environment sharing this knowledge. To me, that really says something about not only the admissions process, but also the community and support that they receive as students.

As a non-GS student, I really appreciated this setup. My education would not have been the same had I not been sitting next to these students in our discussion sections for class, or serving on the boards of student organizations with them. And at the same time, they were able to benefit from the structure of a school that was explicitly tailored to students with nontraditional backgrounds.

Columbia could do a lot more to support GS students[3], as well as support incarcerated prisoners who are not students, but this is something they've been doing for decades without any fanfare at all.

Columbia also has a very long history of accepting veterans who were discharged for being gay, even long before Don't Ask, Don't Tell (Stephen Donaldson was a Columbia student before joining the military[4]). IIRC, many of these discharges would have been dishonorable discharges, which in some states carries the same status as being a convicted felon.

[0] Partly because Columbia GS is so proactive about recruiting on military bases, and partly because their yellow ribbon matching is so generous.

[1] I mention nonviolent crimes because that's what (some of) my GS friends shared with me. I don't know of any who were convicted of violent crimes, and I don't know if this is simply selection bias or if there really weren't any.

[3] If anyone reading this has $100MM to spare, the General Studies school could benefit greatly from its own endowment to increase access to financial aid!

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Donaldson_%28activist%...

jrcii• 11 years ago

I attended a General Studies information session at Columbia. They sit you around a little table with 10 other people, tell you how great the program is and that it will cost $40k/year with little-to-no financial aid.

a-dub2• 11 years ago

Full time tuition at Columbia runs around $52k/yr. Their Yellow Ribbon matching works out to about $8k/yr. So they're raking in a nearly guaranteed $44k/yr from the Federal government for every vet they enroll.

GS isn't some benevolent social program, they see the grant dollars and they take them. They've been experts at this for a long, long time.

The cynical part is that they use completely different diplomas, transcript codes and CEEB codes for the GS program. This is non-standard, where most other universities fully integrate their veteran and re-entry students across the board. (including financial aid)

Shivetya2• 11 years ago

they would also need to press local legislatures to remove many of the restrictions on felons as to what jobs they may hold let alone which certifications they may attain. many who return to the work force who were in white collar jobs can find their profession is blocked from them, even many blue collar workers will have lost their certifications and not be allowed back into their trades.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

Unless they went to prison for something job related like fraud i don't see how this policy would help ex inmates.

You serve your time and you are released to find out that you will be punished the rest of your life by not having access to the profession you've been doing all your life.

And then everybody wonders why people like that fall back to a life of crime. The system is pushing them that way they actually have to fight it to get out.

minthd• 11 years ago

I think something like mooc's(or maybe something like platzi - with it's high[~70%] completion rates) would fit well for prisons ,especially that some states have started to let their prisoners use tablets[1].

[1]http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/17/tablets...

throwaway6497• 11 years ago

This is awesome news by itself. I hope all other US universities follow suit, if they are not doing this already. That will be several billion dollars divestment from bad actors; private prison corporations, in this case.

andrewstuart• 11 years ago

If the futile and counter productive prohibition of drugs comes to an end then all those prisons won't be needed.

wtvanhest• 11 years ago

Drug sentences are only part of the problem. Many violent and non-violent crimes carry far greater sentences than they did in the 1970s.

Extremely high sentences do several bad things, first, they normalize giving extremely high sentences so relatively a 3 year sentence seems low, when in reality, that is nearly 5% of someone's life. Second, large sentences force otherwise innocent people to plea out of charges because the risk is simply too high.

shill• 11 years ago

The Corrections Corporation of America noted this as a risk factor in their 2011 10-K filing.

"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."

Source: http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...

jflatow3• 11 years ago

Interesting article, but the first graph is one of the most blatantly misleading charts I have seen in a long time. Showing two graphs overlapping on completely different scales is a really nasty trick.

adamrt• 11 years ago

Extremely. Also, it looks like they picked random years for the data points as well. They cross in 2010 like it has some significance.

jflatow3• 11 years ago

Right, good point - when you choose arbitrary scales you can make them cross whenever you want.

chimeracoder3• 11 years ago

Interesting article, but the first graph is one of the most blatantly misleading charts I have seen in a long time. Showing two graphs overlapping on completely different scales is a really nasty trick.

They are the same in 2010 because that's where the graph starts. The rest of the graph should be interpreted as "cumulative growth as of $DATE, relative to 2010".

This is actually a common way of presenting two stocks. I believe Google Finance does it. Search for any ticker symbol (e.g. GOOG) and then type in another where it says "compare" (e.g. TWTR). No matter how far back you pull the graph, the leftmost points on each line will always overlap.

I agree that it's a bit weird if you're not used to it.

jflatow3• 11 years ago

I don't think so - in Google Finance compare both graphs are actually on the same scale. Since the scales here are independent, it depends on the chosen scale where they will cross. The graphs do not start in 2010, they start in 2000.

kbenson• 11 years ago

Interestingly, I think it would be more illustrative of their point if they presented the graphs in some normalized form (such as percentage increase). The private inmate population has risen ~48% (~89k to ~132k) over that time period, while the total inmate population has risen ~14% (~1.95m to ~2.22m).

dsinsky3• 11 years ago

Is there any reason to believe that private prisons are significantly worse than publicly run prisons?

I agree that the U.S. is badly in need of major reforms in its criminal justice system, but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?

Private prisons may do some regrettable lobbying on behalf of longer prison sentences, but I'm pretty sure that the corrections officers unions (most of whose membership works in publicly run prisons) is a far stronger political force.

It seems as though the students' activist energy would have been better used fighting the policies of mass incarceration rather than the private companies who do the government's bidding in applying them.

serf• 11 years ago

Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public entities do. The problems stem from that.

That is more or less the ACLU's opinion, as well.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-so...

dsinsky3• 11 years ago

> Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public entities do.

Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.

http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-califor...

> The problems stem from that.

This seems like a serious inversion of cause and effect. Our problems with prisons pre-dated the growth in private prisons and private prisons remain a small fraction of the overall prison industry so its hard to see how private prisons could be the primary source of the problem.

smsm425• 11 years ago

Do unions count as public entities or private ones? Because they have a lot of motivation, and a lot of money, and a lot of success of converting the former into political clout. But somehow I don't see their motives questioned as often as "motivation to maximize profits".

There are a lot of companies that extract profits from what can be regarded as other's misfortune - from hospitals to computer security specialists. However that does not necessarily means that hospitals promote disease and computer security professionals routinely spread malware and deliberately compromise their clients' security, to boost their business. Something better than "they have motive to do so" would be required for that claim.

cnp• 11 years ago

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal for an example of why this is a bad idea in practice.

dsinsky3• 11 years ago

This doesn't really answer the question since I could point to hundreds of scandals at publicly run prisons (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/nyregion/even-as-many-eyes...)

Prisons are cesspools of abuse, that doesn't make private prisons worse than public ones.

uhwhat• 11 years ago

Direct incentives for financial gains from higher incarceration rates, and kicking that money back to lobby for laws that put more people in prison at tax payers expense...

Baby steps.

PavlovsCat• 11 years ago

"private companies who do the government's bidding"

It's not so simple.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/h...

Nearly two-thirds of private prison contracts mandate that state and local governments maintain a certain occupancy rate – usually 90 percent – or require taxpayers to pay for empty beds. In Arizona, three private prisons are operating with a 100 percent occupancy guarantee, according to Mother Jones. There’s even a lockup quota at the federal level: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget includes a mandate from Congress that at least 34,000 immigrants remain detained on a daily basis, a quota that has steadily grown each year, even as the undocumented immigrant population in the United States has leveled off.

slmyers• 11 years ago

Private prisons are widely acknowledged as being utter hell holes, and spawn corruption at the highest levels.

A description of a Youth "correctional" facility in Mississippi:

"Federal Judge Carlton Reeves wrote that the youth prison "has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk." http://www.npr.org/2012/04/24/151276620/firm-leaves-miss-aft...

Also, there are things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal: "Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Not to mention the that the private prison industry lobbies for harsher sentences and basically are a bunch of soulless vampires.

gnopgnip• 11 years ago

Prisons are already getting paid based on their capacity and not occupancy, so sentencing would not affect their bottom line the same way public prisons would be.

tracker1• 11 years ago

How about it just seems morally wrong to create a business where the incentive is increasing imprisonment. This ranges from not just lobbying efforts, and in some states iirc, it's still correction officers working there. To over-reporting and escalating minor infractions so as to deter parole.

I understand that scandals happen in government managed prisons as well. However, the saying two wrongs don't make a right comes to mind. In this case the business model is morally wrong, plain and simple.

lectrick2• 11 years ago

The problem with private prisons is the conflict of interest.

As a private for-profit prison employing what is effectively cheap slave labor, you have zero incentive to actually reform or to reduce the amount of people who become imprisoned or the amount of time they are imprisoned for. You are in fact financially incentivized to do the opposite; classic perverse incentive.

As someone else in here posted, The Corrections Corporation of America noted relaxation of drug enforcement efforts as a RISK FACTOR in their 2011 10-K filing:

http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...

Does this not scream "conflict of interest not in the interest of the greater good" to you? It does to me.

For an example of what happens when you allow this on a larger scale, see North Korea. Not a country anyone should be taking after!

For what it's worth, I just so happen to have initiated a monthly $100 donation to http://innocenceproject.org/ just this morning after reading this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/fbi-evidence-...

scelerat• 11 years ago

The problem with private prisons is the conflict of interest.

And ought to be outlawed for this very reason, IMO.

s73v3r3• 11 years ago

"Is there any reason to believe that private prisons are significantly worse than publicly run prisons?"

They have a profit motive to lobby for harsher penalties, and to do the absolute bare minimum for prisoner housing and health.

"but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?"

Yes. I, for one, do no buy the bullshit that says that private entities are always better than public ones.

slg3• 11 years ago

While I admire the motivation, everything I have seen has stated divestment doesn't have much of an economic impact. If these companies are profitable, they will still be profitable. In fact, the profits will end up being concentrated with less morally minded investors, which can make the problem even worse. A moral stockholder can help drive the company in a moral direction. However if the only stockholders left put profit above all other motivations, the company has less and less incentive to make morally sound decisions.

icanhackit• 11 years ago

If these companies are profitable, they will still be profitable.

Until it becomes politically untenable to provide contracts to these companies or make laws that fuel the industry.

A moral stockholder can help drive the company in a moral direction.

Why would you hold stock in something if the morals you wish to champion will make it less profitable or non-existent? Better to drop that cash in something like renewables which are going to see growth for decades to come and give you warm fuzzies at the same time.

There's also the press angle:

Press: You invest in private prisons

University: But we do so with good intentions, we wish to improve the...

Public: Ugh, too many words. These guys are clearly jerks.

slg3• 11 years ago

You have a valid point. It doesn't make sense for a single investor to actively work against their financial interests by devaluing stock they own. But that shouldn't necessarily hold true for institutional investors, especially a university like Columbia that already has a multi billion dollar endowment and doesn't have the financial pressure to be forced to make the most profitable decisions. For example, PETA owns SeaWorld shares for the purpose of attending and protesting the company at their stockholder meetings. PETA would be perfectly happy to lose their investment and they would just attribute that as the cost of accomplishing their mission.

Really divestment is the no man's land between working for change and supporting the status quo. Instead of doing good, Columbia just decided to stop doing bad.

ganeumann2• 11 years ago

Source?

The 1980s pressure to divest from South Africa is sometimes credited with pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Afric...). University investment funds were in the vanguard, after student protests on campus.

But in that case, as would be true here, change came more from the awareness of the problem divestment brings as the economic effect. Private action can motivate public action.

Regardless, financing the activities of something you find immoral is immoral. Your logic--that if you don't do something, someone else will--is the rationalization for much wrongdoing.

Symmetry• 11 years ago

That article seems to lump together divestment, which requires near unanimity of the market to be effective, and boycott, whose effects scale linearly with the number of people participating.

Divestment campaigns are problematic in that people have finite reserves of outrage and if they write a letter to the local university president urging divestment they're less likely to go on to write their state senator urging them to stop using private prisons.

slg3• 11 years ago

Source?

From http://www.iop.harvard.edu/does-divestment-work

"The conventional wisdom is that divestment from South Africa was a success; public pressure lowered targeted companies’ stock prices and forced them to comply with the divestment activists’ demands. However, the true impact of divestment from South Africa is unclear. In a 1999 study, Ivo Welch and C. Paul Wazzan examined the impact of divestment from banks and corporations active in South Africa and found that these campaigns had almost no impact on public market valuations:"

And from the 1999 study they referenced:

"Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of divesting companies, the financial markets’ valuations of targeted companies or even the South African financial markets themselves were not easily visibly affected. The sanctions may have been effective in raising the public moral standards or public awareness of South African repression, but it appears that financial markets managed to avoid the brunt of the sanctions."

cperkins• 11 years ago

Nice work, Colombia. I hope that others follow suit.

And maybe the awareness around this issue will then lead to a discussion of the high human cost of the War on Drugs, the greatest burden borne by our citizens of color. And maybe that will cause us to revisit our criminal justice system and end the war on drugs.

Private prisons are a symptom, not a cause. For a better understanding of the forces leading to prison privitization and a myriad of other woes and injustices I _strongly_ recommend reading "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander.

adamnemecek• 11 years ago

Colombia != Columbia

tempodox• 11 years ago

That makes a Plus in my book for Columbia. And I thank the students who set this in motion with their protests.

chrisgd• 11 years ago

I don't understand why this matters? In every transaction, there is a buyer and a seller. Even if Columbia divests, someone else is buying in.

The bigger impact is if no one buys newly issued equity.

The biggest impact is stopping them from collecting revenue, i.e. stopping the government from having privately run, for-profit prisons.

wahsd• 11 years ago

The thing about this is that as long as there is a private prison industry, or really any privatization of fundamental government functions, that makes profits, there will be investors that will replace anyone who makes some moral investment decisions.

I laud their efforts and there really should be more of these ethical decisions in investment by public organizations, but reality is those choices are simply a symptom of moral people compensating for the moral depravity of our own government.

njharman• 11 years ago

Guess I was naive. Assumed few to no universities invested in prisons...

Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies

Related Stories