Applying the Heat on CCA
Last May, a few dozen members, their family and staff from the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association (OCSEA)/AFSCME Local 11 traveled to Nashville, Tenn., to keep the pressure on Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) at its annual shareholders' meeting.
It wasn't the first time the group of Buckeye State activists has stormed south to disrupt the shareholder proceedings of CCA, one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the country. Just as they have done in the past, the union members teamed with the Public Safety and Justice Coalition. Their collective beef: a move by the federal government and Lehman Brothers to bail out private-prison firms on the brink of bankruptcy.
As shareholders convened inside a Nashville hotel, protesters marched around the building, waving signs and drawing the attention of motorists and other passers-by. Their message was loud and clear: State and local governments — led by conservatives as well as liberals — are becoming disenchanted with private prisons.
Since the 1990s, ACU activists have done a good job of exposing the perils of prison privatization, but now their battle is with the federal government and investment banks, which are throwing money at CCA and other for-profits despite their financial decline. As recently as May, the Federal Bureau of Prisons awarded the company a three-year, $109 million contract to house federal non-citizen inmates in an empty prison owned by CCA in Georgia.
