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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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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