The Editorial Board recently published an editorial opposing SPEAR’s referendum calling on the University to divest from private prisons. It argued against the University divesting in general and more specifically, against divesting from private prisons. We will refute their arguments by explaining the inherent moral reprehensibility of prison privatization that the Board fails to understand.
In objecting to divestment in general, the Board claims that “the neutrality of the endowment should be maintained, and its investment practices should not be politicized.” But can neutrality actually be achieved when an institution is helping to fund an industry and benefiting monetarily? The Board fails to see that by investing in a company, an institution conveys that it sufficiently approves of the company’s actions to be a shareholder, essentially endorsing the company’s positions. Thus, divesting from a company is not a statement of being actively against a company. Rather, it retracts the endorsement implied through investment by asserting that Princeton as an institution will not economically support the operation of private prisons.
The Board claims that “student referenda are… poor measures of support in the University community for a proposition.” It calls into question the validity of students expressing their voices through the forum that the Undergraduate Student Government provides. If the Board wants to question the efficacy of referenda, it should also consider the elections of class representatives; voting for representatives received a much smaller percentage of votes than SPEAR’s referendum did. The referendum received over 1,600 votes — 30.1 percent of the student body, just short of the required 33.3 percent. Among the voters, 89.0 percent voted in favor. That is as close as the University can come to consensus when there is such low voter turnout, especially given that voting on the referendum far exceeded voting on the USG candidates.
The Board argues against divestment because it presumes opposition among those who did not vote; however, abstention does not translate to opposition. It is just as likely that students didn’t even know about the referendum, given the incredibly short timetable for campaigning. It’s also incredibly ironic that while advocating for “neutrality” in our endowment, the Editorial Board assumes opposition in matters of student opinion. Clearly, this is an issue that students care about, and we cannot ignore the demands of over 1,600 students under the guise of preserving “free and open academic discourse.”
The Board relies on such overused accusations of the “stifling of discourse”in noting that “the lack of an organized opposition campaign to this first-time referendum resulted in largely one-sided public advocacy.” According to USG referendum rules, the referendum’s sponsors are prohibited from campaigning until an opposition party, if it exists, officially organizes by one week prior to the election. Then, both sides are given the remaining time to campaign.
The Board should recognize that there was no real opposition to this referendum. Free and open academic discourse happened; the Board must acknowledge that rather than reproducing the status quo that it seems to consistently endorse, this discourse led to a clear and resounding call from a large portion of the student body to divest from private prisons. The most visible and substantive opposition to the referendum so far took the form of the ‘Prince’ editorial itself.
Next, the Board moves into arguments specifically against SPEAR’s referendum. The Board suggests that SPEAR “conflate[s] issues surrounding the criminal justice system with issues surrounding private prisons.” This statement is perplexing, since private prisons are undeniably a subset of the prison system. Still, it seems that the Board means that there is an insufficient causal link between the actions of private companies and the issue of mass incarceration itself.
To better understand the link between private prisons and mass incarceration, one simply needs to consider the reprehensible incentives and logic by which a private prison operates. A private prison profits by charging the government rent. Thus, its profits are a direct function of the number of people it incarcerates and the duration of their sentences — and of the number of people who recidivate after they are released. It seeks to maximize these three quantities in order to maximize profit. It should not be hard to see why private prisons then lobby for incarceration over alternatives such as drug treatment programs, mental health services and restorative justice — alternatives that are not only more humane, but also cheaper and in fact “not likely to result in large increases in crime and recidivism,” according to a report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Such corporations would also like the government to enact policies of mandatory detention, by which individuals with pending immigration cases are automatically separated from their families and detained without any sort of individualized assessment. Likewise, they would like to promote longer sentences via mandatory minimums and to cut back on in-prison programs such as education and career workshops so that when released into a society that enacts barriers to individuals with criminal histories attaining jobs, education, student aid and housing, former prisoners are more likely to re-commit a crime. Such in-prison programs have been shown to reduce an individual’s likelihood of re-arrest by at least 40 percent. In 2015, the Corrections Corporation of America collected $3,356 tax dollars in profit per prisoner, money that went into padding its shareholders’ pockets instead of to such programs.
Apart from how these motivations directly influence criminal justice policy, they are themselves morally repugnant. We hold individuals accountable for intent to harm in our justice system and everyday moral relations; why should we not do the same of our institutions? The Editorial Board writes that government entities’ choice “to employ private companies to either run prisons or provide the services necessary to run them … should be viewed separately from the policies determining why people are incarcerated.” Even if we take on this naïve supposition that the government is free from corporate influence, private prisons exist for the sake of incarceration. There is no way to separate them from why and how people are incarcerated.
Then again, the claim that there is insufficient evidence to prove that private prison corporations influence policy is preposterous. The Board writes that “the link between lobbying by these corporations and changes in federal or state laws is unclear” because many other organizations, such as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, lobby for such changes.
Private prisons are a $4.8 billion industry with capital and power that public sector prison unions do not have. The Board’s claim that because corruption exists in other parts of the criminal justice system, we should not divest from one is problematic. This is the same argument that has been made against other divestment cases, particularly that of South African apartheid, which the Board highlighted as a shining example of how “divestment should only occur in the most extreme of circumstances and when proposals are backed by substantial consensus among the Princeton community.” We wonder where this consensus was in April 1985, when John Outwater III ’85 rejected divestment in a ‘Prince’ article by asking, “Why South Africa? Economically, blacks in South Africa are better off than blacks in most other African nations. Politically, they are in the same situation — they have no rights.” By following a legacy of anti-divestment sentiment, the current Board continues to obstruct comprehensive movement towards justice by acting against a profound injustice.
The Board claims that while “SPEAR cites several concerning examples of behavior by private prison companies in its referendum fact sheet, they provide little evidence of issues unique to private prisons.” The fact thatpublic prisons frequently perpetrate human rights violations should not stop us from taking action on these issues in private prisons. For the same reason that we cannot invest in public institutions, we can’t divest from public institutions, but we can ensure that our investments in companies are in line with our University values.
The Board also argues against divestment based on the claim that there is inconclusive evidence that private prisons are more harmful than public prisons. The Washington Post article that the Board cites states, “some states allow privatization without requiring cost and quality evaluations at all.” This means that we have absolutely no way of knowing what’s going on inside a large percentage of private prisons. There is a lack of data, and that is a major problem we have previously highlighted about private prisons. These are companies that hold contracts and have the power to dictate the terms of those contracts, which often fail to contain clauses mandating reports on the treatment of prisoners. The end goal of these contracts is to make sure that incarcerated people are kept out of sight; the system is incentivized against accountability.
Additionally, the same Washington Post article supports the divestment coalition’s position. It goes on to point out that “even if the public and private sectors are equivalent, one can argue against privatization on the grounds that… it enables greater expansion of the prison system and therefore may increase incarceration and hinder the search for alternative penal policies.” Thus, the Board failed to respond to the points that refute their arguments.
We ask that the Princeton community question the Board’s poorly argued and researched stance and that it condemn the Board’s choice to perpetuate the unjust status quo under the guise of “political neutrality.” In 1978, Princeton’s Board of Trustees came out against divestment from companies that supported South African apartheid by stating their commitment to a “strong presumption against the university as an institution taking a position or playing an active role with respect to external issues of a political, economic, social, moral, or legal character.”
This delayed divestment from South Africa by about five years, and as we know it, Princeton was on the wrong side of history. Do we want to make the same mistake again for the same reasons? We hope not.
Signed,
Julie Chen ’17
Alice Mar-Abe ’18
Micah Herskind ’19
Members of the Princeton Private Prison Divestment Coalition
Read More
Campus is isolated: Be the voice that speaks out
Wynne Conger“Although today’s encampment represents a significant and monumental stride in campus activism, the culture of the Orange Bubble must fundamentally shift in order to ensure long term change.”
Protesting for peace and justice
Nura Liepsner“To me, the work that pro-Palestine protesters at Princeton, across the nation, and abroad are fighting for can be viewed as a part of a much larger dream of liberation.”
“To me, the work that pro-Palestine protesters at Princeton, across the nation, and abroad are fighting for can be viewed as a part of a much larger dream of liberation.”
Encampments are not ‘inherently unsafe.’ Princeton should not arrest or expel students for them.
Daily Princetonian Editorial Board“We urge Princeton to cease student arrests and to refrain from expelling students simply for engaging in prolonged protest.”
“We urge Princeton to cease student arrests and to refrain from expelling students simply for engaging in prolonged protest.”
