By Joseph Rosen
Thanks to President Trump and Governor Edwards’ racist persecution of migrants, a few rich shareholders at private prison companies GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, and CoreCivic have raked in millions of dollars in profits from an expanding network of more than 15 lockups across the state.
Meanwhile, working people in Louisiana have seen their families torn apart and their wages kept criminally low.
On any given day, around 9,000 men, women, and children are held captive in ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) concentration camps across Louisiana for no reason except to terrorize and super-exploit non-citizen workers. With taxpayer money, ICE contracts private prison companies and parish jails to carry out this abominable ‘business.’
Every year the capitalist U.S. government deducts millions in taxes from the paychecks of workers—citizen and non-citizen alike—in order to hand that money over to multi-millionaire prison owners. Last year, more than $600,000,000 in taxpayer money went to GEO Group; CEO George C. Zoley skimmed $6,963,460 for himself alone.
Capitalists reserve some of their profits for bribing politicians: in 2016, the GEO Group Political Action Committee spent more than $1 million this way. Similarly, the owners of LaSalle Corrections have donated thousands of dollars to Louisiana politicians including Governor Edwards. For this price, GEO Group and LaSalle secure more business and influence over the policies that affect their means of profit-making. This is just one way they work to keep wages down for all workers, citizen and non-citizen alike.
The owners of private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic also reap huge profits from the forced labor and slave wages of the men and women in their custody. Over 60,000 people held captive in a GEO Group work-camp in Aurora, Colorado are seeking damages for being forced to work for $1 or less a day, many under the threat of solitary confinement. Just as in other prisons across the country, this type of slavery is widespread: GEO Group alone operates 130 facilities across the country.
Capitalists get the most profit out of production by putting workers in competition with one another for wages. The less they pay one worker, the lower the wage rate another worker will have to settle for. Citizen workers are worse off when the bosses cheat their non-citizen brothers and sisters who are worse off when the bosses cheat their imprisoned brothers and sisters. Workers are strongest when we come together to fight against our common enemy: the millionaires who would enslave us all if only they owned enough prisons to keep us captive. Workers must unite to put an end to the camps and gather our forces for war on these slavemaster CEOs.