Prisons are Using Military-Grade Tear Gas to Punish People
"... Mount Olive is just one of dozens of prisons nationwide turning to chemical agents for control as labor shortages, private incentives, and intense marketing drive prisons to supplement overworked guards, in overcrowded prisons, by relying directly on pain.

 'Most of these weapons are designed by the military,' says Dr. Rohini Haar, a medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights, “and they’re designed for military uses. But the military, especially the US military, is a limited market. So the next step for companies that are trying to make a profit off these weapons that they design is to sell them to one, law enforcement and police, and two, to prisons.

 'And as there’s more and more attention being paid to social protest and police brutality, prisons are becoming a bigger market for these. Because they’re sold quietly, there’s less regulation, and the market is there.'"

Screening Out Family Time: The For-Profit Video Visitation Industry in Prisons and Jails
"Video technology like Skype or FaceTime can be a great way to stay together for people who are far apart. It is not the same as being there in person, but it is better than a phone call or sending a letter.

Given that there are 2.2 million people who are incarcerated, often many hundreds of miles from their homes, it should be no surprise that prison and jail video visitation is quietly sweeping the nation.

But video visitation is not like Skype or FaceTime. For one, these well-known technologies are a high-quality, free supplement to time spent together, in-person. The video visitation that is sweeping through U.S. jails is almost the exact opposite.

In order to stimulate demand for their low-quality product, jails and video visitation companies work together to shut down the traditional in-person visitation rooms and instead require families to pay up to $1.50 per minute for visits via computer screen."

Community Corrections: Profiteering, Corruption and Widening the Net
"Smoke and Mirrors is a new series that dives into the details of "bipartisan prison reform" to reveal the right-wing, neoliberal carceral sleight of hand that's really at work. It asks hard questions about the content and consequences of various proposals and explores ways in which commitments to unregulated free markets, privatization and states' rights drive the agenda for a new generation of reforms that will reinforce structural racism, intensify economic violence and contribute to the normalization of a surveillance society."

See the related report: Treatment Industrial Complex: How For-Profit Prison Corporations are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain

Meet The Companies That Just Promised To Pull 60 Million Dollars From Private Prisons

Three investment groups announced this week that they will divest from the two major private prison corporations that constitute a massive share of America’s prison-industrial complex.

Scopia Capital, DSM, and Amica Mutual Insurance have all pledged to remove their collective investments of about $60,000,000 from the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group — the two prison companies that own 75 percent of the nation’s private prisons. The decision to divest comes on the heels of pressure from Color Of Change, a racial and economic justice advocacy group that ran a campaign asking a total 150 companies to stop investing in the private prison industry.

Read on...