I’ve just added, as a more permanent page, an email I just received from friend Si Kahn, founder and executive director of Grassroots Leadership. In it he details just what Grassroots Leadership is doing to stop plans for a 1500 “bed” for-profit prison to house undocumented Latinos.

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure and honor of doing research for Si and his wife, Elizabeth Minnich, for their book, The Fox in the Henhouse: How Privatization Threatens Democracy. Si has been working for many years against private for-profit prisons, the ramifications of which are staggering. Thus far in this blog I’ve mostly written about and cited examples of bureaucratic abuse and corruption that have power over others at their center. The profiteering, though astronomical, is for many people secondary to the power.

In the case that Si writes about, it seems that the profit motive comes first. The bald arrogance of it–to pursue the building of this private prison through the city and county even long after the state of North Carolina has ceased to outsource prison management–speaks to an overweening sense of entitlement by some who have come to mistake the public trust as their private right.

I should know better, as a psychologist, but there’s still a part of me that can’t help but wonder how anyone can even imagine they should be allowed to make a fortune off of other people’s misery, even were that a matter of skulking along humanity’s darkest baseboards in the smallest hours of the longest nights. But right out in broad daylight, as if it were a good thing and even a public service to do so–that deserves all the outrage it is generating, and more.

Here’s to the day when such an idea will be recognized as unconscionable across the board.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen