
Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies - shill
http://qz.com/434984/columbia-becomes-the-first-us-university-to-divest-from-private-prison-companies/
======
Blackthorn
While this is great news, I challenge Columbia to do one better.

My own alma mater, Bard College, created a program called the Bard Prison
Initiative. This program teaches college courses for college credit to
incarcerated prisoners in the state of New York, ultimately awarding either
Associates or Bachelors degrees from Bard College. Education for prisoners is
important from both a moral and economic perspective, dramatically reducing
recidivism as well as saving money (a $1 investment in prison education
reduces incarceration costs by $3-$4 in the first three years of an inmate's
release[1]).

This is a great first step but it is not enough to simply not support the
prison industry. There are proven steps that can be taken here to reduce
recidivism and help society. Despite this, the Bard Prison Initiative is
chronically underfunded despite support by governor Cuomo due to politicians
not wanting to appear soft on crime. Columbia is a much wealthier university
than Bard College, so I challenge them to join Bard in their initiative.

[1] [http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-and-education-
departme...](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-and-education-departments-
announce-new-research-showing-prison-education-reduces)

~~~
chimeracoder
In a way, Columbia already does!

Columbia's School of General Studies is targeted at students without a high
school diploma, students with "nontraditional" backgrounds, and students who
have taken more than a year off after high school before going to school. I
went to Columbia, and while I wasn't in GS, a lot of my friends were.

A large number of GS students are veterans[0]. Of the rest, a surprising
number are people with, well, backgrounds that typically disqualify a person
from an Ivy League education.

I can't share their stories because they're not mine to share, but I had
classmates who were caught (and incarcerated for) drug trafficking and other
serious-but-nonviolent crimes[1]. I know this because they told me, and they
felt comfortable enough in their academic environment sharing this knowledge.
To me, that really says something about not only the admissions process, but
also the community and support that they receive as students.

As a non-GS student, I really appreciated this setup. My education would not
have been the same had I not been sitting next to these students in our
discussion sections for class, or serving on the boards of student
organizations with them. And at the same time, they were able to benefit from
the structure of a school that was explicitly tailored to students with
nontraditional backgrounds.

Columbia could do a lot more to support GS students[3], as well as support
incarcerated prisoners who are not students, but this is something they've
been doing for decades without any fanfare at all.

Columbia also has a very long history of accepting veterans who were
discharged for being gay, even long _before_ Don't Ask, Don't Tell (Stephen
Donaldson was a Columbia student before joining the military[4]). IIRC, many
of these discharges would have been dishonorable discharges, which in some
states carries the same status as being a convicted felon.

[0] Partly because Columbia GS is so proactive about recruiting on military
bases, and partly because their yellow ribbon matching is so generous.

[1] I mention nonviolent crimes because that's what (some of) my GS friends
shared with me. I don't know of any who were convicted of violent crimes, and
I don't know if this is simply selection bias or if there really weren't any.

[3] If anyone reading this has $100MM to spare, the General Studies school
could benefit greatly from its own endowment to increase access to financial
aid!

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Donaldson_%28activist%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Donaldson_%28activist%29)

~~~
a-dub
Full time tuition at Columbia runs around $52k/yr. Their Yellow Ribbon
matching works out to about $8k/yr. So they're raking in a nearly guaranteed
$44k/yr from the Federal government for every vet they enroll.

GS isn't some benevolent social program, they see the grant dollars and they
take them. They've been experts at this for a long, long time.

The cynical part is that they use completely different diplomas, transcript
codes and CEEB codes for the GS program. This is non-standard, where most
other universities fully integrate their veteran and re-entry students across
the board. (including financial aid)

~~~
chimeracoder
> So they're raking in a nearly guaranteed $44k/yr from the Federal government
> for every vet they enroll.

Not exactly. The GI bill doesn't pay anywhere near $44k for New York State.
The federal government is not picking up the tab.

I acknowledged the dearth of financial aid in my post, and that's something
that they're desperately working on. GS is not as well endowed, which would be
the solution to this. If you want to be cynical, fine, but the question of how
much money GS has is different from how they're actually spending it.

This is the downside of being a separate school, yes, though with the
aforementioned very notable exception of the endowment issue, GS students and
faculty overwhelmingly favor this model.

In any case, the topic of this conversation was prisoners and convicts, not
veterans. I merely mentioned them because they're a large part of GS and GS
has a history of accepting disonorably discharged veterans, which is
tantamount to convict status.

~~~
a-dub
$20k GI bill + $8k yellow ribbon + $3k/mo living allowance ($24k for 8 months
or $36k for 12 months).

So that's $52k/yr to $64k/yr before you start adding in stuff like Pell
grants.

Do I support federal dollars funding college education for vets? Yes,
absolutely. Do I think this is some great act of benevolence by Columbia? No.
Is that view reinforced by the simple fact that they use different diplomas,
transcripts and CEEB codes for veterans? Certainly. Do I buy that Columbia's
screwy internal administrative structure is a valid reason for this?
Definitely not.

------
jflatow
Interesting article, but the first graph is one of the most blatantly
misleading charts I have seen in a long time. Showing two graphs overlapping
on completely different scales is a really nasty trick.

~~~
adamrt
Extremely. Also, it looks like they picked random years for the data points as
well. They cross in 2010 like it has some significance.

~~~
jflatow
Right, good point - when you choose arbitrary scales you can make them cross
whenever you want.

------
andrewstuart
If the futile and counter productive prohibition of drugs comes to an end then
all those prisons won't be needed.

~~~
shill
The Corrections Corporation of America noted this as a risk factor in their
2011 10-K filing.

 _" The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by
the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole
standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain
activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."_

Source: [http://yahoo.brand.edgar-
online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...](http://yahoo.brand.edgar-
online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?filingid=7753684&tabindex=2&type=html)

------
slg
While I admire the motivation, everything I have seen has stated divestment
doesn't have much of an economic impact. If these companies are profitable,
they will still be profitable. In fact, the profits will end up being
concentrated with less morally minded investors, which can make the problem
even worse. A moral stockholder can help drive the company in a moral
direction. However if the only stockholders left put profit above all other
motivations, the company has less and less incentive to make morally sound
decisions.

~~~
ganeumann
Source?

The 1980s pressure to divest from South Africa is sometimes credited with
pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Afric...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinvestment_from_South_Africa)).
University investment funds were in the vanguard, after student protests on
campus.

But in that case, as would be true here, change came more from the awareness
of the problem divestment brings as the economic effect. Private action can
motivate public action.

Regardless, financing the activities of something you find immoral is immoral.
Your logic--that if you don't do something, someone else will--is the
rationalization for much wrongdoing.

~~~
slg
>Source?

From [http://www.iop.harvard.edu/does-divestment-
work](http://www.iop.harvard.edu/does-divestment-work)

>"The conventional wisdom is that divestment from South Africa was a success;
public pressure lowered targeted companies’ stock prices and forced them to
comply with the divestment activists’ demands. However, the true impact of
divestment from South Africa is unclear. In a 1999 study, Ivo Welch and C.
Paul Wazzan examined the impact of divestment from banks and corporations
active in South Africa and found that these campaigns had almost no impact on
public market valuations:"

And from the 1999 study they referenced:

>"Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of
divesting companies, the financial markets’ valuations of targeted companies
or even the South African financial markets themselves were not easily visibly
affected. The sanctions may have been effective in raising the public moral
standards or public awareness of South African repression, but it appears that
financial markets managed to avoid the brunt of the sanctions."

------
cperkins
Nice work, Colombia. I hope that others follow suit.

And maybe the awareness around this issue will then lead to a discussion of
the high human cost of the War on Drugs, the greatest burden borne by our
citizens of color. And maybe that will cause us to revisit our criminal
justice system and end the war on drugs.

Private prisons are a symptom, not a cause. For a better understanding of the
forces leading to prison privitization and a myriad of other woes and
injustices I _strongly_ recommend reading "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle
Alexander.

~~~
adamnemecek
Colombia != Columbia

------
dsinsky
Is there any reason to believe that _private_ prisons are significantly worse
than publicly run prisons?

I agree that the U.S. is badly in need of major reforms in its criminal
justice system, but is there any reason to believe that society is better off
with exclusively publicly run prisons?

Private prisons may do some regrettable lobbying on behalf of longer prison
sentences, but I'm pretty sure that the corrections officers unions (most of
whose membership works in publicly run prisons) is a far stronger political
force.

It seems as though the students' activist energy would have been better used
fighting the policies of mass incarceration rather than the private companies
who do the government's bidding in applying them.

~~~
serf
Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public
entities do. The problems stem from that.

That is more or less the ACLU's opinion, as well.

[https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-
so...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-solution)

~~~
dsinsky
>> Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public
entities do.

Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations
high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the
private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate
political pressure for high prison sentences.

[http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-
califor...](http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-california-s-
prison-guards-subvert-democracy)

>> The problems stem from that.

This seems like a serious inversion of cause and effect. Our problems with
prisons pre-dated the growth in private prisons and private prisons remain a
small fraction of the overall prison industry so its hard to see how private
prisons could be the primary source of the problem.

~~~
lotso
>Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison
populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector
than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the
aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.

It's not about prison sentences. It's about the poor conditions of private
prisons and the rampant abuse there.

~~~
mistermumble
Haven't looked at this closely, but I would think corrections officers would
care about keeping their jobs and increasing their pay, and perhaps reducing
their work (by lowering the prisoner/officer ratio).

Those incentives seem benign compared to a private corporation, which would be
incentivized to increase the prisoner population (build more prisons, more
revenue), and increase the prisoner/officer ratio (more profits). These
changes would have a negative impact on prisoners, officers, and society at
large.

------
wahsd
The thing about this is that as long as there is a private prison industry, or
really any privatization of fundamental government functions, that makes
profits, there will be investors that will replace anyone who makes some moral
investment decisions.

I laud their efforts and there really should be more of these ethical
decisions in investment by public organizations, but reality is those choices
are simply a symptom of moral people compensating for the moral depravity of
our own government.

------
njharman
Guess I was naive. Assumed few to no universities invested in prisons...

------
tempodox
That makes a Plus in my book for Columbia. And I thank the students who set
this in motion with their protests.

------
chrisgd
I don't understand why this matters? In every transaction, there is a buyer
and a seller. Even if Columbia divests, someone else is buying in.

The bigger impact is if no one buys newly issued equity.

The biggest impact is stopping them from collecting revenue, i.e. stopping the
government from having privately run, for-profit prisons.

