Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.
— Chris Hedges
Sensational Private Prisons quotations
Private Manning is the world's pre-eminent prisoner of conscience, having remained true to the Nuremberg principle that every soldier has the right to 'a moral choice.' His suffering mocks the notion of the land of the free.
Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
For those interested in learning more about corporations and private individuals profiting from the caging of human beings, I highly recommend the book "Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration."
Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?
But you see, that's the gilded prison of fashion.
We're riding in private jets, and meantime I was so incredibly, painfully sad and lonely.
Man's own form in space - his body - was a private prison;
and that it was because of this imprisoning misery - because he was hungry and overworked and went to a horrid place called home late at night in the rain, and his bones ached and his head was heavy.
This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I'm arguing is that, in fact, what we've been told is a lie.
During the Soviet era, private ownership was a crime punishable with up to five years in prison.
Private prison companies are now listed on the New York Stock exchange and are doing quite well in a time of economic recession (and depression in some communities). But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.
It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free—to be under no physical constraint and yet be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national state, or of some private interest within the nation wants him to think, feel and act. . . . To him the walls of his prison are invisible and he believes himself to be free.
The violence inherent in our systems and structures of power is a part of who we are - our thoughts, sensibilities, imaginations, language. We live in manifestations of it - permanent war, environmental destrucution, poverty, racism, misogyny, the assault on labor, torture in our prisons, capital punishment - a corporate capitalist state controlled by oligarchical interests for their own private profit and gain.
We've so, so fallen for the premise that only government can do certain things.
But then when we get around to privatizing, people always applaud it. Well, I mean, the left never does. Privatize this; privatize that. Prisons, you name it. When you are endeavoring to create wealth by virtue of creating profit, you're gonna have a much more efficient operation a bunch of bureaucrats - who have no idea what they're doing, by the way.
There are numerous issues that governments used to deal with that they now no longer deal with to the same extent: Prisons have been privatized in a number of countries; education and health are becoming privatized. Governments don't have the capacity to deliver - or not in isolation.
The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.
This is sort of the epitome of the economic elite that is converging with a political elite. It's not only the banks and insurance companies. It's the war industry and private prisons. Certainly the fossil fuel agencies. It's not only that they're supporting this campaign, they're supporters of the Clinton Foundation. And where the Clinton Foundation ends and Hillary's [Clinton] political actions begin, that too is quite troubling.
We need to have more second chance programs.
I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.
Republicans are always saying we should privatize things like schools, prisons, social security - hey, how about we privatize privacy! Because if the government forbids gay men from tying the knot, what is their alternative? They can`t all marry Liza Minnelli.
The fastest growing occupation in the private sector is security guards.
The fastest growing occupation in the public sector is prison guards. (1992)
When Private Bradley [aka Chelsea] Manning put his conscience ahead of his personal well-being by allegedly releasing important information to the world's public via WikiLeaks, he was put into an inhumane solitary confinement and is now facing charges that carry the possibility of him spending the rest of his life in prison.
Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.
He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.