Graduate students are scheduled to vote later this month on whether to call on the University to divest from private prisons and detention corporations as part of a campaign by Princeton Private Prison Divest, a student group.
In December, the group distributed to the faculty a petition in support of divestment from corporations that profit from incarceration, drug control, and immigrant- deportation policies; it had more than 150 signatures by mid-January.
In an Undergraduate Student Government referendum last spring, 89 percent of the 1,639 undergraduates who participated voted in favor of divestment. The referendum ultimately failed because undergraduate voter turnout fell short of the 30 percent required.
Princeton Private Prison Divest said in a statement that investment in private prisons conflicts with the University’s core values. “Private prisons perpetuate a national civil-rights crisis, one that falls disproportionately upon the most vulnerable people in our society,” the group said. “Supporting the private carceral industry does not support the well-being of our nation or of humanity.”
The group has begun meeting with the University’s Resources Committee, which considers issues related to socially responsible investments. Companies that the student group is recommending for divestment include the Corrections Corp. of America, G4S, and the GEO Group.
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3 Responses
Norman Ravitch *62
6 Years AgoInvesting in prisons is a...
Investing in prisons is a lot more socially responsible than investing in Coca-Cola: The one profits from the work of criminals, the other supports evil concoctions which destroy health. The problem with social investing is that no one will agree on what is socially desirable — the basic problem with all utopian schemes; namely, you eventually cannot sustain them without force and violence.
David Meehan ’98
6 Years AgoDon’t Mix Politics, Investing
The Princeton Private Prison Divest (PPPD) political-activist group has demanded that Princeton’s endowment divest of shares in private organizations that operate correctional facilities. PPPD cites partisan-fueled studies and false information as support. One often-quoted source is a 2016 Department of Justice memo that misrepresented data and alleged that privately operated federal correctional facilities are more costly and inferior to government-operated facilities.
Did the politically motivated memo acknowledge that private facilities house criminal illegal aliens, a more challenging population than the primarily U.S. citizens housed at public facilities? Or that private facilities have significantly fewer deaths, drug use, sexual-assault allegations, and inmate grievances, and publicly operated facilities are 28 percent more expensive? Of course not.
A March 2017 opinion piece by The Daily Princetonian editorial board, opposing PPPD’s proposal, aptly articulated that the University is an educational institution, not a political-advocacy organization. Many companies sell items that some people find highly objectionable. Environmentalists object to oil-drilling companies and vegetarians to meat-packing companies. Still, it would be false to construe, for example, investments in ExxonMobil or Tyson Foods as a moral stance in favor of oil or meat consumption.
The GEO Group, targeted by PPPD, invested several millions of dollars in R&D to develop enhanced offender-rehabilitation programming, including cognitive behavioral therapy and post-release services. In January, GEO was to receive the coveted American Correctional Association’s Innovation in Corrections award for the “GEO Continuum of Care.”
Bottom line: The University’s endowment should invest in companies based on financial criteria, and not one group’s political ideology.
Norman Ravitch *62
6 Years AgoEven the Soviets invested in...
Even the Soviets invested in capitalistic enterprises. They were not worried about being politically correct, even under Stalin.