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End Profiteering From Prisons And Detention

Aug 6, 2017

From your PDA National Team

Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) is organizing with our allies in the Summer for Progress. Earlier this month, PDA National Advisory Board member Rep. Raul Grijalva reintroduced the Justice is Not For Sale Act (H.R. 3227)—one of 8 bills in the People’s Platform that we’re urging all Democratic Representatives to cosponsor. This legislation was also introduced in the Senate by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

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We Need To Pressure Congress

We agree with Rep. Grijalva who said, “The mass incarceration policies in this country that award and incentivize detaining individuals has been detrimental to communities of color and severely tainted our judicial system. To continue to detain and incarcerate men, women, and children in masses simply because doing so increases the profit margins for the already overly-inflated prison industry goes against our basic principles. Private prisons have consistently been found to be more costly and less humane.”

Join PDA working with leading progressive organizers on the Summer for Progress effort. We can’t do a thing without your help! Please click here to sign up to help organize an office visit at your Representative’s office. If your Representative is a Republican, please click here to help with our phone team. No time to volunteer? Click here to donate $20.18 / month or click here to donate another amount monthly to help PDA elect progressives to Congress in 2018. Your regular automatic donation helps us plan and budget most effectively. Click here to make a one-time donation. We gratefully accept any donation you can afford to make.

We join Rep. Grijalva questioning the “the cob-web of connections between Trump’s administration, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and private prison entities that generously contributed to his presidential campaign. Therefore, it comes as no surprise this Administration’s overzealous approach to incarcerating individuals for profit. All this leads to concerns about the continual use and abuse of our correctional systems. It is time to close this chapter of our immoral and corrupt prison system.”

We support the Justice Is Not For Sale Act because it would reform our federal, state, and local correctional policies to:

• bar federal, state and local government from contracting with private entities to provide and/or operate prisons and detention centers within 2 years.
• bars government contracts with private entities to transport individuals for the purpose of disciplining given that multiple investigations of these companies have resulted in wrongful deaths, prisoner abuse, sexual assault, and medical negligence.
• reinstate the federal parole system for individuals on a case-by-case basis, alleviating federal prison over-crowding.
• increase oversight to protect detainees against unfair practices and unreasonable fees for banking and telecommunications services.
• end ICE’s 34,000 detention quota.
• require ICE to improve the monitoring of detention facilities to ensure humane treatment of detainees.
• ends immigrant family detention facilities, which currently detain children and women.

The United States suffers from an astronomical incarceration rate, in large part because of profiteering by for-profit prisons. Outrages plague our corrections and immigration systems. We need your help to make the case for the Justice is Not for Sale Act and the seven other planks of the People’s Platform. Please click here to sign up to help organize an office visit at your Representative’s office.

In Solidarity,

Mike Hersh for Donna, Mike F, Judy, Dan, Janis, Deb, Amos, Dr. Bill, and Kim, your PDA National Team

P.S. Join a Summer for Progress Local Lobbying Team! Too busy to volunteer? Pitch in $500, $50, or whatever you can to help support our mobilizing for a Progressive Congressional majority.

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