abuse of power in any private prison you see. If one of the largest private
prisons in the US was inducing forced labor on their prisoners, it seems
likely that many other private prisons are doing the same, just under the
radar. This recent lawsuit, made in 2017, has brought up controversies in
private prisons, such as the GEO Group’s policies that force immigrant
prisoners to “‘work for free on threat of solitary confinement or for a
dollar a day’” (Woodruff, 2017). That is not the end of the abuse charges
the GEO private prison company faces. Over the course of many years,
many cases have popped up of horrendous treatment of prisoners in their
private prisons. One investigation of a private prison housing mentally
ill prisoners showed that “malnutrition was widespread, [as] an
American Civil Liberties Union inspection team found” (Beall, 2013).
That’s not even the worst of it: “walls were smeared with blood and
excrement” (Beall, 2013) and “mice lived in [the] toilets” (Beall, 2013).
The prisoners were clearly treated with a lack of care and effort and all
the company had to say was that “assaults at the facility [were] sharply
down and that it [was] making improvements” (Beall, 2013). Whatever
those improvements were, why did the private prison ever get into such
a horrid and disgusting state of mistreatment and abuse?
Private Prisons and Their Safety and Security Issues
Private prisons are unsafe for many of the prisoners that they
house. Many large-scale private prison companies face allegations and