From Monday April 17th until Wednesday April 19th at noon, the Undergraduate Student Government has opened a referendum to divest from private prisons+service providers that was put together by Princeton Private Prison Divest – PPPD.
The link for princeton students to vote is : https://princeton.heliosvoting.org/
Please take a minute and vote yes on the Princeton Private Prison Divest – PPPD referendum to divest from private prisons + service providers! These companies exist exclusively for the sake of exploiting incarcerated people + detained immigrants, and they really shouldn’t even exist — let alone be associated with Princeton
Voting here til wednesday at noon: https://princeton.heliosvoting.org/
Fact sheet here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WS0o4Abc2Igb0O_8t0XU6F1htzLqPDCl4KA02t1RUbY/edit
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Statement of Support:
Mass incarceration and immigrant detention are among the most pressing and severe human rights crises in the United States. The U.S. incarcerates more people in its prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers per capita and in total than any other country in the world, and does so in a way that is heavily inflected by race and income. U.S. carceral practices have contributed to the ongoing disenfranchisement of low-income communities of color across the country. Companies that operate carceral facilities and contractors exploit this wholesale caging of bodies, unprecedented in human history, for economic gain. In doing so, they frequently lobby for more punitive state and federal criminal justice and immigration policies and provide unsafe and poorly regulated services. Although these companies have been described as “cost-cutting,” they merely pass the exorbitant prices of incarceration onto the very marginalized people they exploit. To be associated with, or derive profit by investing in these companies in any way is fundamentally at odds with the University’s commitment to acting in the nation’s service and promoting individual human rights. Leading up to this year’s election, various political leaders have condemned the privatization of the U.S.’s carceral system. Furthermore, Columbia University and the University of California system dissociated themselves from private prisons in 2015. To reduce its complicity in one of the greatest civil rights violations of the modern era, the University should join its peer institutions in dissociating from the above companies.
Prison Industry Divestment Movement 