NEW YORK, NY — Today, Worth Rises announced the release of The Prison Industry Corporate Database, a digital resource that illustrates the expansive reach of the prison industry, tracking more than 4,000 corporations that profit from the carceral system. What started as biennially published reports has evolved into a dynamic, interactive database that exposes the breadth and reach of the prison industry and clearly details the harms caused by each corporation involved. This database is part of Worth Rises’ prison industry series that also includes a textbook and curriculum.
The new database includes both publicly traded and privately held corporations across 12 sectors: architecture and construction, operations and management, personnel, programs and labor, equipment, data and information systems, telecom, financial services, food and commissary, healthcare, transportation, and community corrections. Among them are lesser-known, but large corporations that operate only in the prison industry like Aventiv Technologies and commissary provider Keefe Group as well as better-known brands that engage in the prison industry through a segment of their operations like consumer goods conglomerate 3M, construction firm AECOM, food service provider Aramark, and asset managers Vanguard, BlackRock, and Fidelity.
Publicly traded corporations and those held by private equity firms are assigned a harm score that measures their engagement in human rights violations along three criteria areas: the salience or gravity of the violation, their responsibility for the violation, and their responsiveness to advocacy. Corporations with a harm score higher than 10 are marked for immediate divestment. Corporations engaged in prison labor or immigration detention are also marked. Corporate profiles also include annual revenues, stock charts, political spending, and other details, where available.
“Despite earning tens of billions of dollars each year, the public knows little about the prison industry and those that profit from it,” said Bianca Tylek, Executive Director for Worth Rises. “This is not about any one corporation — and it’s not about private prisons or prison labor — but the thousands of corporations that profit off the caging of millions of people in our prisons and jails across the U.S. We are releasing The Prison Industry Corporate Database to help people understand the vastness of the prison industry and the financial incentives it has to expand incarceration rather than protect public safety, so that together we can build the solutions needed to dismantle it.”
To further support divestment, Worth Rises has licensed the underlying data to Envestnet, a financial technology corporation that develops and distributes wealth management technology and products to financial advisors and institutions. Envestnet has used the data to create an investment screen that financial advisors can apply to client accounts to ensure they are not invested in the most harmful corporations in the prison industry.
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Worth Rises is a non-profit advocacy organization dedicated to dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it targets. Follow @WorthRises on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.