The Prison Industry Series
Have you ever thought about who designs and builds the 6-by-8-foot cells in which people suffer for weeks, months, or years? What about who manufactures the shackles incarcerated women are forced to wear while giving birth? Or who trains officers to use force on people suffering mental health crises? It’s time we do. Our prison industry series, complete with a curriculum, textbook, discussion guide, and database, offers everything you need to educate yourself and others about the predatory prison industry. Together, these resources aggregate critical information about the prison industry to help advocates, litigators, journalists, investors, artists, and the public join the fight to dismantle it.
The Curriculum
Spring 2021
The Prison Industry: The Curriculum is a 15-week self-study course about the prison industry and the fight to build a world without it. The syllabus includes weekly reading assignments, discussion questions, short videos, radio segments, recorded classes with incredible guest speakers, and more.
The Textbook
December 2020
The Prison Industry: How it started. How it works. How it harms. offers a blueprint of the prison industry. Each chapter covers the history of privatization of one sector, the methods corporations involved use to extract resources from public coffers and communities, and the harm they cause communities with first-person accounts.
Buy your hardcopy here and don’t miss the discussion guide.
The Database
October 2022
The Prison Industry: Corporate Database exposes over 4,000 corporations and investors that profit off mass incarceration and mass surveillance and their devastating impacts on our nation, and especially our most marginalized communities. Corporations are assigned harm scores, marked for divestment, flagged from supporting prison labor, and more.
Previous version of this data:
2020 (HTML | PDF), 2019 (HTML | PDF), 2018 (EXCEL | PDF)
Other Resources
A Cost-Benefit Analysis:
The Impact of Ending Slavery and Involuntary Servitude as Criminal Punishment and Paying Incarcerated Workers Fair Wages
January 2024
This independent economic study, commissioned by Worth Rises for the #EndTheException campaign, makes the fiscal case for ending slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons and paying incarcerated workers fair wages. It reveals that this policy change would generate fiscal benefits to incarcerated workers, their families and children, crime victims, and society at large to the tune of billions every year.
Policy Blueprint for Ending Carceral Profiteering
February 2023
This policy blueprint calls on the Biden-Harris Administration to stop corporate profiteering off of incarceration — and those it harms, including the public — and gives the Administration a concrete roadmap to doing so. It details system-wide policy changes and actions the Administration can take across the following carceral sectors: healthcare, food and commissary, telecommunications, financial services, electronic monitoring, and labor.
Connecting Families: Compelling Messaging for Prison Phone Justice Campaigns
March 2020
For decades, families have been calling for the right to communicate freely with their incarcerated loved ones. In the few years, this fight for prison and jail phone justice has begun to see big wins with cities and states around the country making prison and jail communication free. In this messaging guide, we share the messaging that works for prison phone justice. Make sure to also review our COVID-19 talking points.
Paying for Jail: How County Jails Extract Wealth from New York Communities
December 2019
This report examines the economic burden that saddles families with loved ones in New York’s county jails. The cost of phone calls, commissary, and disciplinary tickets alone extract an estimated $50 million annually from these families, which are disproportionately Black, brown, and low-income. The report also discusses the lucrative partnerships between county governments and private, for-profit jail service contractors.
Immigration Detention:
An American Business
June 2018
This digital report provides an in-depth look at the tangled web of profit motives behind “zero tolerance” policies and the corporations that spend millions fostering anti-immigration views among elected officials to guarantee its implementation. It aggregates detailed information about the broad spectrum of corporations capitalizing on the separation and detention of families and children. It offers eight actions you can take to challenge immigration detention profiteers and additional resources to help you support organizations doing vital work.