Can you talk about the history of for-profit prisons and how they can be directly linked to slavery in the deep south after the Civil War?
These corporations—CoreCivic, the GEO group—started in the 1980s, [but] we’ve had for-profit prisons for almost all of American history. [At times] the profit is going to companies, [at times] it's going to the states, but for most of American history, especially in the south, prisons were intended to actually make a profit. Penitentiaries were invented in America [and were] meant to turn a profit for its factory. Instead of hanging somebody for theft, we're going to give him a sentence to some years in prison. Louisiana privatized its prisons in 1844. Then, when slavery ended, the penitentiary system in the south was used in a way that mimicked slavery. Where slaves were picking cotton, prisoners started to fill that role.

Every prison system in the south was privatized almost immediately after slavery ended. It was the most brutal labor that existed at the time. The death rates were staggering. States averages in the south for decades were somewhere between 16 and 25-percent depending on the state. One in four inmates died every year largely because of the conditions. An important point here is that this system of convict leasing was actually more deadly than slavery was. As we went forward through history, the states, seeing how much money these companies were making, decided to open their own plantations and run them at a profit for the state.

In the 1960s, Arkansas still allowed prisoners to be whipped. Men were picking cotton in cotton fields and Terrell Don Hutto, who came to be the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America learned the business of corrections by running a cotton plantation. He lived on the plantation himself, had a house boy, a prisoner who served him, and lived a life that, in many ways, resembled slavery. He was the last person to run these state-run plantations at a profit. Towards the end of that era, in the 1970s, we saw a prison boom that ended up being massive. We had a 500-percent increase in our prison population over 40 years. The prisons became a burden on the states and rather than bringing in money, [they were losing it].

When Trump became president his Justice Department kind of breathed life back into the private prison system.
When he was elected, the ( for profit prisons) stock prices rose more than any other companies. Trump has been very aggressive with immigration. Immigrant detention is the frontier of private prison companies. They run about half of the immigrant detention centers. The private prison companies seem very happy with the situation now. I actually went to a shareholder meeting. I bought one share and went to the company's annual shareholder meeting and their spirits were very high. They were very happy with where things stood and their business was growing. I think Trump played a major role in that.

Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. His nomination is not an interesting intellectual exercise to be debated amongst classmates and scholars in seminar. Support for Judge Kavanaugh is not apolitical. It is a political choice about the meaning of the constitution and our vision of democracy, a choice with real consequences for real people. Without a doubt, Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.