Profit from Prison

 The US today spends more than $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.3 million people in state and federal prisons, local jails, youth facilities and deportation centers. 

By the middle of October, close to 150,000 inmates and almost 30,000 staff and workers had tested positive to the coronavirus. 1,122 detainees and 42 staff had died according to the Behind Bars Covid Data Project of UCLA.

4,100 prison contractors make a profit off the people locked up. 

An average of 746,000 Americans are held in local jails. Most of whom have not yet been convicted of a crime or are held only for minor offenses.

Many of these voters are jailed simply because they are poor and cannot make bail. Yet in many jails, they are denied the right to vote.—either because officials are confused about their eligibility, or because they have no timely access to registration and absentee ballots, or because they have no access to the voter ID information that many states now require.