system from various perspectives including those most impacted by the criminal justice system we discussed critical questions about how the current system works its intersections with social justice and highlight the efforts that are being made to improve the lives of everyone that is affected by it we ask you the viewers to spread the word about open sides of the bars and share your comments with us on twitter at the fortune  today's show is titled monetizing misery how capitalism impacts mass incarceration my guest today is lauren book aizen senior counsel in the brennan center is justice program where she focuses on improving the criminal justice process through legal reforms specifically how the criminal justice system is funded l b was previously a senior program associate at the beer institute of justice in the center on sentencing and corrections where she worked on policies that aim to improve public safety while reducing prison populations and she served as an assistant district attorney in new york city where she  the appeals bureau in the criminal court bureau and the sex crimes sessional victims bureau where she prosecuted a wide range of misdemeanor and felony cases thank you l b for joining us  worries and so thank you for making the time i know your schedule is very very busy here you just wrote a new book and so i would love to start there if you can lay out to our viewers what your book is about  why focus on this particular issue in this overall bigger issue of mass incarceration and economy what kind of lead you to the footsteps of that reckoning the two knew that you were going to write this book and this was going to be the topic  write this book on the privatization of the justice system because it grew out of a lot of the work at the brennan center for justice where i work in our justice program and our aim is to really curb our nation's reliance on incarceration and we write policy reports we conduct research we advocate on evidence based practices and really our focus is reducing the number of people who are sent in jail and prison in this country when you are well aware two point two million people are incarcerated in this country more than any other player at any other country on the planet we have five percent of the world's population twenty five percent of the world's incarcerated population and it's not because people in the united states commit crimes more than people in any other country it's because our policies have been so punitive for so long with sense you many people to jail and prison and they spend far too long behind bars and in my work in the justice program i have focused for the last five years on the incentives that perpetuate mass incarceration now these can be financial incentives and they can even be incentives that are unintentional such as the performance measures tied to federal criminal justice funding for example the punjab program sends money to states for law enforcement purposes but the performance measures it's hatch to that funding for many years they asked about how many drugs were seized how many people were arrested and those are unintentional incentives that perpetuate more arrest more incarceration when we spoke to law enforcement officials they said well of course we thought we were supposed to arrest people in these guns with that money because that's what the justice department wanted to know when they asked us how we spent the grant and the idea of the privatization of justice and all of the nanny companies that make money off of incarceration has always just seems strange and at odds with my understanding of the justice system and of corrections you know corrections the idea behind the word is to re ability to ensure that someone does re answer the community and can be a successful member of society and so that's why i investigated you know all of the many companies that make money off of incarceration that profit from corrections and that was really this book's encourage you know after so many years of intense debate about the privatization of justice a what does this mean for you know this is a story of economics as a story of morality it's a story of the nature of punishment and self and that's what i was trying to explore and so what have you learned from all of your research because most people hear about people incarcerated they hear the two point two million and they all too often don't think of the privatization of any of that and so tell us what you found after doing all of this research so when i conducted the research at first i was looking more specifically and narrowly at the modern private prison corporations course civic and for example are publicly traded on the stock exchange are the two companies combined are about four and a half billion in revenue in two thousand and sixteen alone  in revenue and those are only two of the large private prison operators in this country and i focused on those companies that that manage jails prisons immigration detention centers but  conducted my research i realized there were so many more companies that make immense profit off of incarceration companies like j pay that provide tablets and e mail services and allow families to send money to people behind bars and these are companies that tend to take you know large profits and you know out of they're for profit companies and so a company like p for example may charge fifty five cents for an individual to email someone years incarcerated but they're going to take some of the fifty five cents as profit and there are so many companies like that in the u corporations like m c i that were building telephone kiosk inside prisons in california for free at no charge on because they knew they were going to make so much money off of phone calls from incarcerated individuals and so the book looks at all of the companies that are that perpetuate mass incarceration because without a captive consumer behind bars or of correctional supervision these companies wouldn't be able to make a profit so let's try to get into some of the numbers right so two point two million people in it at any given time on any given day in the u s are incarcerated or sitting in some jail so or immigration detention center across the country what would you tell our viewers that they need to kind of understand about the privatization of that process  wonderful question and that's who put in two million people behind bars is just people in jails state prisons and federal prisons so when we talk about immigration detention that's many more people you know right now today as we sit here in the studio there are about thirty thousand people who are behind bars in immigration detention facilities you know there are more who are cycling in and out of these facilities member for a few hours the we we ha so many people behind bars in these various institutions and i think what was most interesting for me when i was doing this research was that we as a country allo these corporations to gain such a strong foothold in corrections and in immigration detention without this national debate today there are you know there's bipartisan consensus that we incarcerate too many people and for far too long and you know back in the mid one nine hundred eighty s when viz corporations were starting to manage jails and prisons and immigration detention centers policymakers and directors o corrections weren't having these philosophical or practical conversations about why we incarcerate whether incarceration is the right sanction for so many people who violate the criminal code whether we could start to invest in ation diversion or even just not send people to jail and prison so in the first place and my research found that these tough conversations really weren't being held because in the mid one nine hundred eighty s about three quarters of states were under some sort of federal court order to reduce prison population and crowding unhygenic conditions prisons refound violative of the us constitution in multiple state sending and convicting they were looking at projections of increased prison populations and these corporations came in and they said if we can do this quickly cheaper we can do an end run around all your complicated government  and we will do this and save you money and it happened very quickly and almost under the nose of the public and you know today in two thousand and eighteen there are private prisons and twenty nine state are about twelve private prisons at the federal level and something that a lot of the viewers watching the show may not know is that about sixty five percent of ice bags are privatized and ice being immigration customs enforcement the law enforcement arm of the department of justice yes that and we have essentially privatized immigration detention in this country so that's where we are today yeah and so why should this because some people would hear this i mean even some of our viewers may hear that you know less expenses quicker easier work around and associate like all of the good things that people would think about when you're trying to run a system that's causing too much money what would you say to caution some of our listeners and our viewers so that to that ideology of this is like the best thing since sliced bread and if you implement it you know actually help things run better and it's really a mixed bag of research but at the end of the day there is almost no evidence that these corporations have saved the government money part of it is it's a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison it's hard to compare facilities it's hard to compare government facilities with a private facility sometimes the cost of monitoring these facilities is just not part of the research and it doesn't need to be because that's expensive but i think the bigger question and a more philosophical question is why are we so concerned about saving money incarceration should be expensive if we as a government have decided that someone has violated the criminal code to such an extent that they need to be that they need to spend time behind bars that they need to be separated by their community maybe hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their families loved ones friends that's a serious decision and it's not a cavalier decision and we should be so sure about incarcerating people that we're ok with spending a lot of money on it and that's just not a philosophy that we've ever had as a nation you know we are looking to cut costs and corrections is incredibly expensive we spend about eighty billion dollars a year on corrections in this country and it eats up a large portion of most and so building off of that question you know there is a lot of conversations on local state and even federal level about implementing technology or access to technology for incarcerated people in you know the ideology is that it you know that technology is unavoidable in in society it is something that helps people to integrate successfully and so why not lao people who are incarcerated to have access to that technology as early as possible but there's a slippery slope to that right and so what what would you say that how would you caution policymakers  even the general public into some of the downsides of that well and any you you point out sort of the pros and cons of all of this technology in a way that it's been implemented in jails and prisons across the country and i think what's happening in new york right now is a great example so the new york department of corrections is now providing these tablets i think the company's jape a see people behind bars and new york is actually not receiving money from the contract and they've been very explicit about that and that is rare in most states the department of corrections is receiving money for that contract and so one caution there is you know departments of corrections across the country the show they just shouldn't be taking money for letting these companies have a monopoly on this technology and their prison systems and you know the corrections the departments of corrections will say well it costs money to implement  you know we needed to monitor it but they just simply shouldn't be taking that money from these corporations and the technology is wonderful there you know there are people who are released from jail in prison who may not be comfortable with email and the web and all of these different apps and you know uses of technology today but we shouldn't allow these companies to make such  incarcerated when i interviewed them for the book and i opened up a jay pay account and i bought these stamps and i think it was fifty five cents to send an e mail and i would attach a stamp so people could e mail me back the think about how many emails you get during the day you know even after the show you're probably going to have hundreds of e mails that you had to respond to you and the people behind bars are making very little money you know their families are sending money to to their commissary accounts but they can buy these e mail stamps and you know one of the dangers of this technology is that a lot of states are eliminating in person video visit date in person visitation so much evidence that you know seeing your loved ones when you're behind bars and hugging them and you know being able to talk to them in person is still beneficial syria entry and  top of all of that you know these companies like jay pay they charge a pretty have to feel for you know video visitation services and so i interviewed individuals who spent you know five or ten dollars t a pretty bad public health and so focusing a little bit on the actual structure of private prisons how is it that something that is supposed to be intrusted to public servants people who are state or local employees because i think again most people would hear private prisons and say how is that even possible how can a state or local government hand over what is supposed to be a task that is trusted to public servants over to a private company how does that happen like what's the nuts and bolts of that actually happening and that is one of the book central themes how have we outsource our jails prisons and immigration detention centers and i write about these congressional hearings in the mid one nine hundred eighty s it was the first congressional hearings i ever had on the private prison industry and lake and the judiciary committee you know this is capitol hill washington d c and i write about this in the book they ask questions about the uniform that course of a professional war and what color the trousers potential of this industry the morality of this industry and where it was headed and you know so far there's only been one country israel that has rolled  the delegation of this responsibility to a corporation unconstitutional so the israeli supreme court issued a very long opinion i'm noting that it was an unconstitutional in israel to outsource this duty to corporations but the way it works now is this industry really stands in the shoes of the government and the nuts and bolts of it all is that directors of corrections just negotiated contracts with these corporations and at the federal level justice department will negotiate contracts with these corporations man engine run these federal private prisons and the details are work out in the contract you know some of the details are how much these corporations will get paid whether it will be per d m which means her incarcerated individual or whether these corporations will be paid as if the facility is one hundred percent full  which is a pretty common contractual provision across the country and for decades the private prison operators have negotiated contracts where they only take individuals who are considered low risk who have very few mental health needs very few medical needs because they tend to be individuals that are cheaper to house behind bars and for years these corporations wouldn't take how these private prison companies do exactly that outside of not taking people in what do they do to cut cost while someone is actually in their custody so we need the government ha these corporations house close care for individuals behind bars but we've said to them you also need to do so while saving us money and in some states like florida there's legislation that requires all of the contract with a private prison companies to indicate you know that they will save the government six percent less than what the government would pay to operate the same facility and in order to do so these corporations do tend to cherry pick the incarcerated individuals that they will housing you know people who will not cost as much money and they also tend to hire less correctional officers and these officers are not unionized and the cost of running a prison and you know the bulk of the costs are really in the staff so about seventy to eighty percent of the cost of running a jail or prison is in the staffing and so by using non you unionized corrections officials are corrections officers and by paying back last and by hiring less officers they're able to save money and so that doesn't create a very safe situation for not only the incarcerated people but also the staff themselves and that's one of the arguments against privatization is that some of the prisons some of the private prisons are not staffed to adequate levels but that's also a problem in government prisons you know are very few prisons and jails in this country that have the adequate number of guards and staff prisons are short staffed across the country but what's interesting with the private prisons is that they can be fined if they don't have enough staff but it's cheaper for them not to have enough staff and pay these fines that it is to actually staff up the way they need to so they willingly accept the penalty the fiscal penalty and knowing that that penalty will still be less than the actual cost of hiring steps they they don't necessarily comply with the contract and part of it might be because it is really hard to find correctional guards you know even their government counterparts are not having an easy time staffing up but they're not incentivized to staff up because it is cheaper for go and learn more about it purchased the book and what would you inspire them to do once they have this piece of literature and they're here and that is educational but also is in independent bookstores on amazon and barnes and noble or through the columbia university press that published the book and i really hope that the reader walks away more educated more informed about the privatization of the justice system and just how hard it is to curb our reliance on mass incarceration and make sense and downsizing our jails our prisons our immigration detention centers with so many companies that are  incentivized to perpetuate the high number of people behind bars today i think that's a really important point that the book makes and i also just hope that the book sparks conversations about the philosophy of punishment itself and you know it's important that we calibrate our system of justice in this country and incarceration is not a one size fits all approach and should not be any reaction to so many people who violate the criminal code and you know all of that is really wrapped up in the incentive structure around privatization and very briefly how can our viewers and listeners follow you and social media they can follow me on my twitter account at viewers for tuning in if you're interested in finding out more about the fortune society please check us out on the web at fortune society that all war g or on face book by typing in the fortunes assigned this is  joining us as we critically look at both sides of the bars