A Common Enemy: Students Fight Private Prisons

...The previous year, HERE had successfully organized SUNY dining hall workers...

...At Johns Hopkins, the traditionally apolitical Black Student Union actively participated in a student labor solidarity activists' sit-in on behalf of university laundry workers...

...Unlike many institutional symptoms of over-indulged global capital, private prisons are politically vulnerable...

...That committee, made up of both student and faculty representatives, advised canceling Sodexho-Marriott's contract if the company did not divest 50 percent of its CCA shares by April 2001 and the other half within the following year...

...But the Sodexho campaign has sparked interest among African-American students, partly because they know the prison mania is targeted at them, or at people who look very much like them: one in three black men ages twenty to twenty-nine are in the custody of the criminal justice system...

...To many young African Americans, the concept of private companies profiting from prisoners evokes the convict leasing system of the Old South...

...To avoid NLRB prosecution for these blatant illegalities, Sodexho-Marriott settled with HERE, agreeing to strike the offending rules from its handbook and notify each employee in writing that this change had been made...

...That's just devastating...

...and in Philadelphia at the Republican National Convention...

...Structural complaints vary—from the powerlessness of the committees on which students and faculty serve to the impossibility of getting a meeting with the college president—but indignation over students' lack of power is pervasive...

...That's a big job, and much depends on what happens on campus this year...

...Some groups' participation in the coalition has been short-lived...

...The slogan locates the students' power in their ability to spend money...

...Pranis also points to the need to build relationships with prisoners and the low-income people whose friends and families are being jailed in such obscene numbers...

...prison and jail population...

...But this means that students are not always in control of their particular struggles...

...Louis University continue organizing against Sodexho...

...Esly Caldwell expects SodexhoMarriott's relationship to private prisons to become a human rights issue on a par with apparel industry abuses...

...In its promising but precarious coalitions, its efforts at racial and class solidarity, its problematic but practical focus on a single company, its need to reach beyond the campus, it is a kind of microcosm for the challenges facing the new student movement...

...Says Oberlin student campaign leader Ty Moore, "We're hoping for a quick victory...

...THERE IS also the danger that in focusing on one company's multiple evils, the specificity of the private prison issue will be overlooked...

...The campaign has been able to make common cause with student labor solidarity groups because Sodexho-Marriott has a grim history of union-busting and labor law violations...

...Furthermore, purchasing power DISSENT / Fall 2000 n 81 STUDENTS FIGHT PRIVATE PRISONS is a limited kind of power, and boycotts often seem useless, in part because no matter how bad a company is, one can be reasonably sure that its competitors aren't much better...

...student activists believe that, as they are an integral part of the university community, they should have some influence over university policy...

...Students objected to illegal union-busting practices and the failure to pay workers a living wage, among other abuses...

...Students in New York and California have for several years been protesting what they see as public spending on prisons at the expense of higher education— as if the state, rather than investing in their generation's future, is investing against it...

...Before the boycott, CCA founder Doctor "Doc" R. Crants served on Sodexho-Marriott's board of directors—in late April, a few weeks after the wave of anti-Sodexho actions on campuses, he resigned...

...In many student labor solidarity campaigns, such disillusionment has resulted in increasingly militant tactics (and administrative concessions...

...Only 130 students ate in the dining hall that day...

...A dining hall boycott in early May—accompanied by an outdoor protest pic8o n DISSENT /Fall 2000 nic, attended by hundreds of students, and an eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot "Hell No Sodexho" banner dropped from the roof of the library—prompted Oberlin president Nancy Dye to agree to end the use of temporary labor...

...Sodexho-Marriott's parent company, the Paris-based Sodexho Alliance, is, with a 17 percent share in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest investor in the U.S...

...Such confrontations bring the connections close to home...

...Private prisons can't make money and still provide decent services...

...Elsewhere, white students are taking their cues from activists of color...

...However, she refused to engage students on the private prisons issue...

...Furthermore, though they are relatively new, Wackenhut and CCA, the two largest management companies, already have a bad track record: they skimp on safety, guard salaries, and education programs...

...Still other opponents of private prisons, most prominently the corrections guards unions, see nothing wrong with prison expansion but believe that prisons should be a public responsibility and should be publicly accountable...

...on campuses nationwide, corporate logos are becoming as ubiquitous as backpacks, as Barnes & Noble takes over the student bookstore, and McDonald's and Starbucks set up shop in the student commons...

...Boycotting the dining hall for a day, the activists held a pizza party outside...

...so do the anticorporatists' constant—and often ugly— confrontations with the criminal justice system...

...In March, for instance, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the company for illegal rules in its employee handbook restricting workers' right to speak to people outside the company about their working conditions and to meet one another in public spaces...

...We're hoping to use gains at Oberlin as a lightning rod for campaigns across the country...

...Indeed, Kevin Pranis says that many student activists have wanted to join the fight against private prisons, but they had no way into the issue until the Prison Moratorium Project started to publicize Sodexho's relationship to CCA...

...It's going to be like the sweatshops...

...If we had been smart," says Esly Caldwell III, a recent Earlham graduDISSENT / Fall 2000 n 79 STUDENTS FIGHT PRIVATE PRISONS ate who was active in the campaign last year, "we wouldn't even have mentioned private prisons...

...These practices have, at many schools, met with passionate student resistance...

...To make matters worse for Sodexho, an outbreak of E. coli in one SUNY-Albany dining hall had made some students sick...

...clearly corporate America has us exactly where it wants us when a decision not to consume something is on a par with not fighting a war...

...Antisweatshop protesters at the Universities of STUDENTS FIGHT PRIVATE PRISONS Wisconsin, Iowa, and Kentucky were peppersprayed and brutally handled by police...

...Students at Hampshire even use the lofty term "conscientious objectors" to describe those who abstain from the meal plan in protest of Sodexho-Marriott...

...This is an increasingly common rallying cry on campuses...

...According to Caldwell, the private prisons issue drew in far more black students than are usually attracted to activist efforts at Earlham, including "athletes' groups, and black student groups that are normally planning parties...

...If they build a powerful enough movement—on a foundation of committed coalitions that understand what they are fighting for, beyond one corporate enemy's particular evils—this revolving door of anticorporate campaigns might work...

...while hundreds of people (including students) were arrested in Seattle...

...Although violent crime in the United States has been steadily declining since 1994, the incarceration rate has skyrocketed...

...HERE has active campaigns underway at Sodexho-Marriott-managed dining halls on a few campuses, in which students are actively involved...

...With two million people behind bars, the United States is second only to Russia in its incarceration rate...

...And many do...

...students agree that sit-ins over Sodexho-Marriott are likely this year...

...In California, for instance, where youth of color, students, and nonstudents—in organizations like Third Eye Movement and Youth Force Coalition—have been organizing against prison-building mania in that state, student antisweatshop activists at Berkeley and San Francisco State have made common cause with them, defining prisons as sweatshops because of their use of sub-minimum wage inmate labor...

...There is no way of gauging the campaign's potential impact on the private prison industry, but it's clear that it could profoundly shape the emerging anticorporate movement...

...They handed out fliers explaining Sodexho's role in the private prison industry...

...Pranis would also like to see the student campaign work with prison guards unions, which adamantly oppose private prisons (most private prisons are not unionized, and guard salaries tend to be much lower than in state prisons...

...Coordinated and well-articulated protests from idealistic students could deal the industry another substantial blow...

...at Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, SUNY-Albany, and elsewhere, students staged sit-ins this spring to urge their university administrations to stop tolerating contractors' exploitation of workers on campus...

...University administrators that do business with Sodexho-Marriott—the largest campus dining hall management company in the world—are beginning to face student objections to yet another ugly kind of corporate profiteering—private prisons...

...By the same token, when they treat students as anonymous consumers—rather than as members of a community who deserve a say in their policies—they can expect students to act like politicized consumer activists...

...DESPITE THE advances they made, students are angry at the administration...

...This makes sense...

...However, according to HERE organizer Marty Leary, the union's research suggests that the company has not complied with this settlement, and at this writing, another NLRB complaint was pending...

...We hope to create a model of a campaign that connects a range of battles—criminal justice, labor, environmental—by fighting one common enemy...

...STUDENTS FIGHT PRIVATE PRISONS Stories of riots and abuses in private prisons are rampant and have damaged their public image...

...Maybe Sodexho-Marriott will pull out [of CCA...

...82 n DISSENT / Fall 2000...

...The "Not With Our Money" campaign looks like a typical consumer boycott—indeed, its slogan could be easily cut and pasted onto any boycott campaign...

...When Sodexho-Marriott took over operations of the campus dining services, the company refused to honor the union recognition clause in its contract...

...Prisoners housed in private facilities make up the fastest growing segment of the U.S...

...Students also say that the school acted according to values that are at odds with its professed mission—as a liberal arts college and as a Quaker institution...

...Oberlin students, too, began a campaign last spring...

...Though of course those objecting to the prison boom don't like public prisons either, student activists find it particularly disturbing that corporations should be making a profit from policies that are not in the public interest—such as excessive prison sentences and the incarceration of nonviolent offenders...

...Not With Our Money," the student campaign against Sodexho-Marriott, was conceived and launched by the Prison Moratorium Project...

...If we had just said the food was bad— which it is—Sodexho would be gone...

...After American University students staged a dining hall boycott and a series of anti-Sodexho guerrilla theater events, the company put up fliers on campus explaining that it wasn't really investing in private prisons...

...Activists opposing corporate wrongdoing— labor and environmental exploitation, for example—and those opposing state human rights abuses—students working to end the death penalty, the prison boom, or police brutality— are working closely together...

...If Sodexho-Marriott is kicked off a campus, those activists may no longer be involved in the fight against private prisons...

...Such "economies" may save the company money, but they result in institutions that violate human rights and endanger public safety...

...Though such disappointment can be especially powerful at a religiously affiliated school, students at all sorts of institutions are being politicized by the sense that academia is supposed to provide a space in which humanistic values at least compete with the bottom line...

...That's a little unsettling...

...Washington, D.C...

...The strength of the "Not With Our Money" boycott strategy will depend on whether students can transcend it...

...The Oberlin coalition included the group working on behalf of Mumia AbuJamal, Ruckus Society-trained kids who can be called upon for almost any anticorporate civil disobedience (they dropped the banner from the library), the student labor solidarity groups, and those working on behalf of prisoners...

...These are hopeful signs, but it's unclear what the anti-Sodexho campaign's future holds...

...Prison guards unions' opposition and public safety concerns have jeopardized their support even among many rabid law-and-order politicians...

...At Earlham, for instance, some administrators pointed out that Aramark, the company that would compete with Sodexho in the upcoming bid for the dining hall contract, serves food in private prisons...

...Earlham's administration, as administrations tend to do when they don't wish to meet activists' demands, appointed a committee to review the matter...

...That was clearly a union-busting tactic, but it may not work: workers have begun discussing a union drive with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees...

...In Canada, which is beginning to have its own public debate over private prisons, students at the University of Toronto, McGill, and Concordia have also joined the campaign...

...And there's good reason to think the students have alarmed the company...

...Student pressure to raise wages did result in a 10 percent wage increase for campus workers...

...And students at many more schools occupied buildings—some even went on hunger strikes—to protest egregious conditions in factories that make hats and sweatshirts bearing their school logos...

...indeed, that has already happened at some schools...

...When Caldwell and fellow Earlham students went to Washington, D.C., for the April 16 protests, they were arrested and taken to a CCA prison...

...The anarchist leanings of many of the young people protesting the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and World Bank make this coalition even more natural...

...And workers throughout the industry are poorly paid...

...So when the administration, in the end, did kick Sodexho off-campus, no one was sure why...

...But the goals go beyond Sodexho itself, he says...

...When people hear what's going on, it's really going to blow up...

...they feel that by creating a sham committee, the university showed little regard for the concept of "campus democracy...

...in Windsor, Ontario, at the Organization of American States meeting...

...at St...

...More likely it will try to avoid serving noxious bacteria for lunch...

...College president Douglas Bennett ignored the committee's recommendation, but agreed to extend Sodexho-Marriott's contract by only one year (it is normally a fiveyear contract...

...But because we were doing what Earlham students are supposed to do and looking at the larger social justice issues, they're still here...

...private prison industry...

...for example, that of the Oberlin Coalition for Sustainable Agriculture, which objected to Sodexho-Marriott's use of genetically modified (and needless to say, nonorganic) food...

...This reflects shifts taking place in the student movement as a whole—as it begins to confront domestic as well as foreign injustice, it becomes more multiracial...

...Hampshire and SUNY-Binghamton students, on the other hand, served potluck and now have promising campaigns underway...

...But at Oberlin and elsewhere, other elements of the coalition may have more staying power...

...clearly the student protest had helped, but the literally stomach-turning cuisine shouldn't be underestimated...

...Student dining hall workers had been trying to unionize for two years and had been campaigning to end the use of nonunionized, underpaid temp labor in the dining hall...

...Food is crucial to this campaign...

...It is becoming more and more usual for behemoth management companies to run universities' janitorial, laundry, and dining hall services...

...Louis University, where the student government endorsed the dining hall boycott, activists provided no festive food alternative, and the campaign went nowhere...

...Much of the student anticorporate movement has been criticized for being "too white...

...Though their numbers are growing, private prisons haven't exactly taken over the corrections system: only 7 percent of prisons and jails are privately run...

...LIZA FEATHERSTONE is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y...

...In August, just as Evergreen College was about to sign a contract with Sodexho-Marriott, negotiations broke down in the face of a threatened boycott from students and faculty...

...THE SODEXHO campaign is based on numerous coalitions—some of them unusual...

...Whatever happens, the campaign is one to watch closely...

...many are shocked to find out that their administrators, many of whom now like to be called "CEOs," think like businesspeople...

...The other problem with boycott campaigns is, of course, the contingencies involved...

...Private prison companies' performance on Wall Street has been dismal, and despite the demand, profits seem elusive...

...Caldwell might be right about the bad food complaint...

...At Earlham, a small Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, students have been fighting for better wages for dining hall staff, who are Sodexho-Marriott employees...

...Working with campus dining hall workers is a good start—it is by working with workers in the United States and the third world that students protesting sweatshop labor have begun to forge a solidarity that is far more inspiring—and effective—than merely voting with dollars...

...Five hundred students— of Earlham's 1,150—signed a petition asking Earlham to boot the company off campus...

...At SUNY Albany this spring, when student labor and antiprison activists joined forces with students holding an antisweatshop sit-in in university president Karen Hitchcock's office (in which seventeen students were arrested and several were handled brutally by campus police), the coalition demanded Sodexho-Marriott's ouster...

...students should undertake campaigns in which they have some power to affect change, and they have far more power to influence their university's practices than, for instance, to persuade a judge to grant Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial...

...The administration bought off the food activists with a promised allocation of several hundred pounds of organic yams per semester, so their future participation is uncertain...

...Students at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Evergreen, American, Howard, Skidmore, University of Maryland-College Park, James Madison, and St...

...that makes private prisons a logical target for 78 n DISSENT / Fall 2000 activists who object to the current incarceration mania...

...So when the Prison Moratorium Project kicked off the "Not With Our Money" Campaign in April, the Earlham students got on board immediately...

...Part of the challenge is trying to transform a consumer boycott into an effective and meaningful political event...

...Students denounced the CCA holdings and pointed to the company's terrible campus labor record...

...Given that universities act like corporations and shamefully exploit their workers—from dishwashers to Englishcomposition instructors—they shouldn't be surprised when those workers organize unions...

...THE CAMPAIGN'S racial mix is also promising...

...In the correctional system, says Kevin Pranis of the New York Citybased Prison Moratorium Project, a coalition of student, youth, and other activists, "there is no fat...

...The campaign against Sodexho-Marriott has already achieved some concrete gains...

...Clearly, as Pranis points out, there would be political and cultural obstacles to such an alliance—guards tend to favor building more prisons, for instance, while most student radicals see private prisons as a disturbing symptom of the expansion of the prison industry—but he hopes they'll "at some point, like the loggers and environmentalists, realize the enemy is elsewhere...

...But there are other reasons to oppose private prisons...

...Without food, says Pranis, the boycott is "just starvation"— not politically hospitable...

...Throughout the campaign, Sodexho-Marriott has insisted that it is being unfairly targeted, since it is its parent company, Sodexho Alliance, that invests in CCA, technically not Sodexho-Marriott...

...At SUNY-Albany, for instance, it's unlikely that the company will take its ouster as a sign that it should divest from CCA, because private prison investment ended up being only one complaint among many...