Columbia Just Became the First US University to Divest From Private Prisons

@mtaibbi wrote:

If there's a more twisted corner of American capitalism than incarceration for profit, I can't think of it.

Matt Taibbi tweeted out this article in Mother Jones, and I think it is a must read.

The New York university is pulling its money from the controversial industry

Citing the "ongoing discussion of the issue of mass incarceration," Columbia University has decided to stop investing money in companies that run private prisons, becoming the first university in the United States to divest from the controversial industry.

The university’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing announced last week that Columbia's board of trustees would divest from companies currently engaged in the operation of private prisons, and would "refrain from making new investments in such companies," according a statement on the university’s Finance Gateway website.

This is a good start and hopefully one day for-profit prison's will be outlawed.

That whole industry always seemed crazy to me, same with for-profit medicine.

Didn't even know universities were investing in private prisons. Columbia divesting is like praising a spouse abuser for no longer abusing.

Most of the time it is just finical advisers looking for the best investments. We went through a similar process in the 80's when students got schools to divest from South Africa in order to end apartheid.

I'd say this is a first good step in fixing the prison industry.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Didn't even know universities were investing in private prisons. Columbia divesting is like praising a spouse abuser for no longer abusing.

That is a little unfair to Columbia, I am sure they have allot of money to manage and it is probably not all done in house, so it is likely they invested in prisoncorp either indirectly or because they were investing in some diversified company where one of its activities is for profit prisons. Additionally they were most likely investing in companies that met some fiscal threshold, not specifically in a given facility.

This is similar to when institutional investors got out of South African investments towards the end of apartheid.

All I'm saying is that this is not an action that deserves praise. It's simply something that should be expected of them to do. They're meeting the baseline for common decency, that's it.

Wait, is it NYU and Columbia? Or just Columbia?