Unfortunately, 25 percent of incoming black American high school seniors will have an incarcerated parent, the Princeton Private Prison Divest (PPPD) Coalition warned. This came in after the group demonstrated outside Alexander Hall on Thursday.
According to The Daily Princetonian, the protest resulted from a walkout at a Council of the Princeton University Community meeting last March 27. The recent demonstration aims to show prospective freshmen that the school community is concerned about mass imprisonment and anti-immigration policies. It also hopes to remind administrators that PPPD will continue to push for full private prison divestment.
For the record, Princeton has clarified that it has not invested in private prisons and has no intention to do so, Vice-President Bob Durkee told the media himself. Participants in the protest held up signs and handed out flyers outlining PPPD's goals like a meeting with the University's Board of Trustees. The members of the coalition then stressed that they seek "formal divestment and dissociation from private prison and detention corporations."
Now, going back to the claim that a quarter of incoming black American students will have grown up with a jailed parent, one of the organizers of the PPPD rally explained that it will have an "adverse" impact on the abilities of the students to educate themselves. Nevertheless, the coalition noted that it does not "discourage" prospective students from attending the University. It just wants to show the kind of activism that is happening on campus.
In fact, per an earlier University Herald report, various school organizations and hundreds of students flocked together at Firestone Plaza on April 26 to stage the "Rally for Hate-Free Princeton". Apparently, the participants fight against attacks based on gender, race, religion, disability, or ethnic origin. This occurred after the University received a series of hate speech flyers posted on its buildings last week.
To shed more light on the issue, a private prison is a place wherein people are physically confined by a third party contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies usually enter into deals that will pay them a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner or for each place available. Such contracts may be for the operation of a facility, design, and construction. Below is a video from Now This that features Bernie Sanders' opinion about private prisons.
