Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

Corrections Corporation of America (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This topic of CCA keeps coming up (like, to my conscience) in the middle of other posts.  I finally decided to give it a page so it would be brought up, but not detract, from the point I’m making about US Congress response to Hermitage Capital Management, Ltd./Browder & Hamilton Securities/Fitts.

And the ongoing “global heist of capital.”  Slave labor from prisons is part of this, don’t kid yourself.

A former prisoner bought enough shares of Corrections Corporation of America (Tennessee) to cause them some well-deserved negative publicity. Those that haven’t yet connected this to wealthy US politicians (as in Lamar & Honey Alexander) have bats in the belfry, still.

~ ~ ~ ~  Thurgood Marshall is on the board of directors of CCA and recommended AGAINST a biannual report on what it’s done to reduce sexual assaults on its inmates.  however, 20% of the shares (shareholders or their proxies) (a good chunk!) voted FOR this.

More to the point, the majority shares in this outfit voted NOT to:

PRweb

“CCA Prison Rape Shareholder Resolution Gains Almost 20% of Voting Shares” Nashville, TN 3/17/2012

14.6 million shares voted in favor of requiring Corrections Corporation of America to report on efforts to reduce prisoner rape and sexual abuse. Resolution proponent calls vote results “significantOn May 10, the shareholders of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison firm, voted on a shareholder resolution that sought to hold CCA more accountable for reducing incidents of rape and sexual abuse at the company’s for-profit detention facilities.

The resolution, introduced by Alex Friedmann, a former prisoner who was incarcerated at a CCA-operated facility in the 1990s, would have required the company to issue biannual reports describing the Board of Directors’ oversight of the company’s efforts to reduce incidents of rape and sexual abuse at each of CCA’s prisons. Friedmann is employed as the associate editor of Prison Legal News, a publication of the non-profit Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC).

The voting results, reported by CCA on Form 8-K filed with the SEC, indicated that 14.6 million shares voted in favor of the resolution and 64.35 million shares voted against, with 7.89 million shares abstaining and 5.33 million recorded as broker non-votes. Therefore, of the shares voting, around 18.5 percent voted for the resolution – or more than one in six of the voting shares. CCA did not release the voting results at the annual meeting as was its prior practice. ISS Governance, one of the nation’s leading proxy advisory firms, had recommended a “for” vote.

“The results are significant,” said Friedmann, “particularly considering the public policy subject matter of the resolution and the fact that it was backed by a limited campaign initiated by a single shareholder – who is a former CCA prisoner, at that.”

“Since almost 20% of the voting shares were in favor of this resolution, CCA’s management team should take notice – and action – accordingly,” added HRDC director Paul Wright, who noted that the SEC considers a 3% favorable shareholder vote to be successful enough to reintroduce a resolution the following year.

CCA had formally objected to the shareholder resolution, saying the company would voluntarily produce less detailed reports related to rape and sexual abuse, claiming that reports on prison rape were part of the company’s ordinary business operations, and questioning Friedmann’s motives behind his resolution to require the company to report on its efforts to reduce prison rape. The SEC rejected CCA’s objections {{link, above}}, which led to the resolution being included in the company’s proxy materials – where CCA included a lengthy opposition statement.

Friedmann noted that the resolution provided CCA with an opportunity to demonstrate it was willing to be transparent and publicly accountable in regard to its efforts to reduce incidents of rape and sexual abuse at its facilities, but that the company had failed to do so. CCA’s Board of Directors, including Thurgood Marshall, Jr. and former U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, recommended that shareholders vote against the resolution.

(Forms 8-K filings (lots of them…Cannot be read without signing up for “edgarOnline” — SEC filings.)

	(Filer)	Received ( Period )
SC 13D		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(CORVEX MANAGEMENT LP)	04/05/12
PX14A6G		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(FRIEDMANN ALEX)	04/04/12
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(HORNE JOHN R)	04/02/12 (04/02/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(GRANDE ANTHONY L)	03/30/12 (03/28/12)
DEF 14A		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA	03/30/12 (05/10/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(COLLINS BRIAN D)	03/22/12 (03/20/12)
8-K		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA	03/21/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(ALVARADO DONNA M)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(CORRENTI JOHN D)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(DECONCINI DENNIS)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(HORNE JOHN R)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(JACOBI C MICHAEL)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)
4		CORRECTIONS CORP OF AMERICA(MARSHALL THURGOOD JR)	03/20/12 (03/16/12)

CCA sexual assaults on prisoners is NOT A SMALL MATTER:  Mother Jones article, the day before the proxy vote, also shows

Ex-Con Shareholder goes after World’s Biggest Prison Corp.

Alex Friedmann, who did time at a CCA facility,

demands it get better on prison rape. And investors are listening. 

By James Ridgeway

For instance, in a 2007 survey of local jails by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a CCA facility in Torrance County, New Mexico, clocked in with the highest rate of sexual victimization (13.4 percent), more than four times the national average. It also had the highest rate of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization—7 percent, as compared with a national average of around 2 percent.

CCA can certainly afford to address the issue. The longtime industry leader in prisons and immigrant detention, it owns or operates 67 facilities (see table of its customers below) and boasts about $1.7 billion in annual revenues—more than 40 percent of which come from the federal government and most of the rest from the states and localities. The company reportedly employs 35 lobbyists on Capitol Hill, with hundreds more working in 33 states over the past eight years.

(not to mention also the labor involved, and groups like ALEC expanding the prison population…)

HERE are their Board of Directors as of 2012 shareholders’ meeting votes, and the record of the voting on the matter above:

Commissioners during a hearing of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Related articles

• CCA takes step forward on REIT conversion (bizjournals.com)
• Contract Requires Prisons 90% Filled (ritholtz.com)
• United States Private Prison Industry (inprisonedwomen.wordpress.com)
• Private Prisons Spend $45 Million On Lobbying, Rake In $5.1 Billion For Immigrant Detention Alone (thinkprogress.org)
• Prisons as Growth Industry (counterpunch.org)
• Immigrants’ detention profits companies (miamiherald.com)
• Prison Companies Making Big Money Off Arrests of Illegal Immigrants (hispanicallyspeakingnews.com)
• “Engendering Rape” (sentencing.typepad.com)
• Ralph Nader urges Obama and Romney to discuss “the prison-industrial complex” (sentencing.typepad.com)