The issue: Prison industrial complex

Mass incarceration is particularly devastating for poor communities, immigrants, people of color, and their families. For-profit firms have flooded money into prison and immigration jail infrastructure and services, and have used industry associations to lobby for harsher policing and longer sentencing, even for non-violent offenders. People who are incarcerated work for pennies per hour while their families pay exorbitant fees to keep them supplied with bare necessities. Powerful, private equity interests and corporations reap enormous profits from the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the policing of immigration.

Asset managers like Vanguard are investing in economic systems of oppression and exploitation – and they’re using workers’ retirement plan savings to do so. Through Vanguard, the retirement plans of companies like Amazon and Comcast are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into private prison operators and other companies recommended for divestment by the American Friends Service Committee state violence criteria.