Lawsuit Cites Slavery In Challenge To AZ Private Prisons

ARIZONA, AZ — A new federal lawsuit is challenging Arizona's private prison industry on the basis of slavery. The suit, filed Monday on behalf of five inmates and the Arizona State Conference of the NAACP, argues that the current system “enables private prison corporations to commodify human beings just as private jails in the nineteenth-century South commodified slaves.”

The comparison to slavery isn’t an exaggeration, said attorney John Dacey, who has spent years preparing the lawsuit as director of the Arizona-based nonprofit Abolish Private Prisons.

“Our view is that incarceration and punishment are uniquely the government's responsibility,” Dacey said in an interview. “We don't think the private prison industry should exist at all.”

However, the complaint doesn’t list any private prisons as defendants. Instead, it is seeking a federal judge’s approval for class-action status in order to allow prisoners to sue the state’s Department of Correction, Rehabilitation and Reentry. The suit also lists David Shin, the department’s director, as a defendant.

The lawsuit’s central argument comes down to whether Arizona’s decision to delegate its “sovereign power of incarceration” through contracts to private corporations violates the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery.

The suit’s five named plaintiffs are among the 8,000 Arizona prisoners serving time in private facilities. Those prisons, the lawsuit argues, represent “jailers who have disincentives to see plaintiffs released” and replicates the conditions of “slave jails before the Thirteenth Amendment.”

Dacey said that the suit is the first to challenge the private prison industry through the U.S. Constitution’s definition of slavery — and whether that definition includes corporations whose stock prices fluctuate based on their ability to keep facilities filled with state and federal inmates. It’s a legal battle that may have to go all the way to the Supreme Court for judgment, Dacey acknowledged.

“We're not against public-private partnerships, or making a profit,” he said . “We just don't think it should ever be at expense of someone's liberty.”