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News > World

US: Hillary Clinton Claims She Would End Private Prisons

  • Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Iowa, Oct. 7, 2015.

    Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign rally in Iowa, Oct. 7, 2015. | Photo: Reuters

Published 9 October 2015
Opinion

The presidential candidate made the pledge during a meeting with activists looking to end mass incarceration.

​U.S. presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with activists on Friday from Campaign Zero, a group pushing for criminal justice reform, to discuss issues ranging from privatized prisons to heavily armed, “militarized” police

It was the second meeting between Clinton and activists associated with the broader Black Lives Matter movement, a product of the social unrest that followed the police killing last year of an unarmed African-American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.

RELATED: Ferguson Attorney Named Missouri ‘Prosecutor of the Year’

Clinton spoke with activists for 90 minutes in Washington, DC. A chief topic of concern was privatized prisons.

Activist Deray McKesson, a founder of Campaign Zero, said he wants to see Clinton engage in more than just talk.​ “She hasn’t released a platform yet about racial justice or criminal equity or criminal justice,” he told MSNBC, “so I’m hopeful that this conversation will inform that platform."

Clinton's chief rival for the Democratic Party's nomination, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, released a criminal justice platform of his own following a series of Black Lives Matter protests at his campaign events. He has called for “demilitarizing” the police and outfitting law enforcement officers with body cameras.

Much of the focus of Campaign Zero and the Black Lives matter movement has been the perceived racial bias of police in the United States and the fact that people of color are placed behind bars at a much greater rate than whites for crimes they are statistically no more likely to commit.

According to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic males. Indeed, though they make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, nearly 40 percent of the United States’ 2.3 million prisoners are African-Americans.

RELATED: Black Lives Matter Rebuffs Democratic Party Endorsement

During the meeting, Clinton reportedly pledged to get rid of private prisons should she be elected. That promise came just one day after she was interrupted by an immigrant rights activist who accused her of being funded by private prisons that are complicit in the U.S. government’s policy of mass deportation.

In July, The Intercept reported that lobbyists for two major for-profit prison companies are Clinton’s top fundraisers.

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