‘All servants imported and brought into the country … who were not Christians in their native country … shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion … shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all punishment … as if such accident never happened.’
-Virginia Slave Code of 1705, Virginia General Assembly
Although many criminal justice activists are quick to denounce the most egregious race-based expressions of prison privatization, ranging from involuntary prison labor to racially disparate sentencing policies, few, if any, have attended to the deeply racialized, yet somewhat arcane, relationship developing between the private prison industry and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Curiously, one of the best ways to understand exactly how the private prison industry views itself and its fundamental mission is to analyze changes in the IRS corporate filing status of private prison companies.
In July 2012, the GEO Group – the nation’s second-largest private prison operator behind Corrections Corporation of America – sent a letter to the IRS requesting a conversion from a typical ‘class-c’ […]
