The Center for Justice commends the University for voting to divest from private prisons and recognizes and values the work of the student organizers that brought this to the attention of not only Columbia University, but now to universities across the country. Below are statements from the University and Columbia Prison Divest, the student campaign led by Students Against Mass Incarceration.
From Columbia University
Trustee Action On Prison Divestment Issue
The University Trustees have voted to support a policy of divestment in companies engaged in the operation of private prisons and to refrain from making new investments in such companies.
The decision follows a recommendation by the University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI) and thoughtful analysis and deliberation by our faculty, students and alumni. This action occurs within the larger, ongoing discussion of the issue of mass incarceration that concerns citizens from across the ideological spectrum. We are proud that many Columbia faculty and students will continue their scholarly examination and civic engagement of the underlying social issues that have led to and result from mass incarceration. One of many examples of the University’s efforts in this arena is the work of Columbia’s Center for Justice.
In partnership with the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Justice recently received generous support from the Mellon and Tow foundations to help educate incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons, and to integrate the study of justice more fully into Columbia’s curriculum.
http://finance.columbia.edu/content/trustee-action-prison-divestment-issue
From Columbia Prison Divest
We are pleased to announce that after 16 months of research, protest, presentations, and countless hours of organizing, the organizers of the Columbia Prison Divest campaign have just been notified of the Columbia University Board of Trustees’ decision to #DIVEST from the private prison industry and to institute a policy banning reinvestment in companies that operate prisons! This will make Columbia the very FIRST university in the country to divest from the private prison industry.
As the student organizers of the Columbia Prison Divest campaign, we have embraced the collaborative spirit of prison divestment as a strategy born out of Black/Brown solidarity and organizers who came together in the common struggle against criminalization. While this campaign is primarily an effort born out of Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI), a Black-led prison abolitionist group, our strategy in targeting private prison companies specifically has been in effort to call out the ways in which these companies exploit the intimate ties between anti-Black racism, criminalization of immigrant communities, gender policing, and settler colonialism. CCA, GEO Group, and G4S (the main targets of our campaign) make money from anti-Black drug laws, mass deportation of immigrants, and mass incarceration, policing, and surveillance in occupied Palestine. Not only reaping profits from existing systems of oppression, these companies have played major, active political roles in the creation of policies that further criminalize marginalized communities through participation in conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and lobbying for racist policies like harsh sentencing and ID laws.
Prison divestment has been our demand not because we see private prisons as the primary problem or because we see financial investment as the only (or even primary) way that universities like Columbia participate in systems of criminalization and control. For us, prison divestment has been an entry point for addressing the ways in which students at elite colleges and universities are directly and specifically in the privileged positions that we are because of systems of inequality. The racist, classist images of “criminals deserving of punishment” are created in tandem with images of “hard-working college students deserving of opportunity,” and each is defined in relation to the other. Through prison divestment, we have worked to challenge these narratives and structures. We refuse to buy into false narratives that justify our privilege at the expense of the suffering of others and refuse to be the brown faces in college brochures that mask institutionalized racism within our education and criminal justice system(s) under the guise of exceptionalism and diversity. It should not be socially acceptable for an educational institution to invest in prisons. We hope that Columbia’s divestment contributes to the larger antiprison movement in effort to weaken mainstream notions that prisons = justice and prevent private prison companies and other institutions from upholding punitive frameworks of justice.
We hope this victory opens doors to more campaigns, to more organizing, to more victories. This is not the end. This is a beginning. We want to see more schools divest. We want to see Columbia have to continue to respond to the pressure of students and members of the West Harlem community who will not stand for the university’s extensive and active participation in systems of racist, classist criminalization and punishment. #PrisonDivest #BlackLivesMatter #FreePalestine #NoOneIsIllegal #Decriminalize #Decarcerate #Decolonize #Reparate #Abolish #TheStruggleContinues
https://www.facebook.com/columbiaprisondivest/posts/1602317203370652