“Uh, yeah, I don’t know anything about that,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent replied when asked about a strange purchase by the federal government.
  • Kirp123@lemmy.world
    10·
    9 days ago

    Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 28, 1983, by Thomas W. Beasley, Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto.[18] Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party; Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville; Hutto was the president-elect of the American Correctional Association, and according to a 2018 Time investigation, ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay.

    Oh right, how could I forget.

    • Kiernian@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 days ago

      and according to a 2018 Time investigation, ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay.

      fuckin…what!!!

      please tell me that was closed down in the 60s and 2018 was just when the article ran?

      • Kirp123@lemmy.world
        4·
        9 days ago

        Before founding the Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. It was 1967 and the Beatles’ “All you need is love” was a hit, but the men in the fields sang songs with lyrics like “Old Master don’t you whip me, I’ll give you half a dollar.” Hutto’s family lived on the plantation and even had a “house boy,” an unpaid convict who served them.

        That whole article is worth a read.

        https://web.archive.org/web/20250628151843/https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/