Harvard Professor Cornel West wants the university, considered the most reputable in the world, to stop making money off of prison-related investments, according to a tweet from the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign.
As of 2013, 8.4 percent of the overall U.S. prison population
is housed in privately owned prisons, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice.
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More than 3,100 corporations—including 2,500-plus privately traded companies—profit from the U.S. prison system, according to a report released by the Corrections Accountability Project, PS Magazine reported.
West is a professor of the practice of public philosophy at Harvard Divinity School and teaches in the Department of African and African American Studies. He works to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., according to his bio.
The divestment campaign describes itself as a reparatory justice initiative that seeks to sever Harvard’s financial ties to the prison-industrial complex.
“We hope (Prof. West’s) endorsement encourages other thought leaders with Harvard affiliations to endorse their names on the right side of history
Harvard has publicly acknowledged and apologized for the university’s “direct complicity in the institution of slavery,” but it continues to profit from it, according to the petition:
“Beginning in early 2016, Harvard’s leadership took steps to publicly acknowledge and express remorse for the university’s direct complicity in the institution of slavery. Nevertheless, Harvard continues to profit from the caging and forced labor of Black people through its investments in the prison-industrial complex, through which the legacies of slavery persist.”
Prisons are sites for making
“It is a moral imperative that Harvard
More than 75 percent of undergraduates who voted in the most recent Undergraduate Council election support divestment from the prison-industrial complex, according to the campaign. The divestment campaign defines “prison-industrial complex” as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to what are, in actuality, economic, social, and political problems.”
Almost 2.3 million people are in prisons and jails plus another 4.5 million are on probation or parole.
“We demand that … Harvard Management Company
During its first public event in 2018, Prison Divestment Campaign organizers shared an audio tape of Derrick Washington, an inmate at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center maximum security prison in Lancaster, Mass. Washington was convicted of murder and described his experiences in the state prison system and his involvement with the Emancipation Initiative, a group that advocates for prisoners, according to a Harvard Crimson report.
“Because prison is all of misery and hopelessness — and Harvard readily profits from it — in
The Prison Divestment Campaign wants Harvard to:
West, a professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Center for African American Studies, has also endorsed divestment from Israel.
In 2015, West said Princeton had a moral obligation “to divest from Israel and its systematic injustices,” comparing the divestment movement on campus to the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s, Times of Trenton reported.
“The Israeli occupation of my Palestinian brothers and sisters is a crime against humanity,” West said. “They are killing hundreds daily — but where are the voices?”
