We are calling on your support to demand an end to the horrific culture of the privatized prison industry. With your help, signature or vote we can continue to move this effort forward. The private prison industry is a driving force behind America's addiction to mass incarceration. This focus to maintain extremly high incarceration rates is directed at black and brown Americans as well as immigrants. The private prison industry, its financiers, and its shareholders are dependent upon a growing number of inmates serving longer sentences. To that end, the industry and its financiers have successfully lobbied to manipulate public policies to incarcerate grossly disproportionate numbers of people of color in the 1990s, primarily via mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws, and to detain over 2 million immigrants in the past 5 years. Since 2004, the nation's two largest private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group (GEO), spent over $18 million lobbying the federal government; these corporations and their biggest investors engage in political scheming and lobbying at the state and local level as well. Such policies drive up prison populations, destroy families, pose short and long term threats to society and put added strains on state and federal budgets. Increasing prison costs cause cuts in funding for education and health care. We demand that our government officials ban the practice of private prison through realistic weeding out measures for much needed reform. We demand that our global corporate and financial leaders redirect their investment focus on a productive and thriving future of the United States and not a doomed incarcerated future. Let's work on being number 1 in Education and not incarceration.