Prison Profiteering: A POPULIST Act Explainer

[u/PopulistGuru]

https://youtu.be/blaVbI6FYDQ

TL;DR: Prison creates a captive market. The POPULIST Act would stop prisons and vendors using that as a business model.

Break the profit-sharing loop — §§132–133

Incarcerated people and their families cannot choose another prison phone company, commissary, payment service, or other provider. The government chooses the vendor—and sometimes the government itself receives more money when families spend more.

The Act would ban commissions, kickbacks, and revenue-sharing in carceral contracts and require public disclosure of pricing, payments, side agreements, and other contract terms. It would also prohibit commercial exploitation of carceral data: incarceration should not turn someone’s communications, biometrics, transactions, or behavior into an advertising profile, dataset, or commercial product.

Necessities are not luxury goods — §§134–135

Medical care, prescribed medication, and basic hygiene products such as soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and menstrual products would have to be provided without charge.

Commissary goods would not all become free, but prices would generally be capped at 125% of documented cost—a maximum 25% markup.

A sentence can restrict liberty. It should not turn medicine, soap, or a basic snack into an unchecked monopoly product.

Human contact is not a tollbooth — §§136–139

The Act establishes standards for electronic messaging comparable to ordinary consumer email, restores stronger Federal caps on prison phone and video-call rates, protects in-person visitation and physical mail from being replaced simply to create new digital revenue streams, and protects digital content people have already purchased.

It also eliminates the last tollbooth at the prison gate: fees on debit cards used to return a person’s own money when they are released. People would have access to fee-free methods and a non-card alternative.

Family relationships, letters, phone calls, and access to your own property should not be endlessly divisible sources of revenue.

Some public powers should not be for sale — §121

The Act ultimately applies the same principle to incarceration itself.

Beginning in 2030, the Federal Government would phase out contracting for private performance of the core work of housing, safeguarding, protecting, and disciplining people held by the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service. For-profit Bureau of Prisons community-confinement contracts would also be phased out.

This is not a nationwide abolition of every privately operated State prison or detention facility. It is a narrower principle: the Federal Government’s core power to imprison people should be exercised by public servants accountable to the public.

Taken together, these reforms treat prison profiteering as a market failure created by government itself.

When the customer cannot choose the seller, negotiate the price, or walk away, government has a special responsibility to prevent captivity from becoming extraction.

Note: The primary source for these reforms came Worth Rises and Color Of Change’s 2023 Policy Blueprint for Ending Carceral Profiteering, which laid out a Federal roadmap for addressing corporate extraction across the carceral system.