NEWS
REPARATORY JUSTICE: A LOOK AT THE HARVARD PRISON DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGN BY ELIE LEVINE
W
hen Harvard University student Jarrett Drake worked on a class project regarding the school’s investments in prisons in the fall of 2017, he didn’t expect it to garner national attention and spark widespread campus action in the following three years. The class had focused on incarceration, ending with a final creative project. Drake dove into the project with his classmate, Graduate School of Design student Sam Matthew. Throughout the course of their research, Drake and Matthew discovered that Harvard’s $40 billion endowment includes 14 Meet the Makers | scoutcambridge.com
holdings in companies that profit from the prison-industrial complex. The result of their project was Harvard’s Investments in Prisons (HIP), a look at the school’s investments in the prisonindustrial complex (PIC), which later grew into a full-fledged activist group: the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign (HPDC).
A MOVEMENT IS BORN
A
ccording to Rachel Herzing, co-founder of the grassroots organization Critical Resistance, the PIC is composed of “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.’” This means that private prison businesses gain profit from incarceration, rather than tackling the problems that lead to imprisonment at their roots. Most of the university’s investments are not public. However, of the holdings it does disclose, $3 million are invested in the PIC, the HPDC found. This number includes investments in private prison companies CoreCivic and GEO Group. It also includes exchange-traded funds (ETFs)—which are bundles of
stocks and bonds—bound up in these private prison companies, as well as companies that profit from the PIC through bail bonds, surveillance, prison labor, transportation, and other services for public and private prisons. For the better part of 2018, Matthew and Drake took the data they had gathered about the PIC for the project. In February 2018, Drake, along with a group of other Harvard students, held a teach-in on Harvard’s investments in prisons. He says 10 people attended the first interest meeting on March 2, 2018, and meetings continued throughout the semester.
Photo, left, by Sasha Pedro. Photo, right by Lilly Milman.
