125. Are there any prisons in your 401K?

Many Americans are unaware that their retirement savings may be profiting off mass incarceration. In this eye-opening episode, we explore how major corporations and Wall Street firms are making billions by operating prisons and exploiting incarcerated workers.

You’ll learn how to use the free Prison Free Funds tool to easily check if your 401(k), IRA or other investment funds are invested in private prisons and related companies. 

Most importantly, you’ll hear actionable steps you can take to divest your retirement savings from this industry. Whether it's contacting your employer about alternative fund options or choosing socially responsible funds, you'll walk away empowered to align your investments with your values.

Our money has power. By keeping it out of the prison-industrial complex, we can be part of the solution to end mass incarceration and build a more just society. 

Tune in to learn how to take control of your financial future while making a positive impact with your investments.

Links from today’s episode:

American Slavery, Reinvented. The Atlantic. September 2015.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/

Prison Free Funds

https://prisonfreefunds.org/

ICYMI another episode you might enjoy:

Episode 82 Divesting from Prisons

https://pod.link/1577031108/episode/04a729da60dd2f1eb0b27eaf1ac8853b  

(recorded before the 2024 rebranding of this show)

Connect With Genet “GG” Gimja:

Website https://www.progressivepockets.com

Twitter https://twitter.com/prgrssvpckts 

Work With Me:

Email progressivepockets@gmail.com for brand partnerships, business inquiries, and speaking engagements.

Transcript

Welcome to Progressive Pockets! I go by GG, that’s short for Genet Gimja. This is a show about our money.You and me, non billionaires. People who care about what’s going on with our communities, with the planet, and we’re interested in finding untapped sources of our power.

And today’s episode is about whether or not there might be some prisons in our 401Ks.

Even if you have never gone out of your way, made it your mission to seek out private prisons and invest in them, they might be in your retirement accounts anyway. And the names of the private prison companies are so sneaky. Two publicly traded companies are CoreCivic (which used to be called Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group (which used to be called Wackenhut Corrections Corporation).

You can do a quick google search to find out of CoreCivic or GEO Group are in your accounts. I found them in a lot of the total market index funds.

But it’s possible that you might not be invested directly into private prison companies, but rather, maybe you are invested in companies who profit off of prison labor.

Investigations have exposed how major food brands like McDonald's, Walmart, Tyson, and Coca-Cola, Victoria’s Secret are profiting from prison labor in their supply chains. I remember when Whole Foods was outed a few years ago. 

The work that prisoners are doing includes manufacturing work, sometimes it includes agricultural work. In the South, there are prisons located on former plantation grounds where prisoners now work the same fields. I’ll link an Atlantic article about Angola, that’s a prison in Louisiana where prisoners are picking cotton in the same fields where some of their ancestors were likely enslaved and doing the same work. 

Major commodity traders like Cargill buy crops directly from prison farms. They admitted to that this year. They said they’re doing it in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Ohio and they’re trying to decide what to do about that. 

Russell Stover chocolates profits from incarcerated workers in Kansas. They STARTED doing this three years ago. So it’s not like these are all archaic practices that have just been handed down. No, this practice is very much alive and well.

My point is that companies in sectors ranging from agriculture to retail have profited from prison labor, often through complex supply chains that make the ties difficult to trace

Regardless of whether the prison is in the South or in another part of the country, prisoners are exploited. Prisoners can face punishments for refusing work, earn very low or no wages, lack training and safety protections, and have limited legal recourse even when injured or killed on the job. Prisoners are getting paid less than a dollar an hour, often much less than a dollar an hour and that is resulting in billions of dollars of extra profits for corporations.

So what can you do if you discover your 401(k) or IRA is funding mass incarceration? Here are some things you can do:

1. Use a transparency tool to find out what’s in your accounts

The non-profit As You Sow has created a free "Prison Free Funds" tool that allows you to look up mutual funds and ETFs to see if they are invested in companies involved in the private prison industry or using prison labor. Simply enter the name or ticker symbol of the funds you're invested in to get a letter grade and see any "flagged" holdings.

1. Engage with Your Employer on Alternative Investment Options

If your retirement plan is through your employer, such as a 401(k), you can absolutely write to them requesting alternative investment options that avoid funds with ties to the private prison industry or prison labor. This feedback works. There are employers that have divested from private prisons in response to pressure from the employees who didn’t want their 401Ks to include prisons. In fact, episode 9 of this podcast is all about how to get your employer to update the 401K options if you don’t like them. That episode was called “When your company doesn’t offer a socially responsible 401K.”

1. Divest Your Individual Retirement Account

If you have an individual retirement account like an IRA, you have more flexibility to choose which funds you invest in. You can divest from funds with poor grades from the Prison Free Funds tool and instead choose highly-rated funds that avoid companies profiting from mass incarceration.

1. Support Shareholder Resolutions

If you own stock in companies using prison labor, look for shareholder resolutions and vote in support of them to pressure the companies to change their practices. Shareholder advocacy is an important tool to drive corporate accountability.

Don’t worry, you are not a sole investor out there trying to fight this. There are organizations that are working on this issue. The NAACP is fighting it. The ACLU is fighting it. Incarcerated workers are organizing themselves to fight it. So it’s a team effort.

So to recap, here’s what we covered today:

• If you have broad market funds, you probably have some private prisons in your retirement accounts, which means, without our consent, they have us out here profiting from prison labor. Yuck!
• You can do a quick check to confirm if your retirement accounts do have prison profits lurking in there. Just go to prison free funds dot org and you can get a quick report card type of rating.
• If your employer doesn’t offer a prison-free 401K you absolutely can ask for one. And if you know any of your colleagues that might care, they could request the same.
• For the retirement accounts that are fully within your control, like your IRA, that’s where you can really choose exactly the investments that you want. Prison free investments.
• And then finally, I want to remind you that you are a shareholder and that means you have a voice! When they ask you to vote on the resolutions, vote! It doesn’t take that long at all!
• If your money is being managed with a financial planner you can ask them to vote on your behalf.

If you have more time today, check out episode 82, that’s the one about divesting from prisons.

Welcome to the new subscribers of the newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, don’t be shy, you can either go to progressive pockets dot com or you can send an email to progressive pockets at gmail dot com to say hi and get signed up.

Let’s end with a quote…this one comes from civil rights activist Coretta Scott King

“Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others.”

Let’s talk again soon!