 Well, hello everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here. And I am especially excited about this panel and opportunity. And it's rare that at SoCAP or in general, we get such a diverse group on the stage that we have organizers, activists, athletes, investors, African-American, Bengali-American, Latinx, white Jewish, that have been coming together around a particular issue. And in this case, we're talking about private prisons and their role in mass incarceration and family detention. And we're here today to talk about how this diverse set of actors has been collaborating to address this critical social issue, but also using it as a real example of how diverse actors can collaborate on any social issue. And in general, we talk a lot about the idea that there's a money story behind every story, that any social issue you can think of, there's connections to corporations, to investments, and that as we interrogate these, we can really be more effective as activists. I'm Morgan Simon. I'm founding partner at Candid Group. We work with athletes, actors, families, and foundations that want their money working for social justice. And we are very proud members of the Families Belong Together Coalition, and as all of us are on this stage. So excited to share some of that experience. I want to provide a little bit of context to start knowing that, particularly at SoCAP, we have a lot of folks internationally who may not know of the many ways in which America is very unique, that we have close to 4% of the world's population, but close to 25% of its incarcerated people. We lock up more people than any other country. And we're also relatively unique in relying on private prisons to do so. That means companies who make more money, the longer and the more people who are locked up. And in the case of mass incarceration, it's over 10% of people who are held in private facilities and then in immigrant detention, over 70% of people. And that's a big part of why private prisons have been central to this debate around immigrant detention in the US and how families belong together, came together to address this issue. But I want to kick off with someone who is really there from the start. Sochi Yoseguera from Mamas Compoder, to share a bit about how did private prisons become so central to this coalition of 10 million activists across the country? Yes, thank you. Thank you for being here. My name is Sochi Yoseguera. I am a National Campaign Director for Moms Rising, and I lead our work for the Latinx community, Mamas Compoder. And Moms Rising is a nonprofit, a grassroots organization over a million members around the country. When we had the crisis of family separation in the summer of 2018, there was something really visceral about knowing that you have children or you work with children and they're being taken away from their caregivers for political and monetary reasons. And so we started thinking, well, how can we really make a difference? How can we have an impact and offer a solution for our members to take action? Instead of making more noise and create more chaos, we decided to go after the private prisons that are working on family separation and family detention, because 70% of ICE detainees right now are housed in a private prison. The two main corporations that are the private prisons that are imprisoning these immigrants and criminalizing them is a geo group and C corporation. And what we did, we decided to go after the money, the loans that, and Morgan could explain it better, but they heavily depend on the loans from banks. And so we decided to use our consumer voices, organize our members, and get together with a coalition of over 120 organizations, partner organizations, that we're feeling the same way. How can we make an impact? How can we make a change? And we gather in a families belong together corporate accountability coalition, which we have what it's called the inside-outside strategy. Inside strategy, basically talking to investors and putting pressure from inside the company. And my panelists will talk a little bit more about that. But the outside strategy is basically using our consumer voices. The moms will bring over 7,000 mothers came to drop off petitions to stop financing private prisons to the local branches with their strollers and with the superhero capes. And we will go in and talk to the executives and the branch managers and say, we don't like this. We don't like that your bank is sponsoring these human rights violations. Please stop. And so we did several mobilizations. One of them was very creative led by Morgan. That was break up your bank. Don't break up your hearts on February 14. Then we had big hearts. And so that was a way that we came up to deliver on Valentine's Day these petitions. And so we have been so successful that up to today, we have had nine banks that declare and that announce that they will stop financing the private prisons. Absolutely, clap for that one. I'm going to pass it on to Morgan. Sure, absolutely. And it's just been such an honor to work together the over million members of Moms Rising Nationwide that have been taking such a leadership position across all 50 states in the country. I'm going to turn to Jasmine, who I have the pleasure to work with at Candid Group and who has been leading real money moves, which is our nonprofit educational initiative that's been very active in this campaign. So that makes Jasmine in general an expert on the money story behind the story. And I'm curious if you can share a little bit more on what that is and how that applies to private prisons. Definitely. Thank you. And it's such a pleasure to be here with all of you today. My name is Jasmine Rashid. Like Morgan said, I'm the director of real money moves and also work with Candid Group, which is a registered investment advisor out in Oakland. I think it's really important to ground our understanding of private prisons and immigrant detention centers in this country knowing that they're a relatively new phenomenon. They started in the 1980s and were officially codified. But this idea of commodifying and profiting off of particularly vulnerable communities who were incarcerated is nothing new in our country. This is just the latest iteration of it. And this iteration, this business model, is pretty straightforward. It's make as much money as possible by locking up as many people as possible for as long as possible. And that is why we speculated and we believe that Geo Group and Corsivic, these two publicly traded giants in the private prison industry, have spent upwards of $25 million on lobbying over the past three decades, which have included laws for harsher, sorry, for ICE, ICE enforcement. And they have both served on the board, served in the committee of ALIC, which drafts model legislation for criminal justice laws, such as three strikes you're out, which many of you may have heard of, mandatory minimums. And though Geo Group and Corsivic say that they don't participate in lobbying, trusted partners of the Justice Policy Institute and other researchers in the space would definitely agree otherwise. So I believe that private prisons are permissible in the United States because of three key myths. And those are that they would save money to government, that they would result in better conditions for incarcerated populations, and that they would reduce recidivism, which is a huge problem in our country upwards of 70% of people who are entered into the system are likely to return. But now that we're 30-something odd years down the line and we actually have the data, we know that those three myths aren't true, right? So often, if a person is incarcerated in a for-profit private facility, they're going to cost upwards of $1,600 more per year per inmate than a federal or state facility. It's definitely more violence that's happening inside of these private facilities, not just for inmates, but also for guards and for staff. And there's extremely high turnover rates in these communities where private prisons have turned up. And recidivism has increased. And this is all really intuitive when you think about this core business model of that bottom line. You're going to make sure you're not spending external money on safety and on training or rehabilitation. That's just not part of the business model. And some of you may remember in 2016 when the Department of Justice announced that they were phasing out the federal use of all private prisons for those exact reasons, as well as documents that human rights abuses. Obviously, that phasing out was overturned, which is why we're still in the room having this conversation today. I also want to point out in terms of financial structure that private prisons are structured as real estate investment trusts, structures of REITs. So for investors in the room, you know that means they get some great tax benefits. But on the flip side, they're required to distribute 90% of their profits to shareholders, which makes them extremely, extremely reliant on bank capital, like Zosir was mentioning, specifically term lines and credit loans. And that first came really into public consciousness with that moment of the crisis at the border when people started asking, who's funding this? Where is this money coming from? And the answer was we are. Both through our taxes, private prisons have billion-dollar-year contracts with ICE, which is about $2.8 million of taxpayer money a day. But then that other piece, really honing in on the bank credit lines and term loans, which are necessary for these private prisons to run their day-to-day operations and to expand any facilities. So that's why at Candid Group, as registered investment advisors who have this grounding in social justice, we saw that it was our responsibility to contribute that financial knowledge to the activists who are already on the ground and the trenches doing the work, who know how to get campaigns done, who know how to win, but using that financial story, that money story behind the story, like Morgan mentioned, as a really powerful tool and leverage point for winning campaigns and figuring out those key pressure points. Fantastic. And can you share a little bit more about how the Real Money Moves Initiative came together specifically, what that's looked like? Yeah, so Real Money Moves first came at the same time as Family Detention really came into public consciousness. And this idea that we wanted to make sure that activists in the space had those financial tools, but also leveraged the visible platforms, public platforms of influencers. So people like Derek, who reached out and said, I'm interested in impact investing and I also want to make sure my money is aligned with my values. I don't want the money that I'm making to support my family, that I'm investing, to also then be locking up someone else's family. Because knowing, as consumers, when we put our money in the bank, the bank is then lending that out to these private prisons. So since then, we've grown to be a resource and a 501C3 to make sure that all these different campaigns, private prisons and beyond, are able to have that really strong financial activist training in their work. And Real Money Moves over time came together with over 30 athletes and influencers, a number of cast members of Orange as a New Black, saying that they did not want their money in private prisons. And then at the same time, some committed 10 million to social investing to save. We want to really be thoughtful about not just where we take our money out, but where it really should live in the world. And Derek, you're one of the early adopters and supporters of Real Money Moves. If you could share a little more about how you got involved and with such a busy life and schedule of how this became an issue that you were so passionate and committed to. Yeah, so it was around 2018, the summer of 2018 when the crisis at the border was happening and it was getting a lot of attention. And it was really actually after the fact in which DNFL protests were going on, actually during the same time. And a lot of the protests were about mass incarceration and police brutality. And the one reason why I think a lot of athletes can relate to these issues is because a lot of them, including myself, were affected by issues like mass incarceration. Like if you look around in any locker room in the NFL, chances are probably 75 to 80% of those guys in there have a family member that's locked up or has been locked up, myself included. And so that really hit home for us and that really resonated with us. And it was like, okay, there's all these issues. There's the family detention at the border. There's the mass incarceration issues, the things in which guys are protesting. And so you can only protest for so long. It's like after the protests or during the protests, what's the action? Like what's the followup? And so for me, that's how I was always thinking of it. Like, yeah, we can take knees and raise fists, but what are we really gonna do that's tangible to affect change? And so when Maureen brought the idea and the campaign of real money moves to me, I was like, yes, this makes a lot of sense. I think we could get a lot of buy-in from guys in the league and the influencers alike. And so for me, it was an easy ask because it was like, hey, talk to your teammates about talking to their advisors about divesting from private prisons. Send them a note in the email and say, hey, look, can you make sure I'm not in GL Group, Core Civic? What is it called now? C Corporation? Core Civic. Is it Core Civic? I said it wrong. Okay. Well, so a moment on that, this goes back to how nefarious these things are that originally it was Corporate Corrections of America, which made it pretty clear that sounds like a prison. Core Civic, that could be like an after-school program, right? It sounds like really benign. So it goes back to good branding can change the face and also confuse people. So it is Core Civic and GL Group. So, I mean, they kind of slide under the radar, you know? Like you're looking at these issues and you're like, wait, how is this getting to this point? And you have these giants, like you referred to them as just kind of operating and making profits and nobody knows about them. And so what this campaign did was expose those players in this game and really had the voice and the momentum and influence of guys like myself and my teammates in my locker room and different influencers. And so it really shined a light on it that was necessary to really get the conversation going in the masses. So it was a very successful campaign, I would say. It had a lot of momentum and led to, I think, what you see a lot going on in terms of these banks divesting or not cutting ties with these entities. So it was a very tangible thing that made a lot of sense to guys like myself and in the locker room. And I think the other element with influencers, it meant that we were able to get these conversations into very different places than had been in the past, so to actually have People Magazine do a feature on private prisons because they care about influencers and what they're up to. And the way that that changes when someone is hanging out on the checkout line, what might get into their news pipeline and the importance of that mass presence, given the whole point was whether you had $100 in the bank or 100 million, you were connected to this issue. And I think for all of us, the ability to read the news and not just get mad but get even, to feel like we can really be protagonists and play an active role has been very exciting. And I want to turn now to Matt Nelson, Executive Director of Presente.org, which represents over 600,000, I think, Latinx. Half a million, yeah, five percent. Half a million. Latinx, activist nationwide advocating on a number of issues and has been fantastic strategically as we muddy through these waters and all these different players. I wanted to ask if you could share a little bit more tactically what has happened in this campaign. Great, and thank you so much. This is amazing to be here. It's so great to work with such incredible partners. And as we move to get free, so how is everybody today? You all right? How's SoCAP going? It's a beautiful day for justice today. Like Morgan said, I'm Matt Nelson. I was born in Columbia. I grew up in Minnesota, which makes me a proud Minolumbian. That's right. And Presente really is at the intersection of building power, changing culture, and staying present day. And I got into some of this private prison work in 2013 when we specifically focused on how the private prison industry was expanding into states. They were expanding their contracts and they were focused on, they had a new model of business, which was focused in Florida about getting youth facilities. And this was before they were really into the migrant space, but their model was in order to maximize profit, knowing that if you lock up young people, teenagers, mostly black and brown teenagers, they are more likely to come back into the adult system. So they came up with this idea of why aren't we building youth facilities? And so we got involved and we actually, at that point, went after their institutional investors and were able to pull $300 million out of institutional investing from the private prison industry. And then from there, really pressured the federal government and it precipitated into the federal government saying, we're gonna cancel contracts, as Jasmine mentioned. But tactically, it was similar to what's going on now, is that you do need multiple strategies involved. You do need active engagement. And quite frankly, you need a lot of leaders from a lot of different sectors in order to make this happen. And I think we're gonna get into that a little more about how we made it. But I do wanna say a bit more about how the private prison industry started. So in 1983, the album of the year was Thriller. Scary, right? But even more scary was that was also the year that Corrections Corporation of America formed. And they formed with the founding principal, and it was a quote from one of their co-founders that said, look, we can sell prisons just like we sell cars, real estate, and hamburgers. People are not hamburgers. Locking people up for profit is akin to slavery. And that, no one should be in the business of something that's like slavery. And so then let's go back to the Thriller album to 1983 in that while this was happening, the mass incarceration boom of the country was happening. So in the early 80s, there were less than 700,000 people locked up in US prisons. Now it's something like 2.2 million. So in the time, in the private prison industry knew this, they knew that there was a boom of mass incarceration, why? Because the governing policies were criminalized, communities of color, and changed the doctrine of incarceration from rehabilitation, as Jasmine mentioned, to punishment. Prisons were for punishment. And the third strategy here was give law enforcement more flexibility to target communities of color and poor people, because again, like more than a third of people when they are incarcerated are unemployed. And so you have this confluence of white supremacy coupled with corporate domination that really is the core of the private prison industry. So the remedy is what we've seen in the last year, what we've seen over time is this incredible leadership, heroes, the heroes who are on the front lines of this migrant detention, not just in the US, but present their worst with people in Central America following the caravans understanding what's going on in other countries because money flows transnationally, our organizing also has to be transnational. And it's the leaders who we centered, it's the mothers, it's the people directly impacted, it's the family members, those are the best people positioned to find the solutions. Because a lot of our folks and a lot of Latinx folks, you know, we face the dual crises. And I'm sure at SoCAP you're talking about the existential threat of climate change and war and how to move money away from those existential threats. And coupled with that is the daily, what I would call a violent fixation on criminalizing migrants, Latinx people and other communities of color. And so in order to do that, we need deep solidarity, we need courage and compassion that what we've seen in this campaign, and that has to replace the cowardice and corruption of the private prison industry and any elected official who supports them. I love that frame of courage and compassion. And I'd love if you could share more of what are some of the ways that people have shown up with courage and compassion, whether at bank branches or through petitions, like what actually led to some of these victories. And I do want to make sure it's really important as well to reference that historical context, right? That families belong together as a relatively new coalition. There are certainly activists who have been working since 1983, right, to address private prisons. So we stand on the shoulders of giants and are so thrilled to get to be part of this overall legacy. So to note, this is a much broader victory, but just to highlight a bit of what are some of the actions that kind of led to the current announcements. Sure. So the coalition I think was very strategic and disciplined and in first engaging, first having the research, going to the banks, engaging them, really giving them an opportunity to be transparent about their involvement in private prisons and then make, we had both the financial argument as well as the moral authority of what was going on here. And as we escalated the internal conversations, we at any moment could put thousands of people around the country in the streets at bank branches. Again, we had some very brand name banks who were the first to be focused on and the first to pull out of private prisons like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan. And so a lot of these banks knew that we could show up whenever we wanted to. And I think the other piece of this was really the narrative power. Like, and part of that narrative power is, yes, mothers showing up with strollers and kids saying like, these children who are detained could be my children. This could be us. It's a really powerful narrative to have financial experts show up and say, look, there's no financial reason for this. The industry is a mess. The risks are too high. It's powerful to have athletes and influencers say, look, we're taking a stand. We're moving our money. We believe in this. We're part of this movement. We're part of the solution. And I think that's what it took and quite frankly, like when I think about how the dreamers, the dream walkers started 10 years ago and walked from Florida, from Miami to D.C. Saying undocumented and unafraid went from being criminalized to being heroes with the 80% approval rating across the country. That's the type of narrative shift and the type of cultural change that then is part of the powerful formula to move the biggest financial institutions and to do the right thing and not just for the short term. And I hope somebody talks about how like real money moves is sort of leading and Kendi Group is leading on ensuring that the victories and the progress we made continue and will be there for the long run. So to speak a little bit to those victories because I think it's really critical to acknowledge what's actually happened, right? So as Sotri mentioned, nine banks that represent 100% of the publicly known credit and term loan providers for GeoGroup. That's big. Yeah, you get a little woo to that. You know, something to celebrate. And then over 60% of the banks that have provided the credit and term loans to CoreCivic. So there are a couple banks that are still outstanding. There's National Days of Action coming up. There's the opportunity to check and see if your bank has made the commitment yet. So I would invite people to check out realmoneymoves.org, follow hashtag families one together, real money moves, right? If you want to kind of keep in touch and join the ever-growing movement. But it is really important acknowledging that we've made some progress but we have still a long way to go. And I want to take a moment to really talk through what are the other financial elements that are still part of the story? Jasmine, if that's something that you'd be able to touch on of really how are the prison companies reacting to this news, right? We're seeing it on the political landscape. I know you're heading off on a red-eye tonight to be working more on that political side. What's happening in terms of politics and then markets and how is that impacting private prisons? Yeah, so on the political front, we've seen a lot of movement in terms of getting private prisons into mainstream conversation. If you've been watching the Democratic debates or just following the news there, there's several presidential candidates who are talking about their comprehensive plans for getting rid of private prisons, which is a big deal. We've seen places like here in California completely agree to stop the use of private prisons and we've seen major, not just banks, but institutional investors like CalSRS and CalPERS both agree to divest and we're seeing just more and more at local levels. Individuals passing legislations or putting legislations forward that would stop not only the use of private prisons, but the financing of private prisons from any banks that are chartered in their state. So on the political front, we're seeing a lot of movement and just really conversation, which this time last year was not really happening. And then I wanna talk about stock prices. See, we have so much fun around the office for like, I wanna talk about the stock prices, right? We make it really great. Yeah, so if we had a screen, I would just let the kind of graph speak for itself. But, so geogroup and core civic at the levels that are out right now of their stock prices, the last time levels were this low was when the Department of Justice, like I mentioned before, in 2016 announced the federal phasing out. So that's where we've returned to. The one year returns for investors is down 30%. So when you compare that to other real estate investment trusts, so in their investment class, they're significantly, significantly underperforming. But I think perhaps even more telling about kind of the state of private prisons and how these companies are feeling is to actually just hear what they're saying. What are, how are they responding to the movements and what are they saying in SEC filing? So I'm gonna read a really fun quote from one of their SEC filings, this is from geogroup. They wrote, and I quote, increase public resistance to the use of the public-private partnerships for correctional detention and community-based facilities in any of the markets in which we operate and or if other banks or third parties that currently provide us with debt financing or that we do business with, decide in the future to cease providing us with debt financing or doing business with us, such determinations could have material adverse effects on our business, financial conditions and ability to operate, right? So not, not looking too good in terms of, yeah. So say that last line again, material financial impact, can you unpack that? Yeah, so as a part of that I also wanna mention that Fitch and Moody's, these traditional credit rating agencies have since, because of the, that cutting off of totally 87.4% of all of those known bank credit lines and term loans to the private prison industry since they have that financing gap, the credit rating agencies have downgraded the status which is going to make it more expensive for Geogram and Core Civic to find borrowing partners to fill that gap and we can anticipate that, okay, there's other financial players in the game, right? There's private equity and though banks are particularly uniquely placed in order to be able to fill that financing gap because of their capacity, which really needs to be fast and on hands, we are seeing a few private equity firms and asset managers that are engaging in this space but really out of just investors that we've talked to representing close to three billion assets under management and we've asked how do you feel about this issue, we're seeing that there really is no appetite for investors to touch this industry anymore just because of this reputational risk, the human rights concerns, but also like Matt mentioned before financially, it's kind of a mess, which is exciting, but that, like Morgan mentioned, doesn't mean that there isn't still work to be done, right? The fight isn't over, there's still these five banks that are financing, there's also bonds that are in the market which are also making sure that these companies continue to run their day-to-day operations and I think I just want to mention that this conversation of, for us, it's ending private prisons so not just ending private prison financing or at least speaking for myself, I want to see the end of private prisons has to be positioned in the larger conversation of criminal justice reform as a whole, right? So this needs to be looked at as a sound investment, if you will, to free up the time and resources and people power of these amazing people who know how to win, know how to do these campaigns so that they can work on making our communities safer and healthier and more free and if you have never engaged in activist campaign, I think the same way that many activists and kind of everyday people are saying, oh, I can engage in financial activism, if you have never engaged in the activist world and you have this financial knowledge, knowing how to do things like how to file a shareholder resolution is really, really valuable and really strategic for these movements that need to have all these different pressure points, like I said, because they know how to make our communities healthier, safer and more free. Absolutely, all really great points and I think also critical to highlight in the broader landscaping conversation about decarceration, this isn't just saying, oh, we want public prisons, not private prisons, right? What we really want is, well, and some of us want no prisons at all and a greater emphasis on mental health services, on drug treatment, on sentences that actually make sense, right, rather than the sort of arbitrary mandatory minimums through strikes, these policies we mentioned before that have been very beneficial to companies that might make money off having more people locked up for more time. So the idea is that, why don't we work on just reducing the overall population as opposed to saying that it's about, you know, public prisons being a walk in the park either. So what's also been really exciting is to see as people are moving away from private prisons where they can go to, right, because sometimes divestment campaigns can feel a bit like whack-a-mole, right, of like, which corporation is gonna do some terrible thing today? And that's often a critique of sort of ESG with an impact investing of, if we're just kind of screening out but not being more conscious of, well, what is the positive impact that my money can have? Are we actually going as far as we can go? And it's been really amazing to see Derek's leadership in really emerging within the impact investment sector in transitioning your own portfolio to impact. I wanted to ask if you could share a little bit of what are some of the opportunities that you found to really invest in something different than private prisons and what you're doing with the Kingdom, your impact investment initiative? Yeah, so I would take it back to 2016 and this is right around the time that, you know, I had watched the 13th documentary on private prisons and Kaepernick was protesting and it was a very volatile environment around social justice. And for me, I was always looking at what's the action? Like what's the action item for alleviating this and remedying this issue? And so one of the things we did back in 2017, 16, 17, we took about 100 kids from HBCUs to South by Southwest to expose them to the tech industry to get them in a room full of decision makers with companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Google, MailChimp and a lot of them got jobs out of that and internships and so for me it was like, okay, there's a reason why obviously people are getting locked up, this policy, it's, you know, corruptness, it's private prisons, all these things, but a lot of it is, a lot of people don't have options so they're committing petty crimes and getting locked up for it. So if there are options for kids and opportunity to do something else, right, then you start to alleviate it from a different vantage point. And so that was one initiative that we've seen had a lot of ROI and was a very good outcome. More so me personally, I started to transition most of my money out of the market. I always wanted to see what my money was doing and when you're investing into the market and to these ETFs and these funds, you're taking a passive role. You're not really understanding what your money's doing and where your money's spending the night and for me that wasn't really sitting right and so after reading Real Impact and consulting with Morgan, like I really started to educate myself on what the possibilities were in the impact space. So as I transitioned out of the market, I reallocated the things like affordable housing and invested in Bitwise. It's a company founded by a Latina founder in Fresno that gives technology training to underserved minorities and so that was something that was tangible for me. Invested in macro, a company that tells positive stories about minorities and so these things made sense to me and it seemed like I was playing whatever role I could play and that made me feel good. I could sleep good at night knowing that my money was working in positive ways. Fantastic. So I hope people have been inspired about all the different ways that we can work more closely together as financial activists, as organizers on the street, of what are the ways that we can really apply this sort of collaboration to so many different social issues and I wanted to close off before we take a couple questions with Sochi and Matt, if you could share a little bit of ways that this community can really support grassroots organizations and efforts. Yeah, thanks for asking. Jasmine mentioned that we are working, we're targeting five more regional banks and on November 14th and 15th, we're going to have deliveries in Alabama and Tennessee. If you know anyone in Birmingham and Nashville, please let me know. We would love for people to join us and to be there with us when we deliver our petitions and we're gonna have signs outside. We'd love to see kids, moms and so those two places, we're targeting five regional banks and I believe that these banks are also, some of the executives have been executives for, I don't know exactly the name of the sector. Board members for the prison companies as well. Yeah, of course. No conflict of interest, right? Totally okay. So these are the next steps. It will be wonderful if you follow the Candid group presented, moms rising, every single action that you take, make sure it has a big impact. I spend a lot of my time delivering your signatures. We do deliver them and every single one counts. So please keep taking actions. Thank you so much, Matt. Right, and that's a great point. Like we've had pretty incredible numbers on the campaign petitions and all of those may seem like big statistics, 100,000, 500,000 million, but statistics are people too, especially with organizations like ours and so we really are committed to that, to making sure that the people power moves things. No disrespect to cockroaches or rats but I think the private prison industry operates a lot like cockroaches and rats and so they're gonna be, in terms of rats, they're gonna be looking for the next, they're gonna be trying to sniff out the next, you know, disgusting way to make profit. And when Corrections Corporation of America formed, they actually had like another partner entity that was called Hospital Corporation of America that was in the business of essentially cutting corners in hospitals in a way to make profit and as you can imagine that didn't turn out very well. But what I see for where these companies are going is that e-carceration is a big deal. The surveillance industry, again over the last 35 plus years, for-profit incarceration, privatized incarceration has become a large industry and there's so many ways that they can gouge people. And so I think it's up to us to understand where they're going to expand and be able to be there to make sure that there's not money for their next scam. You know, and there's other smaller companies that are part of the industry. So for instance, there was a company that researched how much can you charge for a bag of chips at a prison? That's a rural prison. Let's say it takes an average of three hours to drive there for families. If they calculate it, if it takes an average of three hours to drive there, you could probably charge $7 a bag. If it took an average of four hours, you could probably charge $8.25 a bag. And so going back to this model that is inherently wrong and needs to be cut off in any way possible, I think we actually have now the infrastructure to go where they wanna go and stop them before they do any more harm. All right, well we will close out on that call to action and would love to have everyone in the room engaged with us. We're gonna take a couple questions. We're gonna talk about questions, which are the following. Questions have a question mark at the end. They are relatively brief. They're directed to a person. And then hopefully they'll be answered. So we're gonna start here in the back. And all right, yeah, we should be good. Thanks. Thank you all. So I fundamentally believe that private capital, which includes the financial services industry is necessary to change some of the wrongs. That's why we're all at SoCAP, right? That's what social capital is. So I started my career 30 years ago as a banker in London financing private infrastructure projects, including the first privately financed public hospital. I think today bankers involved in this industry have been accused of profiting from locking people up, holding slaves and I guess now cockroaches and rats. I do applaud that you have cut off the funding or are in the process of cutting off funding for a business model that has not met its goals and has not been successful. I feel as strongly about mass incarceration, recidivism and the issues around immigration as anyone else in the room. But like I said, I believe that the financial services industry and private capital have a role to play and some of the solutions you've talked about are sort of entrepreneurial and small, but it seems to me that cutting off private prisons, which again I applaud you for, is sort of the low hanging fruit in addressing these societal issues. And so I guess my real question is, how are you going to change your language and become friendly with the private funding markets so that they do bring the banks included back into funding solutions that the government is not addressing? Did you want to direct that in anyone in particular or? Whoever feels the most negative about the financial services industry or maybe some of the, it's really about the activists and the banks working together, so maybe the activists. Yeah, I guess I can start. And actually like through this campaign, I've actually been very heartened by the role of finance and money and the power that it has to change how we think about incarceration. And I thank Morgan and Jasmine for really leading that and showing that there is an alternative. There is an alternative to the type of brutal, horrible for-profit torture that these particular, that this industry has represented over the last 35 years. There is an alternative there. And like Derek mentioned, there is a way that you can actually do a lot of good through finance, through money. And I think that's powerful. And I think part of it, and why I'm excited to be at SOCAP is, we have to expand our imagination around how can we actually transform and create a situation where people do have opportunities, where there's not a focus on punishment and criminalization, but it is on opportunities and dignity. And I think that most of the, there's so much out there around what Derek was saying about if we actually have a baseline and protect and affirm basic human rights, we can go a long way in not needing the type of mass incarceration system. And so there are choices to make, I think for private equity and quite frankly for this particular type of capitalism. It can either go in the way of doing the most harm for the most profit or it can partner with communities to find a better way and quite frankly change the culture around money. I think it's also really important to acknowledge, mind my taking the proverbial mic, that all of these major banks had environment, social and government's policies, ESG policies, right? And a couple of them actually even quoted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, right? That these are institutions that have clearly stated we do not wanna be financing companies that have clear human rights abuses. So then when there were credible reports of human rights abuses within private prisons, including reports from the Department of Justice, right? Under the Trump administration, just to be clear, right? So this is not about political bias, but just the inspectors going in and seeing what was happening in facilities like Adalanto in California, that when we were going to banks saying, you have a policy that says that you do not wanna support companies that have human rights abuses. Here's some reports saying this is happening and you've made this commitment to your shareholders and to your customers and we'd love for you to fulfill that. And I don't see that as at all in congruent with them funding future interventions that are absolutely supportive of human rights in a way that is integrated with the policies that they've created. I do wanna make sure we get to hear from other voices in the audience. Take that, Sochi, the question of are we thanking the banks that have been joining us? Hey, why don't you take it? You can support them. I'll take it and I'll say yes. I say that not only do we have these public-facing protests, we're getting on the phone with these different banks and we're actually talking to the human rights lawyers that they have on staff that they hire because they wanna be better. They want to make sure that their role in the world is aligned with the values they're saying because as we move to this market economy that is really focused on consumers being conscious about what their money is doing, we want them to be going the right direction. We're not saying that banks should be, we're not trying to demonize banks through this campaign, but we are trying to make sure that all of the companies that are using our money to fund their business practices are aligned. And I also wanna agree with you and thank you for bringing up the question but this idea of low-hanging fruit because I agree, I think private prisons in many ways are a low-hanging fruit, a low-hanging fruit that has extremely high rates of sexual assault among children, women, men that has extremely high rates of human rights abuses and a low-hanging fruit that I really believe we do need to get rid of in order to join the bigger fight of a forming a criminal justice system. Thank you, which has been opening up us to a lot of different conversations, like Morgan mentioned, we're flying to South Carolina tonight into tomorrow morning and we're gonna be front row at a criminal justice reform watching President Trump speak about how he believes the future of criminal justice will be shaped in this country as well as all of the Democratic primary candidates. So being able to get in those spaces and ask those questions through private prisons, really this is just the beginning. And just to add quickly, I think one of the hopes with these type of collaborations is that it brings more proximity. Like I do think these advisors should be visiting facilities, should be going with us and really seeing what's going on and finding solutions together. We have another question, I think, down here. I also, Jasmine, I wanted to thank you for that comment because the mass incarceration crisis in this country is huge and there's no single strategy that will solve it. We have to have multiple strategies across all the problem areas in order to be successful. And so private prisons is one part but it's a big movement. Definitely. My name is Tanay, I'm the founder of Freecap and I have been incredibly inspired by all these folks on stage to launch a publicly traded fund that's divesting from prisons and investing in companies that can actually create policies that can reduce mass incarceration rates in this country. So my question is how, what does a publicly traded company look like as an ally in this space? Like what are some of the ways that corporates can actually help as opposed to be a problem? I think there's a couple pieces in the shareholder landscape that have been really powerful. Talk about unbelievably low hanging fruit is open hiring policies of the number of people who come out of incarceration and are not able to get a job for the incredibly dumb reason that the idea that if you haven't, basically if you served your time, the whole point is you served your time and that it's hard enough to come back into a society that may or may not be familiar to you, that you may or may not have support from family or friends, you gotta find a home, you gotta find a job and there's often that box and a job application have you done time and how incredibly exclusionary that can be. So there have been national campaigns around ban the box that have been led by a number of investors of filing shareholder resolutions and otherwise looking to have publicly traded companies just get rid of that restriction and that's the type of step that companies can choose to do proactively, right? They don't have to wait for shareholders to demand it but I would hope that in the context of a fund like yours, right? That it would be equally looking at how do we get out of these prison companies but then also what are some of the practices within companies that can better support returning citizens as they move on in their lives. So we're gonna do one more and I think we've got the candidate in the back. Yeah, you. Yes, sir. Hi, my name is Joe Engle coming from Sacramento and our publications. We created a publication for immigrant know your rights which actually made Fox and friends but not in a positive way but we were as a batch of courage and so my question is what are the communication needs? What like who's not getting the message? What does the general public need to know about this that they don't know already? Those are my questions. Anybody can answer. So I do think that there's no such thing as a general public and we like to think about it is that what do we need to win and how do we figure things out together? I do think there's a big shift happening and 2020 is gonna be essentially the proving ground of whether or not the model can hold the current model of private prisons can it hold? There's a good chance that it can't and we actually have to be building this narrative of what does a rebuild look like? I take inspiration from some of the detention facilities in Mexico and in Central America that are now being turned into trauma support centers and we're at a point where we can rebuild from the hopefully what will be the ashes of the private prison industry as we know it and so more aspiring narratives knowing that we have people on our side and knowing that we have this wave of culture that has been universally disgusted by what's going on with family detention and so it does open up the space as an invitation for quite frankly remaking how we deal with incarceration and democracy in this country. And the one other small kind of culture shift I'd say in that same way we often think about family separation is sort of how it's been portrayed in the news of the Trump family separation policy but it's really critical to think that any time we incarcerate someone and separate them from their spouse from an aging parent from anyone in their life that's family separation. So this is not a new phenomena and we need to be equally outraged in the case of adults as we are children and that I think that's one of the narrative shift pieces that is really important as we continue on. That is the time that we have for today and I think this conversation just goes into the levels of complexity in getting down to critical social issues and their connections to finance and I'm just so honored to get to be in this work with you every day and hope that you all join us. Thank you so much. Thanks to our panelists. Thanks everybody. Thank you. Yeah. Great.