- AP Photos
- Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner has ties to a company that makes money by punishing poor people for minor criminal violations.
During stops in black and Latino neighborhoods in Chicago this week, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner promised to fight crime in low-income neighborhoods by creating jobs, funding a stronger social safety net, and especially targeting the most dangerous criminals—all things that he accused Governor Pat Quinn of neglecting to do.
Though Rauner retired from GTCR in 2012, he’s still an investor in it. Not long after he left the firm, it acquired a company called Correctional Healthcare Companies, which provides medical and mental care, including “behavioral programming,” for prisons and jails that want to save money by outsourcing such services.
Such probationers are then responsible for monthly fees of $35 to $40, on average, and if they can’t keep up, they fall further into arrears. The New Yorker‘s Sarah Stillman detailed the experience of a 49-year-old mother in Montgomery, Alabama, named Harriet Cleveland: she was put on probation with JCS after being unable to pay off the fines for driving without insurance or a license. From there her hole only got deeper:
The truth is that neither candidate was talking much about public safety or criminal justice issues until Rauner slammed Quinn in an ad this week.
As it is, the budget for the corrections department is more than $1.3 billion for the current fiscal year.
