the prisons make money. and more people in iraq no longer even the more money they make but some see it as a way to keep crime off the streets but private prison firms say it's a way of making crime pay we're going to bring you the shocking sales pitch for a recession proof investment one that seems outright criminal. and while private prisons are raking in the dough students are drowning in debt and that's not news sadly but this is all its loan rates are about to double going to explain what that means for you and hear how one woman is fighting the system. that tweet really should choose to be. the only. almost series

whatsoever it's really sure overrated sarge and from a random thought to a rallying point for protesters to these place for breaking news who knew that one hundred forty characters could revolutionize the way we communicate on twitter sixth birthday we're going to show you how a little bird couldn't make and break a person's reputation. to anything that's wednesday march twenty first five pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy catherine when you're watching r t we here in the united states they may be some signs small economic signs of improvement but with soaring debt a crippled housing market and depressed consumers are still gloom and doom when it comes to the big financial picture and most folks are struggling just to survive in these difficult times and if you're looking to make a quick buck so you have a little bit of money to spend and gambling isn't necessarily or thing there is

a billion dollar business opportunity out there for you it's an enormous industry that's virtually recession proof with sky high profits to boot states and average americans with some cash to spare can all get in on the action now it's not snake oil folks it's the business of keeping people behind bars artie's marina port meyer has more. america's financial crisis has been something of the on the shuttle monster swallowing up millions of jobs homes and businesses throughout the nation yet again it is ongoing economic armageddon one industry has remained recession proof. private prisons. with more than two point three million people behind bars the united states trumps china russia and the rest of the world in both the number and percentage of people doing time where it falls short though it's being capable

of containing such a large population it's a political dilemma turned cash cow for dozens of corporations creaming profits punishment prisons make money off of course ration and more people they lock up and the longer the and the more money so they have the same perverse incentive to expand our justice system and increase or number of people our number of citizens who are behind bars because it increases their profit margin. the profitability of private jails depends on the prison population in ewing to go up the rate of incarceration in the us has quadrupled since the eighty's when america's war on drugs are short in the three strikes policy which ties judges to mandatory minimum sentencing even for nonviolent offenders since the late eighty's and into the ninety's and now today we see a turn away from that rehabilitated model so across the country prison programming is cut rehabilitation is being cut there's less opportunities for education to gain

work skills and instead there's just this drive towards isolation towards punishment private prison companies are paid between forty five and one hundred thirty dollars a day per detainee rates for juveniles women and immigrants could be higher while public prisons are accountable to the public or private was the answer only to shareholders and are not subject to external scrutiny that means many private contractors face few consequences for the or even inhumane treatment of detainees we just see more and more isolation sensory deprivation and prisoners who literally never interact with human beings. would come. into the facility there would be a sign out front with their stock price to let them know how the company was doing corrections corporation of america and geo group are the two largest private prison companies which combined revenues of two point nine billion dollars last year but

critics say they've been using that financial clout to line their own pockets even further encouraging politicians teeth going with the heavy handed sentencing program by launching an influential lobby campaign in the corridors of power lobbying and in order to influence public officials only a small car or private prison industry is ever to keep policy check and others include campaign donations so the companies make hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to politicians nationwide both on the federal and state levels with most states and the federal government currently operating under record deficits and budget cuts private prison companies are pitching their facilities i've lower cost alternatives and while most americans continue struggling during this economic downturn now incarceration may grow even more profitable we're in a fortnight r.t.

new york. well the corrections corporation of america is the largest private prison firm in the country but there were sixty facilities across the u.s. and thousands of prisoners within its walls the wall street giant is raking in the profits but i settle for rich when one can get richer and like any smart smart business the c.c.a. is actively courting investors billing itself as the smartest recession time investments during these tough economic times now keeping people locked up isn't a cheap sort of activity so at a time when states are struggling with budget shortfalls the c.c.a. is offering to help in january but firm sent a letter to forty eight states with a sales pitch that went something like this we're going to buy your prison will go hire prison now if you keep it mostly full and pay us now for the next two decades so all that's safe have to do is make sure their prison population never dips below ninety percent what could possibly go wrong and now there is this bizarre financial presentation explaining why the c.c.a. is

a quote unique investment opportunity for all among the highlights private prisons are recession resistant there is a large and under under penetrated market just ten percent of prisons are private so the growth opportunity is huge and with a virtual monopoly on the industry the c.c.a. doesn't have to worry about competitors getting in the way and of course should be economy turn around don't worry and good times mean higher incarceration rates and that means more profits for all well and all at the business insider on earth the screen sales pitch here's his take on the story. well i guess the weird part to me is how it's presented by the company and other presented by the company as being totally normal i mean it's very strange this company that that there exists a business where you could make a lot of money incarcerated people keeping people in cages and i'm squeamish i understand that we have prisons and society back you know they have to be there and some people ought to be in prison and so i you know i'm not some idealist that

would like to see prisons abolished or anything but it still seems strange to me so then when you see these presentations in these investment pitches they're basically talk about the business like any other business i mean it's like you know coca-cola would advertise that even in a downturn or as a toothpaste company might advertise that in the downturn people still have to buy toothpaste so it's a good very special purpose industry then here you have this company saying even in a downturn the private prison business never stops booming as it is just totally normal business and it obviously isn't and then i think beyond that part of that disturbs me is the incentives for the prison industry to lobby for more incarceration you know. the idea that it becomes in their best interest to see longer sentences prison sentences handed out for more crimes and so if you know it's all pretty strange and unlike pretty much anything else you'll see in a publicly traded company right and then that's the whole sort of proximate because

you're tying profits to the outcome of incarceration rates and you know i mean i'm not one to pass judgment on what individuals do with their money but it seems to me that the bigger problem you get into here is when you apply this to states right because states are not only going to be financially busted and keeping these private firms profitable in order to keep their rates low but states also control policy to some degree and i mean could there be a conflict of interests where for example more folks will end up going to prison essentially in order to stay through these deals. it seems absolutely there's a potential for a conflict of interest or just basically the interests of the company not being interests or in the same interests as a society that may not want such a high degree of incarceration or may prefer a society in which we aim to rehabilitate prisoners faster and so on so there's all kinds of things and then you know there are questions about in this case. prison

companies offering to buy existing prisons and you have to wonder whether the state is actually saving money in the long term or whether it's just they can do to project budget constraints they can't resist a one time lump sum of payment when they sell the prison so there are all kinds of strange issues involved in this business right and of course in the state issue in order to you know they'll have a mandate to keep the prison ninety percent fall so it's not like you know a shoe company where you have to make enough shoes to keep the factory operating at ninety percent we're talking about criminals here so if the rates for better alone you know you know i don't really know but how do you want to go. one thing i would also point out is it's not just prisons that end up having it sent to the prison guard union in california is famously powerful for having and for having supported a lot of the same things that the private prisons have in terms of increased costs ration and increase you know penalties for criminals so basically any group that

benefits from more people in prison will do what you know will try and use. organized power and expand the prison societies so it's not just private prisons but obviously. they're the most glaring example of it these days. that was joe rise and fall of the deputy editor for business insider. but private prisons may be in recession who are recession proof but the cost of a college education sadly is not and thanks to congress it just got a heck of a lot more expensive to earn that degree now in july interest rates on federally subsidized loans are going to double from three point four percent to six point eight percent and if congress doesn't step in as many as eight million college kids will be effective so say you borrowed twenty three thousand dollars right that's the maximum amount of money you can get in student loans now if you take a decade to pay that money back your debts going to go up by five grand take twenty

years to pay that back then you will owe eleven thousand dollars and that's huge and sadly that problem is part of a larger trend college students college tuition prices are skyrocketing and so is unemployment for recent graduates outstanding school student debt hit a trillion dollars last year in americans own well your money for their school loans and if you're on their credit cards or cars now my next guest unfortunately knows about this issue firsthand last remember in the last november we brought you the story of stuff re than a twenty three year old unemployed college graduate who was struggling to survive she was armed with a master's degree in geography and one hundred thirty thousand dollars in debt during that time she told us she couldn't get even a job scrubbing toilets for minimum wage she lived on food stamps and sold textbooks on e bay to make cash well since then she's been on a campaign to bring attention to this issue and to get private loan lenders like sallie mae to change their ways she joins me now from new york steph thanks for

coming back to this program before we get into sort of these new changes with the rate increase tell us a little bit about what you're doing now in this quest against sallie mae. so things have changed quite a bit since november i'm still unemployed but i'm twenty four now as of last week so that's another thing that's changed my campaign has really taken off when we last spoke spoke to marina november my change our petition against unemployment penalty fee had only stood at three thousand signatures now it's toppled one hundred fifty thousand signatures and i can't believe the success it's seen after going viral so far we've had a partial victory in which sallie mae has decided to tweak its palsy a little bit which i'll get into a little later but what is the sign employment fee explain that ok basically if you have federal loans directly through the federal government. means for you if you're unemployed if you're underemployed if you're reading t.

bills any reason why you have an economic hardship and you can't make payments on time in full the income based repayment system is sort of a safety net that'll allow you to postpone your payments as long as need be or adjust your payments quoting here income you sometimes get back on your feet now if you have private bank fact loans through lender such as sallie mae they don't offer that sort of safety net there's no guarantee if you're unemployed and you have loans to sell in may what they demand is that you pay a fifty dollars per loan fee every three months just to prove that you can't make payments and meanwhile interest still cruise. makes no sense at all i mean you are you graduate you have your degree you can't find a job and you have to pay extra because you can't find a job. absolutely and for me because i have three different loans through sallie mae and they took away the option of consolidations two thousand and eight that means that they're demanding one hundred fifty dollars every three months just to prove that i can't make payments meanwhile prior to my petition this one hundred

fifty dollars every three months did not even go towards mates at whatsoever now because of my position success they'll put the money towards your if and only if you fulfill certain stipulations and that's not good enough for me i don't want there to be anything whatsoever any more it just seems logical user it just as hard as i could it just seems really illogical to me because we're having you know we're in a situation where school tuition is are skyrocketing right loans to more and more students are going into debt when you have student debt you can't get rid of it in bankruptcy court and it seems like there's not a lot of action from either the politicians or the big corporations care in terms of making it easier for americans to get access to education isn't there something fundamentally wrong with. well there's really no incentive for any sort of change i mean first of all financially offices do a terrible job of differentiating between federal and private loans sallie mae america's largest private lenders a fortune five hundred company that's painted as

a benevolent nonprofit or a subsidiary of our government this is not true whatsoever it is for profit company and they do service both federal and private loans so there's a lot of these safety nets such as income based repayment that apply to federal loans but are not available at all for private loans secondly there's just no incentive to help borrowers because with the lack of bankruptcy protection as you mention lender stupid off it off of defaults you know but at the same time some might say well you know you're graduating in this wonderful degree with your wonderful degree and increased earning power it should be a complete breeze for you to pay back all that debt. right but if there's no way to adjust payments in accordance to your income or postpone payments while you're facing economic hardship or get a job that are in place for federal loans or get a job it's true you're just going to slip and fall into pulsing and if you default on a student loan which will happen if you fail to make payments for several months in

a row you may never be able to buy a home you won't be able to rent an apartment you won't be able to even buy a car if your credit is completely racked and sixty percent of employers check right when hiring so how are you even supposed to get a job to claw your way back out of that hole and stuff how hard was it when you were going through this i mean were you really sort of at the bottom of the barrel really scraping by to survive definitely because. i was able to get after graduation were just a few times our jobs here and there but i was able to receive unemployment so i told sally this i told them listen my parents passed away before i turned twelve years old that's why i had new cosigner by me interest rates are certainly high and needed stakeouts in those in the first place i told them how i was struggling to even pay for utilities and groceries and they even listen they just keep demanding this fee and basically right now my loans are in the stage they're not default yet but they're still demanding hundred fifty one hundred fifty dollars fee or i fall

there's really no other option here and you know i guess my final question to you this isn't an isolated incident unfortunately there's a lot of people here in the in the u.s. who are in your position. who do you feel is sort of profiting from from this whole situation certainly isn't the students. oh the lenders absolutely and you know the millions of dollars yearly lobbying congress to strip away the various safety nets and put in place to help borrowers one thing i want to spend is that representative and some clerk of detroit michigan who had the pleasure of meeting with about two weeks ago he has a bill right now that he's trying to push through congress he. it's called the student loan forgiveness bill and this will cap payments for federal and private loans ten percent of your take home income will allow your payments to not eat up your entire paycheck which will allow students to be able to buy homes like ours all of these things that allow us to move out of our parents' basements and

stimulate the economy there's a lot of other reforms in there that are absolutely wonderful and it's what students have been desperately crying for for the past twenty years or so so far the bill is not it's just been introduced it's not being voted on. anytime soon but it is it isn't any house it is that an important step in the progressive direction i guess considering the power of sallie mae unfortunately don't know that's going to catch on but we'll certainly keep following that and thank you so much for taking time to speak with us that was step gray founder of change dot org a true success story oh another website they founded a petition on change that i apologize thank you. meanwhile a little bird told me that it was some of these birthday today social networking sites that made everything from the wiener gave to the arab spring possible is turning sixty years old today and to say the very least it has revolutionized the way we communicate and if it can't be expressed in one hundred forty characters

then it is not worth our time or so goes the saying but i didn't start out that way an r.t.s. correspondent. has more. six years ago. the little blue bird chirped its first tweet a new era of social networking took off my interviews weaved into one hundred forty characters a tweet really shouldn't just be a random utterance and you know like it should be held to almost zero standard whatsoever it's really just a brain fart but with half a billion users today from anonymous bloggers to world leaders twitter has become a much more powerful force than that. the micro-blogging site helped the spread of protests during the arab spring but it's also become a tool for manipulating public opinion a book has a higher standard of joking than a column does in fact a column is a higher standard than a blog a tweet is the lowest circle of fact during iran's green revolution tweeted

eyewitness accounts of government brutality helped boost western support for protestors turned out many other bloggers were thousands of miles from the action. you thirty's also appreciate the power of a tweet recently occupy wall street somebody who we don't know who posts you know a message saying cop should be killed ok my guess is the cops post it you know because then they were the ones that reacted to it made it a story whether for this information or propaganda you have a very misleading tweet from some of the members of the security council in the sense of it they're kind of using it for propaganda they're right today we said you know and it's it's it's very selective they don't want reporters to try to find out what happened in a closed door meeting but they're tweeting things are often forced from inside them from closed doors to private affairs our did reckless twitter posts have seen its authors humiliated and by really hated even fired so whether it's somebody like

charlie sheen who can come out and say it's are terrible things about his bosses on twitter and his job or someone like as their client who's now back on him as r.b.c. but in two thousand and seven he was on with tim russert and tweeted. process from . russert with an acid spiny test. and you know lost his contact with imus and the c.e.o. for arguably the most notorious downfall now former congressman anthony weiner's tweeting a photo of his most private of parts we are certainly is one model of what not and i think that if i were ever going to cheat on my wife i don't think i would start by broadcasting it over twitter. but this new broadcasting tool available to all is seductive i don't know if it makes them stupid or if they come to twitter already stupid and they simply use it stupidly i think probably the latter was the truth and micro blog is a minefield for those not cautious make

a twitter account and post you know anything you wouldn't want your mom to see or wouldn't want reported in a newspaper you probably shouldn't consular so what are we putting on twitter and early study found so called pointless babble made up forty percent of tweets news only four percent is a waste of time for me. and yes if you really care what sandra bullock over we're following has to say it's not always time for you but social networks are big. work time is wasted on junk and trivia and information. everyone's made we can't think everybody else nonsense the world burns at the end of the day you can use it to dumb down you can use it to smarten up it's how you use anything that really matters this expanded verse three of the first tweet marks billions of tweets already posted and revolutions guided lady gaga is the number one blogger with over

twenty one million followers and micro blogs top trending topics of today include bieber our boyfriend and things i hate about sex some tweeters may well regret that one. party. carol how has twitter change this over the past six years with me to chat some more as the esteemed chris chambers journalism professor at georgetown university thanks for being. here after what us aside from teaching us all the perils of actually tweeting or general. for public consumption what's your biggest impression in terms of how twitter has changed us or affects us as a society well you have to look at it from the from their perspective when we look at twitter's you look at it it's. a company twitter's yes a company twitter so you think you know one hundred forty characters now they're looking at the world the world consciousness in terms of tweaks were we as tweeters

are looking at it in terms of one hundred forty characters but they're looking at this big mass consciousness and how to commodify it and how to monetize it make money off of it so they're not really thinking about the effect on society they're thinking about themselves the fertile society however is a year we start to get more and more tunnel visioned the good news here is is that this is really isn't any different than what happened with the printing press or radio or t.v. it's just that how we going to use it you heard the commentators do the right it's how you use it and most of it is i mean when the gutenberg bible was the printing press was invented i mean yeah you had bibles being printed but then there's third printing porn i mean it is if you have babel it's always going to make up a huge percentage of it and then the adult portion of twitter is like this much so you know yes it's revolutionized the way we think because of speed and size but

it's really just more of the same i mean of course there's always going to be kids that turn to social media for justin bieber so on and so forth but at the same time i don't personally it's been the biggest tool in terms. journalism in saying that i'm breaking most most people are getting a lot of people professional journalists first of all but a lot of other people are getting their news from twitter or breaking it on twitter there you have a tool that is is really precise and can be there boom and you know depending on the circumstances you know it can be manipulated you heard that right but if you like anything i mean t.v. could be manipulated you know you had the first appearances of photographs of the battlefield in the civil war that could be a manipulative but they were revolutionary that part is really turning our minds onto the possibilities and then you can use something like storify to create whole stories from two weeks but beyond that yes justin bieber or you know oh my god tim

thibeault destroying the jets we you know when you're talking about millions of these things occurring every thirty seconds you know yeah i mean the precise wonderful use of it is always going to be eaten up by the juvenile crap and in the non juvenile crap. do you see it right or is sort of another nail in the coffin of . the traditional media press i have been able to adjust and other people have been able to it's just i think the gatekeepers have done a really good job of co-opting and recruiting people to be you know that you know you have a set of people who are curating in aggregating that you have a set of people who are repackaging that for twitter i think they're doing a pretty good job of that because if you think about it being the gate keepers they are still people who are doing original reporting because even in the professional wonderful part of twitter a lot of those stories have to originate somewhere so if it's the new york times or it's or a t. it doesn't matter i mean those outlets are going to control what's going on in the

ground so that stuff get swallowed up and spit out among people's followers so they're always going to have their place and they've done a good job co-opting i don't think that that spelled the death knell of two. many publications the way the internet initially came in and flatten them but they're starting to adjust to that it's worth although there are some infamous holdouts like harper's as well yeah but i wish we didn't have any but you know the one area where i guess it was the most stark sort of example of twitter's usefulness was that. you know the mainstream press was sort of late to this and a lot of the ways that we were getting information and you know personally putting information out there was twitter and i think that does the same for sort of the arab spring a lot more on the ground and that is something that that phenomenon again is nothing new i mean we could go back like a sort of hundred fifty years to the telegraph and battlefield photographers in the civil war revolutionizing this but again with the speed and the ability to get

a lot of resources online quickly i mean it's been indispensable you know i was watching the tweets you were filing you know world war people would get their heads persian in oakland i mean you cannot you cannot compete with even even t.v. cannot compete with that especially with budgets being cut with american media outlets however again it all goes back to that gets overshadowed by the nonsense and even though there are. some positive things and that have to lead lining in sort of a silver lining for example at south by southwest in austin there was a lot of talk about how the digital divide in the united states between minorities and whites was it has been frittered away by twitter but when you look at some of the tweets and access it's again it's you people are tweeting about rianna they're not tweeting about you know c.p. so again you see a lead lining to the silver cloud in other words certainly i'm sorry in fact is there a little here. next time.