February 28: Rally at Massachusetts Hall to Demand Harvard Divest from Prisons

Local and national media are invited to attend a rally hosted by the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign on March 1, 2019 at 11:30am. Harvard students, workers, and affiliates will gather on Friday outside of Massachusetts Hall in Harvard Yard to deliver a petition demanding that Harvard disclose and divest their holdings in prisons to University President Lawrence Bacow. The students of HPDC released their petition on February 4, 2019 asking Bacow and the Harvard Management Company to divest Harvard’s 39 billion dollar endowment from companies that significantly profit off the prison-industrial complex. In the following days, the petition has gained over 3,100 signatories from across the university’s twelve schools.

The rally follows the February 14th the meeting between the student organizers of HPDC and Bacow. The students asked President Bacow if he would consider divesting the Harvard endowment, but Bacow refused. Harvard holds stocks in CoreCivic and GEO Group, companies that run immigration detention centers. Last year, a Guatemalan toddler died in custody of a GEO Group detention center. In February, a Wyoming prisoner killed himself while under the care of a CoreCivic-contracted prison. Harvard has not commented on either of these deaths.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, author of the book Inside Private Prisons, commented, “The students are building on the success of Columbia University […] in 2015, it became the 1st first U.S. institution of higher learning to divest from the private prison industry. The University of California system also divested $30 million of holdings in private prisons companies[.]”