Fresh off a meeting with high-ranking leaders of the powerful Black Lives Matter movement, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Friday tweeted a blunt message: “Racism is America’s original sin.”
She also thanked the leaders for sharing their ideas. One of those leaders was DeRay Mckesson, a prominent movement activist whom Clinton dubbed the “social media emperor,” according to MSNBC.
“We didn’t agree about all the issues, but in the end I think that we felt heard,” Mckesson told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts. The meeting touched on transgender violence, the closing of private prisons and criminal-justice reform.
Private prisons are a hot-button issue for communities of color, “uniting both activists skeptical of corporate power and those focused on policing and racial justice,” the report says.
The television news outlet says that Clinton favors ending both private prisons and immigration detention centers. “Her first major speech as a presidential campaign called for criminal justice reform, but her forthcoming policy will be more detailed,” the report says.
Clinton is not alone in her desire to close private prisons. Fellow Democratic presidential contenders Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have proposed ending for-profit prisons, which house about 6 percent of state inmates and 16 percent of federal prisoners, the report says, citing ACLU statistics.
“We cannot fix our criminal-justice system if corporations are allowed to profit from mass incarceration,” Sanders last month when he and Democratic Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush introduced a measure to ban for-profit prisons and make changes to the criminal-justice and immigration detention systems, notes the report.
Read more at MSNBC.