This week on Everyday Injustice we speak with Bianca Tylek from WorthRises.
In her new book The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, Bianca Tylek pulls back the curtain on the vast network of corporations, investors, and government actors that profit from human incarceration. Drawing on her background in both Wall Street and public interest law, Tylek reveals how the $80 billion prison economy monetizes every aspect of imprisonment—from phone calls to healthcare—and disproportionately exploits Black, brown, and low-income communities.
“Far more insidious are the industries that operate within prisons, profiting off captive markets with little oversight.” – Bianca Tylek
While private prisons are often the face of the system, Tylek emphasizes they represent only a fraction of the problem. Far more insidious are the industries that operate within prisons, profiting off captive markets with little oversight.
The book traces financial connections to powerful private equity firms like H.I.G. Capital and Platinum Equity, which invest heavily in prison telecom and healthcare services, often delivering substandard care while reaping massive profits.
Tylek recounts organizing divestment campaigns, including one in which a public school worker demanded her pension not be invested in incarceration.
With the looming possibility of renewed mass immigration enforcement and expanded detention under a second Trump administration, Tylek warns that these financial actors are preparing for a “gold rush” fueled by human suffering.
Yet the book isn’t just an exposé—it’s a blueprint for resistance. Tylek highlights divestment campaigns, legislative advocacy, and public pressure as tools to make incarceration less profitable and more transparent. Through vivid storytelling and firsthand accounts, The Prison Industry humanizes those caught in this web of exploitation and urges readers to see incarceration not as an inevitable system, but as a constructed one that can be dismantled.
Tylek’s message is clear: “Justice and profit are incompatible.”
