The fun and games are over, time to pay the piper.
Via Tennessean:
For hours Monday, officers worked to unchain protesters as they occupied the property of a private prison company’s corporate headquarters, managing to shut down Nashville-based CoreCivic’s office building for the day.
As of Monday afternoon, the Metro Nashville Police Department had arrested at least 10 of the few dozen protesters on trespassing charges, some of whom had locked themselves to cement-filled barrels to block parking garage entrances to the office.
Kris Mumford, a department spokeswoman, said officers expected as many as 20 people would be taken into custody.
“We have no intention of leaving,” said the Rev. Jeannie Alexander from No Exceptions Prison Collective. “It’s a nonviolent, peaceful resistance.”
Alexander said protesters “do not recognize this as private property,” alleging the protesters by their actions had appropriated the grounds for the people of Tennessee.
Alexander was later arrested and carried away, being loaded into a police van by her hands and feet.
One protester, a woman sitting atop a 20-foot tripod fashioned from wooden beams, was brought down by special operations officers after nine and a half hours and the use of the department’s mobile ramp truck.
CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, is one of the nation’s largest owners and operators of private prisons, operating roughly 65 facilities across 19 states, including the Metro Davidson County Detention Facility on Harding Place.
The company contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and runs eight immigration detention centers, but has repeatedly declined to provide current copies of its contracts to operate these facilities.
Public records requests with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are pending.