Kim Kardashian's 'Prison Reform' Is Tied to a Corporate Sponsorship

As we reported last week, Kim Kardashian has partnered with Lyft to bring “5000 jobs” to former inmates. As TMZ reports, she’s “worked tirelessly on both the federal and local levels to ensure inmates will be provided housing and employment opportunities.” They also detail her upcoming partnership with the ride sharing giant, which goes into effect this week:

Sources with knowledge of Kim’s partnership with rideshare giant Lyft tell us the company has committed services to get up to 5k soon-to-be released inmates to job interviews. We’re told the biggest group of prisoners who have been granted release will get out of prison July 19.

Isn’t it unsurprising that walking billboard Kim Kardashian has tied her activism to a commercial “activation” that nets positive press for an industry battling a PR firestorm? I understand that, according to the quotes we’ve been given, Kim Kardashian believes she’s doing the “right thing.” She “wants to learn” and has been “confused about what she should do” in the past. The latter sentiment, in fact, led to her decision to pursue law (according to her speech last week in the White House announcing this partnership.) But as I read the developing story around this new treaty between Lyft and the White House, I’m reminded of a quote from Jezebel’s interview with Bhairavi Desai, labor activist and founding member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, ahead of the May strike organized by Lyft and Uber drivers:

“[Lyft] has been really savvy on social media. They would even give funding to local non-profits. And so they packaged themselves as members of the 99 percent. [laughs] Meanwhile, they’re financed by Wall Street and all along, were looking for the highest valuation in recent history. […] They presented themselves as innovators and visionaries with this progressive bent and so even in the labor circles, we had to fight through this wall of support that was built around them. In the beginning, it was harder because they would offer bonuses to drivers to sign up. In the summer of 2015, Uber defeated an effort to cap the number of [for-hire] vehicles [in New York City]. Then in February 2016, they decided to cut drivers’ rates. They said drivers would earn less per fare, but they would be getting more passengers—in other words, drivers would work more for less.”

I can also say with some assurance that Donald Trump likes business. So much, in fact, that he’s crowned himself the king of deregulation. Lyft wants to permanently classify its workers as contract employees, as Quartz reported last week. By partnering with Trump, who gets a photo op with Kim Kardashian in return, this agenda surely inches along. As it’s been said: nobody is free until we are all free. Kim Kardashian has allowed a corporation to entrench its agenda into a decades-long struggle by prison abolition so that it can systematically strip hundreds of thousands of their rights. Many of which come from the same marginalized communities under siege by unjust legal systems. We don’t call it the Prison Industrial Complex for nothing!