Pistons’ Tom Gores responds to calls to divest from prison telecom company
Updated Dec 27, 2020;
Posted Dec 27, 2020
Pistons owner Tom Gores announced donation of masks and gloves to help fight coronavirus. (Mike Mulholland/MLive)
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DETROIT For years, criminal justice reform groups have been pushing Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores to either sell the team or sell his prison telecommunication company, Securus Technologies.
This fall, advocacy groups turned up public pressure, first by writing to the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, from which Gores resigned. Then they wrote an open letter to the NBA and took out a full-page ad in the New York Times.
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The company Securus offers telephone services to prisons. It has faced criticism for price-gouging incarcerated people and their families for phone calls, and now that controversy has trickled over into the NBA. Tom Gores, the owner of the Detroit Pistons, also founded a private equity firm, which owns Securus. Now the activist group Worth Rises is accusing Gores of profiting off incarcerated people and accusing the NBA of hypocrisy. The group took out a full-page ad in Sunday s New York Times and wrote a letter to the NBA saying Gore should either sell the Pistons or divest from Securus. Bianca Tylek is the executive director of Worth Rises.
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DETROIT An anti-incarceration activist group is demanding the National Basketball Association make Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores step down from the league’s board and give up the franchise. They claim his private equity company profits off a prison industry that deliberately exploits people of color, Daily Wire reported.
The aggressive move comes from a nonprofit advocacy organization called Worth Rises, which according to its website, envisions “a society in which no entity or individual relies on human caging or control for their wealth, operation, or livelihood.”
Moreover, Worth Rises ran a full-page ad directed at the NBA in the sports section of the New York Times on Sunday, asking, “If Black Lives Matter, what are you doing about Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores?”
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Ameelio founders Uzoma Orchingwa ’22JD, ’22MBA, and Gabriel Saruhashi ’22 have compiled long résumés in their short careers. Orchingwa, a Chicago native who spent part of his childhood in Nigeria, got his BA in philosophy and sociology from Colby College, where he was awarded a Truman Scholarship. He then went to the University of Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge Scholar, where he earned a master of philosophy in criminology. He was awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship to study at Yale, where he is pursuing a JD from the Law School and an MBA from the School of Management. He spent the last two summers working for law firms in San Francisco and Washington, DC.