When I first heard the recent allegations that Colgate had used lead in its toothpaste, it made no logical sense to me. We have known for decades how dangerous lead is, especially to children. So why would a company put lead in a product meant for the mouth, sometimes the mouth of a child? It didn’t add up.
This article was optimized by the PublicistBot.
Want 10 articles per month promoting your business & making you money on autopilot? Activate the PublicistBot for $299.99/year. Add 720 short-form videos for $250 per month more.
Learn More About the Offer in This Article
Send your interest to the appropriate article or offer owner. PMN records the article that generated the enquiry, updates the funnel, logs the activity, sends notifications and adds the lead to PMN Messages.
The exact article is saved with the lead.
The featured offer or redemption link is preserved.
Owners receive messages and email notifications.
The applicant is connected to the campaign source.
Then I remembered something from years ago. Leaded gasoline was introduced in the 1920s and became the standard fuel for American cars after World War II. By the 1970s, the dangers of lead were becoming impossible to ignore and the United States began phasing lead out of gasoline. That phase-down continued through the 1970s and 1980s. By 1996, leaded gasoline for on-road vehicles was finally banned.
What happened to crime?
In the United States, crime rates rose sharply from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Then, beginning around 1991 to 1993, violent crime began a dramatic decline that continued through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The lead-crime hypothesis suggests that childhood lead exposure, especially during the decades when leaded gasoline was at its peak, helped fuel the earlier crime wave, and that removing lead from gasoline helped produce the later crime drop. Lead exposure, particularly in childhood, has been linked to aggression, impulsivity and later criminal behavior.
So I had to ask myself: could there be a more purposeful reason behind this that we are missing?
And YES, I think there most certainly was!
There is a moment in every mother's life when she looks at her child and sees not just who they are but who they might become. She sees the first steps, the first words, the first day of school. She does not see a cell. She does not see a prison bed. She does not see a profit margin. And yet, if we follow the threads of corporate interest and public policy far enough, a quiet architecture emerges, one that suggests some children's futures are being written before they can even hold a pencil.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a story of incentives, investments and the uncomfortable intersection of profit and punishment. And it begins, strangely enough, with lead.
Part One: The Poison That Predicts
For decades, scientists have known that lead is a neurotoxin. What has emerged more recently and with increasing scientific confidence, is the link between childhood lead exposure and criminal behavior later in life. A 2026 review in the field of environmental neurocriminology found that "longitudinal studies, meta-analyses, and natural experiments converge to support a causal association between childhood lead exposure and subsequent criminal behavior," mediated by damage to the brain's dopamine systems, neuroinflammation and oxidative stress. The evidence is not perfect, correlation is not causation and skeptics rightly caution against overstating the case however the pattern is difficult to ignore. Communities with higher lead exposure tend to see higher rates of violent crime years later. When lead was removed from gasoline, crime rates fell.
This is the backdrop against which the rest of the story unfolds. If lead exposure shapes the likelihood of criminal behavior and if certain children are more likely to be exposed to lead than others, then lead becomes not just a public health issue but a matter of justice. A matter of whose future is being shaped, and by whom.
Part Two: The Toothpaste Problem
In late 2025, a class action lawsuit was filed against Colgate-Palmolive, alleging that two of its children's toothpastes contained "dangerously high levels of heavy metals like lead and mercury". Independent testing reported lead levels of 200 parts per billion and higher in products including Colgate Total Whitening and Colgate Watermelon Burst. A separate class action in California alleged that the lead content in kid-friendly toothpaste "far exceeds the limit set by the FDA.
The litigation is ongoing. Colgate has moved to dismiss parts of the case and a federal judge in the Southern District of New York recently denied some of those motions while granting others. The company denies wrongdoing. But for parents, the allegation alone is enough to provoke a cold dread: the thing you put in your child's mouth every morning, the thing you trust to clean and protect, may be introducing a toxin into a developing brain.
This is not a claim that Colgate toothpaste is poisoning a generation. It is a claim that the regulatory system that is supposed to protect our children failed to catch something and that a company with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders had little incentive to look too closely.
Part Three: The Prison Industry and Its Investors: you read above, below and inbetween each line
Here is where the threads begin to cross.
The private prison industry in the United States is dominated by two companies:
CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group.
Together, they manage a substantial portion of the country's immigration detention and private correctional facilities. Their business model is, at its core, simple: they are paid per person, per day. The more people who are incarcerated, the more revenue they generate. GEO Group reported a record $254 million in profit in 2025, a roughly 700 percent increase over the previous year, driven largely by contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcemen.
CoreCivic reported $116.5 million in profits in 2025, an almost 70 percent increase and projected $147.5 million to $157.5 million in 2026.
This is not a judgment of the people who work in these facilities. It is an observation about incentives. When a company's profits rise with the number of people behind bars, it has a structural interest in policies that put more people behind bars. The private prison industry, as one legal analysis put it, "answer[s] not to the people but to boards and shareholders," and therefore has "not only an incentive but a duty to their shareholders to maintain a profitable bottom-line".
And who are those shareholders?
The largest institutional shareholders of GEO Group are BlackRock and Vanguard.
Those same two asset managers are also among the largest shareholders of CoreCivic.
And they are also among the largest shareholders of Colgate-Palmolive:
BlackRock holds approximately 9 percent of Colgate, and Vanguard holds approximately 6.5 percent-.
This is the connection. There is no evidence that Colgate owns private prisons or that private prisons own Colgate. But the same investment firms profit from both. BlackRock and Vanguard, through their index funds and institutional portfolios, hold significant stakes in the company that makes your child's toothpaste and the companies that profit from incarceration. The same hands that touch the morning routine touch the cell block. From cradle to incarceration is not difficult to make a speculative connection.
Part Four: The Human Cost
The private prison industry does not operate in a vacuum.
It operates within a criminal justice system that has profound racial disparities. People of color are disproportionately placed in private prisons compared to white prisoners, and private prisons "aggravate racial inequality and continue a tradition of mass incarceration.
In Tennessee,
African American males made up less than 8 percent of the state's population but represented 44 percent of those incarcerated.
It would be most interesting to see the colgate sales and marketing on toothpaste to Black Community businesses.
One in three Black men will spend part of his life in prison.
These are not abstract statistics. They are sons, brothers, fathers. They are the children who were exposed to lead at higher rates because they lived in older housing with deteriorating paint, in neighborhoods where environmental regulations were less vigorously enforced. They are the children whose schools had fewer resources, whose communities had less political power, whose futures were shaped by forces they could not see and did not choose.
And then there is the matter of prison labor.
Colgate products are sold inside prisons through exclusive commissary contracts.
A 2001 report described Colgate as having a "monopoly to sell its products to the 150,000 prisoners in Texas," charging "exorbitant prices to workers behind bars whose only source of funds is from family and friends".
A package of toothpaste that costs $3.40 in a grocery store costs $7.00 in prison.
Inmates are a captive market and companies like Colgate profit from that captivity.
So you put the fish in the tanks, having baited them, then continue to feed them that same poisonsous bait, making rehabilitation coming only after and well beyond the grave.
There have also been accusations, over the years, that multinational companies have benefited from prison labor. Colgate's own policy statements prohibit prison labor in its supply chain but the historical record includes a 2001 boycott of Colgate products by Texas prisoners demanding wages for work and cheaper hygiene products. The tension between stated policy and historical practice is not unique to Colgate but it is part of the larger picture.
Part Five: The Big Brother Question
There is a broader unease here that goes beyond any single company or contract. It is the sense that we are living in a system where the incentives are quietly aligned against the most vulnerable and where the machinery of profit is so deeply embedded in the machinery of punishment that the two can no longer be separated.
Sociologists have described a "digital panopticon" in which business becomes the surveillance mechanism of everyday life.
The data we generate as consumers, what we buy, where we live, what we search for, is collected and analyzed and sold. It is not a stretch to imagine a future in which that data is used not just to sell us toothpaste but to predict who will end up in a cell. And if that prediction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, then the line between consumer and captive begins to blur.
This is the "Big Brother" fear but it is not a fear of a single dictator. It is a fear of a system, a network of corporate interests, political incentives and institutional inertia that produces outcomes no one explicitly designed but everyone implicitly permits. The government relies on private prisons to house its detainees. The private prisons rely on government contracts to generate revenue. The investors rely on both. And the consumers, the parents buying toothpaste, the families sending money to commissary accounts. are caught in the middle, their choices constrained by forces they cannot control.
Part Six: What This Means for Our Children
The lead-crime hypothesis is not destiny. Not every child exposed to lead becomes a criminal and not every criminal was exposed to lead. The science is probabilistic, not deterministic. But probability is a powerful thing when it is applied to millions of children over decades. If we know that lead exposure increases the risk of behavioral problems, learning difficulties and later criminal involvement and if we know that some children are more likely to be exposed than others, then we are making a choice, collectively, as a society, about which futures we are willing to protect and which we are willing to risk.
For more information please click here or select the claim offer button below.
Claim OfferMake Money Building Your Fan Network
Share music, videos, articles, events and contests. Build your network, grow your audience and earn rewards when people connect through you. PMN turns ordinary content into shareable, interactive and trackable experiences designed to help you reach more people and monetize your network. Earn $1.00 for every fan who signs up FREE to support you.
For artists, creators, fans and everyday social media users.
(30-second preview)
IMAGINE THIS POWERING YOUR NEXT RELEASE.
The question is not whether Colgate is responsible for the prison industry. The question is whether the systems we have built, the regulatory systems, the investment systems, the criminal justice systems, are aligned with the values we claim to hold. Do we believe that every child deserves a fair chance? Do we believe that profit should not come at the expense of human dignity? Do we believe that the government exists to serve its citizens, not to feed them into a machine of corporate enrichment?
These are not partisan questions. They are human questions. And they deserve answers that are more than slogans. And now, we are far less trusting of anything that is preceeded by a corporate smile or a government handshake.
Part Seven: The Long-Term Damage
The damage to public trust is difficult to quantify, but it is real. When parents learn that the toothpaste they trusted may contain lead, they lose faith not just in Colgate but in the regulatory agencies that were supposed to catch it. When citizens learn that the same investment firms profit from their children's consumer goods and from the prisons that may one day hold them, they lose faith in the fairness of the economic system. When communities learn that their government has contracted with private companies to profit from incarceration, they lose faith in the idea that justice is blind.
Justice in fact, IS NOT BLIND.
Trust, once broken, is not easily rebuilt. And the irony is that the very institutions that depend on public trust, corporations, governments, financial markets, are the ones most responsible for eroding it. A toothpaste company that cuts corners on safety, or perhaps more nefarious
motives, a prison company that lobbies for harsher sentencing, an investment firm that holds both without asking questions, these are not villains in a comic book. They are participants in a system that rewards certain behaviors and punishes others, knowing fully well that the system itself is the problem.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
There is no single document that proves a grand conspiracy. We have no evidence of a secret meeting where executives decided to poison children so they could grow up to fill prison beds. That is not how these things work. What exists instead is a web of incentives, profit motives, investment strategies, regulatory gaps, political pressures, that produce outcomes no one planned, [PUBLICLY], but many benefit from.
The lead-crime link is real enough to take seriously. The Colgate allegations are serious enough to warrant scrutiny. The private prison industry's profit model is clear enough to raise ethical questions. And the shared investors between Colgate and the prison industry are documented enough to deserve attention.
What we do with that information is up to us. We can dismiss it as coincidence. We can retreat into cynicism and say that nothing will ever change. Or we can ask harder questions, of the companies we buy from, the politicians we elect, the systems we accept as normal. We can demand transparency. We can demand accountability. We can demand that the architecture of our society be built to protect the vulnerable, not to profit from them.
Turn one article into an ongoing visibility engine.
PublicistBot can keep your business visible with monthly articles, search-friendly distribution, affiliate-aware sharing, and optional AI Marketer video content.
Learn How to Share This Article and Earn $1.00 per Free Enquiry
Ask PMN how referral-aware article sharing works, how eligible free enquiries are attributed, and how Social Rewards are tracked in your account.
The exact article is saved with the lead.
The featured offer or redemption link is preserved.
Owners receive messages and email notifications.
The applicant is connected to the campaign source.
The future of our children is not predetermined. But it is being shaped, every day, by choices that are made in boardrooms. secreat meetings, investment offices and legislative chambers. The question is NOT whether we will pay attention. The question is whether we will care.
Bibliography
Abood, Mitchell. "The Evolution of Private Prison Incarceration in the United States." Miami Law Review, 2026. https://lawreview.law.miami.edu/evolution-private-prison-incarceration-united-states/
Afeworki, Tomas S. "Captive Consumers!" Works in Progress, July 24, 2026. https://www.olywip.org/p/captive-consumers
"Brower v. Colgate-Palmolive Company." CourtListener, Docket No. 1:25-cv-03348 (S.D.N.Y. 2026). https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69927917/67/brower-v-colgate-palmolive-company/
"Captive Consumers! Within Prisons, Exclusive Contracts with Private Vendors Leave Incarcerated People with No Choice." OlyWIP, 2026.
"Colgate Palmolive Co (CL) Ownership." FinanceCharts, June 17, 2026. https://www.financecharts.com/stocks/CL/ownership
"Colgate Palmolive Co (0P59) Ownership Distribution." ADVFN, September 4, 2026. https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/london/colgate-palmolive-0P59/share-holdings
"Class Action Filed Against Colgate-Palmolive Over Lead Content in Kids' Toothpaste." HarrisMartin, October 28, 2025. https://www.harrismartin.com
"GEO Group." BankTrack, May 18, 2026. https://www.banktrack.org/company/geo_group
Liberati, Anna Sara. "Environmental Neurocriminology: The Impact of Environmental Toxins and Stressors on Neural Pathways Underlying Criminal Behavior. A Narrative Review." Zenodo, 2026. https://zenodo.org/records/20269133
"Private Prison Firm GEO Group Reports Record $254 Million Profit After New ICE Contracts." Prison Legal News, March 1, 2026. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2026/mar/1/private-prison-firm-geo-group-reports-record-254-million-profit-after-new-ice-contracts/
"Profit Over People: How Private Prisons and ICE Harm Communities and Democracy." Demos, July 14, 2026. https://www.demos.org
"The Militant." May 28, 2001.
"Private prisons report massive profits from aiding Trump's immigrant crackdown." MS NOW, August 10, 2026. https://www.ms.now/opinion/private-prison-companies-profits-trumps-immigration-crackdown
"Racism and Private Prisons in the US: Why Minorities Suffer More." Amnesty International, 2015.
"Texas prisoners demand wages for work." The Militant, May 28, 2001.
"Toothpaste labeling lawsuit advances against Colgate-Palmolive." VitalLaw, June 26, 2026. https://www.vitallaw.com
"Who Owns Colgate-Palmolive? CL Shareholders." Investing.com, August 7, 2026. https://www.investing.com/equities/colgate-palmolive-company-ownership
Want more optimized articles like this?
PMN can create and promote up to 120 PublicistBot articles per year for $299.99/year, with an optional AI Marketer video add-on that adds up to 720 videos for $250 per month more.
Learn How to Earn $90.00 When a User Activates PublicistBot AI Agents
Ask PMN about the PublicistBot referral process, eligibility, attribution, commission tracking and the steps required for a qualifying activation.
The exact article is saved with the lead.
The featured offer or redemption link is preserved.
Owners receive messages and email notifications.
The applicant is connected to the campaign source.
For more information please click here or select the claim offer button below.
Claim Offer