Since Donald Trump retook office, his administration has moved forward with promises to expand the surveillance, detention, and deportation of immigrants, an operation that heavily relies on private prisons in the United States. It is a gift to some of his most loyal corporate backers, GEO Group and CoreCivic, who invested millions in Trump’s reelection and inauguration. On a recent investor call, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger described this moment as “truly one of the most exciting periods” of his career.
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Private prisons emerged in the mid-1980s. Their first contracts were in immigration detention, a space they continue to dominate today. But soon after, they broke into the much larger correctional market. By the early 1990s, their executives were helping to draft model legislation for mandatory minimums, truth sentencing, and three-strike laws, major contributors to the prison boom that followed. Today, private prisons earn more than $5 billion in revenue annually.
But the privatization of corrections and immigration detention runs far deeper and wider than just private prisons. Through the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, privatization ran rampant through the carceral system. Across the country, private corporations built businesses around incarceration and detention. Soon everything in carceral facilities, from food to healthcare to telecommunications, was being outsourced, creating an industry worth over $80 billion a year.
Whether they directly exploit incarcerated people and their loved ones or receive taxpayer funds to contract with prisons, corporations in the prison industry rely on overcharging for substandard products and services. Think shoddy phone service at $0.12 a minute. And given the opaque nature of correctional environments and their limited oversight, corporate abuse quickly became a mainstay of the modern prison industry — the subject of my new book, The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits.
The prison industry is rife with unconscionable corporate behavior. For example, to increase the use of their new video calling services, for years, prison telecoms contractually required jails to eliminate visits, promising to share the anticipated revenue. Hundreds of jails saw visit rooms turned into video calling centers where young children reached for their parents through screens, unable to touch them. For many families, the cost of communication drove them into debt until they could no longer bear the burden.
Law enforcement narratives claim that this dehumanization is the cost of our security and safety. However, the prison industry stands in direct opposition to both. For instance, regular communication between incarcerated people and their families increases program participation and reduces violence in prison, and it improves reentry outcomes and lowers recidivism upon release.
The truth is buried in corporate filings and contracts. In its most recent annual report, CoreCivic lists “reductions in crime rates” as a risk to its business that “could lead to a decrease in convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.” The corporation has a fiduciary duty to shareholders to mitigate that risk, and they go to great lengths to do so.
The prison industry is not just collecting a windfall but rather actively paying for access to our carceral system. They donate to the campaigns of elected officials who support tough-on-crime laws or can award contracts. They lobby for bills that will increase the number of people in corrections or immigration detention facilities, like the Laken Riley Act that was recently passed in Congress. They hire former corrections and immigration officials, creating a revolving door between the industry and the government. And they wine and dine staff, offering perks like steakhouse dinners, strip club visits, and Caribbean cruises.
The bottom line is that the prison industry has a financial interest in putting more people behind bars and for longer. And the type of greed that can justify such gross behavior can even get cringe-worthy.
Take the story of Smart Communications, a prison technology firm that pioneered replacing mail with digital copies. As the Lever reported, the corporation’s CEO, Jon Logan, owns a $10 million yacht named “CONVICT” and a $300,000 Lamborghini with a license plate that reads “INMATE.” His empire is built on denying incarcerated people the ability to hold their child’s hand-drawn cards or receive pictures from family on the outside.
Some may balk at the idea of showing care and concern to people who have committed harm to others. Still, there are even some businesses in the industry that are more specifically designed to take advantage of the churn through jails for low-level offenses — a suspended license, a turnstile jump, a bar fight. For example, one of the services offered by JPay, which shares an owner with the NBA’s Detroit Pistons, involves taking the cash a person is carrying at booking and returning it to them upon release on a debit card that charges exorbitant fees for everything from entering one’s PIN to closing the card. Serious crimes with long sentences don’t support this business model as it needs high turnover to make money.
We must recognize the prison industry for what it is: an industry built on the human suffering of crime victims, incarcerated people, their families, and still others. The growth of this industry is part of a long, bipartisan pattern of prioritizing quick corporate profits and political wins over our supposed American values of justice and freedom.
After a decade of hard-fought wins that left us just a little bit safer and freer, we are set to see the largest increase in incarceration and detention since the last prison boom that started in the 1970s. The social costs will be immense for all of us unless we intervene and dismantle the financial incentives that capitalize on crime and incarceration.
