core civic cca 2

disambig, --> bak

see main corrections corp

susie wiles miller strategies?!

see hutto

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intercept

ICE Revives Former “Hellhole” Prison — And Hires the Same Company To Run It

Nathalie Levey

At Leavenworth, former workers say CoreCivic made conditions dangerous, which led to a near-death attack.

Read More →

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ggl 11 25

AI Overview

CoreCivic operates detention facilities in California, most recently reopening the former state prison in California City as the largest immigration detention center in the state. Another facility is the Otay Mesa Detention Center near San Diego. Both have faced significant criticism and legal action regarding conditions, with accusations including poor medical care, inadequate staffing, and inhumane treatment, while CoreCivic maintains it provides adequate services.

California City Immigration Processing Center

• Location: About 80 miles east of Bakersfield in the Mojave Desert.

• Background: Reopened in August 2025 on the site of a former state prison that closed in 2024.

• Capacity: Can house up to 2,560 people.

• Controversies:
• A class-action lawsuit was filed alleging failure to meet basic human needs and providing inadequate medical and mental healthcare.

• Reports from Disability Rights California found issues like unnecessary solitary confinement and poor medical care for people with disabilities.

• Detainees have reported not receiving necessary medications for extended periods.

• CoreCivic claims the facility has "robust medical and mental health care on site" and "no delays in individuals getting their prescription medications".

Otay Mesa Detention Center

• Location: Near the international border in San Diego.

• Background: Owned and operated by CoreCivic.

• Controversies:
• Has been the subject of multiple complaints regarding the treatment of detainees and staff.

• An ACLU report detailed "decades of abuse" at the facility.

CoreCivic's Position

• CoreCivic has stated that its facilities provide "robust medical and mental health care" and adhere to standards set by government partners.

• A spokesperson for the company stated that delays in medication have been resolved and that staff are available 24/7.

11 25

Search instead for core civic detention ice mass deport

[### A Limited but Important Role in America's Immigration System

CoreCivic

https://www.corecivic.com › private-detention](https://www.corecivic.com/private-detention)

Private contractor CoreCivic plays a valued but limited role in immigration. We do not operate detention facilities for unaccompanied migrant children.

Missing: mass ‎| Show results with: mass

[### Immigrants Sue Trump Administration Over Inhumane ...

American Civil Liberties Union

https://www.aclu.org › press-releases › immigrants-sue-tr...](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/immigrants-sue-trump-administration-over-inhumane-conditions-at-californias-largest-immigration-detention-center)

Nov 13, 2025 — At the time of filing, more than 800 people were detained in the facility. CoreCivic projects it will reach full capacity by early 2026 as ICE ...

[### Private Prison Companies' Enormous Windfall

Brennan Center for Justice

https://www.brennancenter.org › analysis-opinion › pri...](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/private-prison-companies-enormous-windfall-who-stands-gain-ice-expands)

Oct 1, 2025 — ICE contracts with corporations to build and run detention facilities and to transport undocumented individuals who are in custody. The two ...

[### Private prison executives revel in profiting off ICE arrests in ...

prismreports.org

https://prismreports.org › 2025/10/23 › private-prison-e...](https://prismreports.org/2025/10/23/private-prison-executives-revel-in-ice-arrests/)

Oct 23, 2025 — Second-quarter earnings calls reveal how GEO Group and CoreCivic are championing and profiting from Trump's mass deportation agenda.

[### Trump's budget bill benefits private immigration detention ...

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

https://www.citizensforethics.org › crew-investigations](https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/trumps-budget-bill-benefits-private-immigration-detention-companies-that-donated-to-trump/)

Jul 23, 2025 — One Big, Beautiful Bill Act” allocates $45 billion for ICE to pay private contractors to implement mass detention of immigrants, paving the way ...

[### For-profit immigration detention expands as Trump ...

New Jersey Monitor

https://newjerseymonitor.com › 2025/04/14 › for-profit...](https://newjerseymonitor.com/2025/04/14/for-profit-immigration-detention-expands-as-trump-accelerates-his-deportation-plans/)

Apr 14, 2025 — In late February, CoreCivic also announced that it has expanded its contracts with ICE to accommodate up to 784 detainees collectively at ...

ca

[### Private Prison Corporation Defying California Law at ...

Freedom for Immigrants

https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org › corecivic-def...](https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org/news-and-updates/corecivic-defying-california-law-california-city)

Sep 11, 2025 — Flouting state laws, CoreCivic will endanger hundreds at the unpermitted and unsafe California City Correctional Facility.

[### California City Detention Facility

ICE | U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (.gov)

https://www.ice.gov › detain › detention-facilities › calif...](https://www.ice.gov/detain/detention-facilities/california-city-detention-facility)

Sep 5, 2025 — If you need information about a detainee that is housed at this facility, you may call (760) 491-8104 between the hours of 8 a.m. - 4 p.m. ...

[### Detainees sue over conditions in California's largest ICE site

CalMatters

https://calmatters.org › ice-california-city-detainee-lawsuit](https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/11/ice-california-city-detainee-lawsuit/)

Nov 13, 2025 — CoreCivic turned a former state prison into an ICE detention center. Several detainees now are suing over conditions in the California City ...

[### CoreCivic lands $130M ICE contract to run California's ...

Corrections1

https://www.corrections1.com › ice-awards-130m-contr...](https://www.corrections1.com/ice-awards-130m-contract-to-launch-californias-largest-detention-center)

Oct 7, 2025 — The $130 million contract will allow CoreCivic to operate the 2560-bed California City facility through 2027.

[### What happens when ICE opens a detention center in your ...

The San Francisco Standard

https://sfstandard.com › 2025/11/19 › california-city-ice](https://sfstandard.com/pacific-standard-time/2025/11/19/california-city-ice/)

2 days ago — In California City, immigration advocates are accusing ICE and CoreCivic of similarly acting with disregard to local license and permitting laws ...

[### 'Hell on earth': immigrants held in new California detention ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › us-news › sep › immigr...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/27/immigrants-california-detention-facility)

Sep 27, 2025 — Six people at a remote Ice facility in California City describe medical problems and filthy conditions, which operator CoreCivic denies.

---

AN 7 25

Delegates at the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) 35th General Synod overwhelmingly passed an emergency resolution this week, condemning the ongoing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids as “domestic terrorism” and accusing President Donald Trump's administration of “weaponizing the Constitution.”

Religious News Service reported Tuesday that the resolution targets immigration enforcement operations “carried out by ICE agents working without uniforms, wearing masks or refusing to identify themselves,” condemning these tactics as threatening and abusive.

Titled “Responding to the federal government’s attack on immigrants, migrants, and refugees,” the resolution urges the church to divest from for-profit private detention firms, specifically naming CoreCivic, GEO Group, and Management and Training Corp.— while allowing congregations to go further if they choose, according to the report.

READ MORE:Devastating CNN poll shows just how much Trump has fallen — even among his biggest supporters

Presented as an emergency motion by the Rev. Clara Sims of First Congregational UCC in Albuquerque on behalf of the Southwest Conference, the move reflects the church’s urgent response to escalated immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

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Meanwhile, First Congregational UCC has opened housing and provided food and aid to immigrants arriving from the border, actions its minister says stem from the denomination’s theological commitment to protect the vulnerable.

“Our faith has always called us into spaces of risk on behalf of the vulnerable,” said Sims, “especially when people are being made vulnerable by really corrupt systems of power.”

The Southwest Conference fast-tracked the resolution after national church leaders and regional partners voiced deep concerns about human rights violations in detention facilities, per the report.

READ MORE:Trump 'very irritated' with GOP senator whose reelection bid could decide Senate control

Last month, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Diocese of San Bernardino, California, released a letter addressing recent reports that ICE agents had entered Catholic churches.

As head of the sixth-largest Catholic diocese in the U.S., Bishop Rojas strongly criticized the escalation of ICE operations.

In his communication to Catholics, he highlighted that “authorities are now seizing brothers and sisters indiscriminately, without respect for their right to due process and their dignity as children of God.”

He conveyed his solidarity with immigrants “who are bearing the trauma and injustice of these tactics,” and assured them that “we join you in carrying this very difficult cross.”

---

recipients?id=D000021940

Cycle:

2024

Contributions

RanksMore info

1,229 of 40,455

$784,974

Lobbying

RanksMore info

411 of 9,200 in 2024

$1,770,000

in 2024

$1,680,000

in 2023

Outside Spending

$0

2024

---

an 3 25

Private prison companies in the United States can hardly contain their excitement as the Trump administration moves to revive the practice of detaining migrant families at facilities with records of horrifying abuses, a decision that advocacy groups say highlights the White House's disdain for human rights as it carries out its large-scale assault on immigrants.

"Reopening family detention facilities with devastating histories of abuses, trauma, and long-term psychological damage underscores that cruelty is the point of these Trump administration policies," Amy Fischer, director of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Program at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement Thursday after CBS Newsreported the administration's moves.

According to CBS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—newly empowered by President Donald Trump—"was detaining the first group of migrant parents and children" on Thursday "in a detention facility in Texas designed to hold families with minors."

"The group includes three children," the outlet added, citing an internal government report.

Separately, NBC Newsreported Thursday that "U.S. immigration agents are planning a new operation to arrest migrant families with children as part of a nationwide crackdown."

"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and border czar Tom Homan said that plans for mass deportations would initially focus on migrants who had committed crimes," NBC observed. "The new plans for national operations show that many of the families and children to be targeted do not have criminal histories."

As part of the revival of family detention—which was used by the Obama administration and the first Trump administration, and largely ended by the Biden administration—immigration officials are "refitting" two Texas facilities, including the notorious detention center in Dilley, Texas.

CoreCivic, a private prison company, has been newly contracted by ICE to reopen the facility for family detention.

"I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career," Damon Hininger, CoreCivic's CEO, told investors last month.

George Zoley, executive chairman of the GEO Group, said last week that "we've never seen anything like this before," referring to the speed with which the Trump administration is moving to procure contracts for migrant detention.

The New York Timesreported Friday that "a GEO Group subsidiary gave more than $2 million to Republican PACs that accept unlimited donations, with the bulk going to groups that supported House Republicans and Mr. Trump."

"It is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."

The Detention Watch Network noted that while the Dilley center was "in operation for family detention, there were reports of foul water and negligent medical treatment, with hospitals confirming that children are consistently released with health issues they dubbed 'Dilley-ish.'"

"In 2018, a 19-month-old girl, Mariee, tragically died after leaving the facility, and in 2019, a guard was accused of physically assaulting a 5-year-old," the organization said.

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) wrote earlier this week that he visited the center in December 2018 and "it was horrifying."

"The cruelty and abuse of Trump's family detention policy is a lasting stain on our nation," Merkley wrote on social media. "I'm calling on the admin to reverse this decision—in no world should this facility reopen."

Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of the Detention Watch Network, said Thursday that "it is enraging to see the Trump administration reinstate family detention, a policy of jailing immigrant parents with their children—including babies."

"Detention is harmful and traumatic for everyone, but especially children," said Ghandehari. "Families should be able to navigate their immigration cases in community with support services provided and facilitated by local community-based groups—never Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an enforcement agency that is plagued by egregiously poor conditions and a culture of violence."

"Taking away a child's freedom and deliberately putting them in these conditions is unconscionable, as is denying a parent their most fundamental role of providing their child with a loving and nurturing environment," Ghandehari added. "Family detention, like all immigration detention, is inhumane, unjust, and unnecessary. Everyone, certainly children and their parents, deserves to freely and safely move for opportunity and stability."

===

===

an 12 24

One of the campaign promises President-elect Donald Trump made ahead of his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last month was to carry out the "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."

According to a Sunday, December 22 Wall Street Journal report, the private prison industry is preparing to benefit greatly from the move — if Trump is able to accomplish it.

"Private prisons and other companies that provide detention services are getting ready to cash in on" the initiative, which "includes scouring for as many detention beds as possible in their networks of facilities, and scouting sites for new buildings to house migrants," the WSJ reports.

READ MORE:**Top Trump donors who funded anti-migrant 'invasion' ad allegedly hiring undocumented migrants**

Per the report, George Zoley, who serves as executive chairman of the private prison company, GEO group, told investors soon after the election, "This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity."

The company, the WSJ notes, "which currently houses about 40% of ICE detainees, is looking at a potential doubling of all its services, Zoley said on the call."

GEO Chief Executive Officer Wayne Calabrese told the newspaper, "We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions, of individuals."

WSJ reports:

*CoreCivic, the other major player in ICE detention centers, had a similar message for investors after the election. The company believes it could quickly bring its detention capacity to 25,000 beds by bringing unused ones online, including at a facility previously used to hold families in Dilley, Texas, CEO Damon Hininger said in an interview. The Biden administration chose to close the site earlier this year, but CoreCivic kept it in 'warm status,' Hininger said.

READ MORE:['Acknowledging reality': Fed chair says Trump agenda creating 'uncertainty around inflation'

Hininger, according to WSJ, said "in addition to identifying already-existing beds it could open, CoreCivic is also exploring adding new buildings or temporary facilities on land it already owns."

WSJ also notes, "To bolster its ties to the incoming administration, GEO Group recently hired a Trump-connected lobbying firm called Continental Strategy LLC, according to federal lobbying disclosures. The Florida firm is run by Carlos Trujillo, who advised Trump on Latino voters and immigration issues during the campaign. It also employs Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles."

===

baby jails

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/12/corecivic-defamation-lawsuit-family-separation-simon/

===

other one started with shitty motels as 1/2 way houses?

time:

https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/

The True History of America's Private Prison Industry

Inmates at Louisiana State Prison in Angola, La., march down a dusty trail on May 30, 1977, en route to working in the fields. cop/cowboy on horse]

BY SHANE BAUER SEPTEMBER 25, 2018

Before founding the Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. It was 1967 and the Beatles’ “All you need is love” was a hit, but the men in the fields sang songs with lyrics like “Old Master don’t you whip me, I’ll give you half a dollar.” Hutto’s family lived on the plantation and even had a “house boy,” an unpaid convict who served them.

At the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. In some states, certain inmates were given guns and even whips, and empowered to torture those who didn’t meet labor quotas. Hutto did such a good job in Texas that Arkansas would hire him to run their entire prison system–made entirely of plantations–which he would run at a profit to the state. His ability to run a prison that put money into state coffers would later attract the attention of two businessmen with a new idea: to found a corporation that would run prisons and sell shares on the stock market.

Prisons had been privatized before. Louisiana first privatized its penitentiary in 1844, just nine years after it opened. The company, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward ran it as a factory, using inmates to produce cheap clothes for enslaved people. One prisoner wrote in his memoir that, as soon as the prison was privatized, his jailers “laid aside all objects of reformation and re-instated the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.” Much like CoreCivic’s shareholder reports today, Louisiana’s annual penitentiary reports from the time give no information about prison violence, rehabilitation efforts, or anything about security. Instead, they deal almost exclusively with the profitability of the prison.

Like private prisons today, profit rather than rehabilitation was the guiding principle of early penitentiaries throughout the South. “If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves,” posited the Telegraph and Texas Register in the mid-19th century, “why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?”The head of a Texas jail suggested the state open a penitentiary as an instrument of Southern industrialization, allowing the state to push against the “over-grown monopolies” of the North. Five years after Texas opened its first penitentiary, it was the state’s largest factory. It quickly became the main Southern supplier of textiles west of the Mississippi.

Prison privatization accelerated after the Civil War.The reason for turning penitentiaries over to companies was similar to states’ justifications for using private prisons today: prison populations were soaring, and they couldn’t afford to run their penitentiaries themselves. The 13th amendment had abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime” so, until the early 20th century, Southern prisoners were kept on private plantations and on company-run labor camps where they laid railroad tracks, built levees, and mined coal.

Former slaveholders built empires that were bigger than those of most slave owners before the war. Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, controlled all convicts in Mississippi for a period. US Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar company, forced thousands of prisoners to slave in its coal mines. Lessees went to extreme lengths to extract profits. In 1871, Tennessee lessee Thomas O’Conner forced convicts to work in mines and went as far as collecting their urine to sell to local tanneries. When they died from exhaustion or disease, he sold their bodies to the Medical School at Nashville for students to practice on.

Companies liked using convicts in part because, unlike free workers, they could be driven by torture. One common form of punishment was “watering” in which a prisoner was strapped down, a funnel forced into his mouth, and water poured in so as to distend the stomach to such a degree that it put pressure on the heart, making the prisoner feel that he was going to die. Another punishment was “stringing up” in which a cord was wrapped around the men’s thumbs, flung over a tree limb, and tightened until the men hung suspended, sometimes for hours. Whipping was common. An Alabama government inspection showed that in a two-week period in 1889, 165 prisoners were flogged. Arkansas didn’t ban the lash until 1967.

Lessees gave a cut of the profits to the states, ensuring that the system would endure. Between 1880 and 1904, Alabama’s profits from leasing state convicts made up 10 percent of the state’s budget. By 1886 the US commissioner of labor reported that, where leasing was practiced, the average revenues were nearly four times the cost of running prisons. Writer George Washington Cable, in an 1885 analysis of convict leasing, wrote the system “springs primarily from the idea that the possession of a convict’s person is an opportunity for the State to make money; that the amount to be made is whatever can be wrung from him…and that, without regard to moral or mortal consequences, the penitentiary whose annual report shows the largest case balance paid into the State’s treasury is the best penitentiary.”

This maniacal drive for profits managed to create a system that was more deadly than slavery. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under the lease of a man named Samuel Lawrence James. Before the Civil War, only a handful of planters owned more than a thousand convicts, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die.Throughout the South, annual convict death rates ranged from 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: “Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor…But these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.”

States became jealous of the profits private companies were making, so in the early 20th century, they bought plantations of their own and eventually stopped leasing to private companies. Ten years after abolishing convict leasing, Mississippi was making $600,000 ($14.7 million in 2018 dollars) from prison labor. It was in this world that a man named Terrell Don Hutto would learn how to run a prison as a business.

CoreCivic prisons aren’t nearly as brutal labor camps under convict leasing or the early 20th century state-run plantations, but they still go to grotesque lengths to make a dollar. I saw this first hand when, in2014, I went undercover as a prison guard in a CoreCivic prison in Louisiana. There, I met a man who lost his legs to gangrene after begging for months for medical care. CoreCivic was often resistant to sending prisoners to the hospital: their contract required that outside medical visits be funded by the company. Educational programs were axed to save money. 

To keep costs low, guards were paid $9 an hour and oftentimes there were no more than 24 on duty, armed with nothing but radios, to run a prison of more than 1,500 inmates. The prison was incredibly violent as a result. In a four-month period in 2015, the company reported finding some 200 weapons, 23 times more than the state’s maximum security prison. I knew one inmate who committed suicide after repeatedly going on hunger strike to demand mental health services in a prison with only one part-time psychologist. When he died, he weighed 71 pounds.

Private prisons, according to a 2016 Department of Justice Study, are consistently more violent that their already-dismal public counterparts. Yet while we went through training to become guards, we were taught that, if we saw inmates stab each other, we were not to intervene. “We are not going to pay you that much,” our instructor told us. Our job was simply to shout the words “stop fighting,” thus protecting the company’s liability and avoiding any potentially costly harm to ourselves. Our job, after all, was to “deliver value to our shareholders.” “If them fools want to cut each other,” the instructor said, “well, happy cutting.”

In May 2017, I bought a single share in the company in order to attend their annual shareholder meeting. As I sat and watched Terrell Don Hutto and other corporate executives discuss how their company’s objective was to “serve the public good,” I wondered how many times such meetings had been held throughout American history. How many times had men, be they private prison executives or convict lessees, gotten together to perform this ritual? They sit in company headquarters or legislative offices, far from their prisons or labor camps, and craft stories that soothe their consciences. They convince themselves, with remarkable ease, that they are in the business of punishment because it makes the world better, not because it makes them rich.

Adapted from AMERICAN PRISON: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer.

==

==

https://news.littlesis.org/2019/08/14/private-prisons-now-face-87-4-financing-gap-as-banks-continue-to-flee-industry

As of August 2019, eight banks – JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, Fifth Third Bancorp, Barclays, and PNC– have publicly committed to ending their future financing relationships with the private prison industry, including CoreCivic and GEO Group. Together these eight banks represent an estimated $2.35 billion – or 87.4% – of the credit lines and term loans that are central to these companies’ operations.

Notably, all of the banks that provide credit and term loans to GEO Group have committed to end their future financing relationships with the industry. These commitments are the result of ongoing campaigns from #FamiliesBelongTogether and #BackersOfHate to end Wall Street’s financing and profiting off of the private prison industry.

This mass exodus of banks has had a cascading effect on the industry. Fitch Ratings, one of the three premier credit rating agencies, recently downgraded CoreCivic from BB+ to BB. This downgrade will make it more difficult for CoreCivic to secure the plentiful, cheap credit and loans they have accessed in the past.

Moreover, California’s $356 billion pension fund, CalPERS, is now considering divesting from the industry due to “egregious activities” at the border and the increased riskiness as banks continue to flee. Finally, CBS MoneyWatch reported that stock values forCoreCivic (CXW) and GEO Group (GEO) have been cut in half since April 2017.

Estimated Impact on CoreCivic and GEO Group’s Future Financing

As shown in the chart below, these eight banks provide an estimated combined $2.352 billion of GEO and CoreCivic’s financing, or 87.4% of the total financing currently available to these private prison companies. Given the eight banks’ commitments to provide no new financing, GEO Group and CoreCivic will potentially face a $2.352 billion shortfall when the current agreements expire.

==

==

Since President Richard Nixon declared the national "War on Drugs" in the 1970s, the American prison population has skyrocketed; the same is true of the numbers of people locked up in private prisons, especially since the 1990s. Over their history, private prisons have been controversial for several reasons, including in some cases their treatment of incarcerated individuals. Supporters, however, say private prison companies have shouldered some of the burden from overpopulated federal prisons.

In the 2016 election cycle, private prisons gave a record $1.6 million to candidates, parties and outside spending groups. That was nearly triple what they'd given in 2014 and more than double their contributions in the 2012 presidential cycle. Most of the increase came in the form of donations to outside groups, and Geo Group was responsible for most of that: It gave $300,000 to super PACs backing various Republican presidential candidates, including one backing now-President Donald Trump.

Of the 2016 contributions that went to candidates or parties, 85 percent went to Republicans. That's higher than in most previous cycles, but consistent with the conservative leanings of this industry. Since 1990, private prisons have given 73 percent of their total party-and-candidate contributions to Republicans.

Including its super PAC gifts, GEO Group was the top contributor from the industry by far in the 2016 election cycle, giving more than $1.2 million.

Private prisons' outlays for lobbying were the highest in nine years -- $2.75 million -- as the industry tried to fight back against then-President Obama's efforts to make less use of their facilities.Here, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corp. of America) led the spending with about $1.1 million devoted to lobbying.

==

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=G7000

==

new

==

https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/03/bankers-back-away-profit-prison-companies-step-political-spending

The U.S. for-profit prison industry, already facing organized opposition from human rights and justice reform advocates, got some bad news recently from its bankers.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the biggest U.S. bank measured by assets, this week announced its intention to stop financing private operators of prisons and immigrant detention centers after an evaluation of costs and benefits. The move follows banking giant Wells Fargo's recent decision to scale back its involvement with the private prison industry as part of its risk management efforts. The decisions are a blow to an industry with a business model that relies on debt financing in the form of credit, loans, and bonds for day-to-day operations as well as for buying smaller companies.

The banks' announcements come amid a years-long campaign by advocacy groups that targeted the industry's bankers. For example, JPMorgan and WellsFargo were among the six Wall Street firms identified in a 2016 report by California-based privatization watchdog In the Public Interest (ITPI) as financing the debt of the two biggest U.S. for-profit prison companies: Nashville, Tennessee-based CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), which at the time had total debt of about $1.5 billion, and The GEO Group of Boca Raton, Florida, with debt of about $1.9 billion.

In 2017, after release of the ITPI report, the national progressive advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy launched the "Corporate Backers of Hate" campaign to target "some of the companies which most egregiously prioritize profits over people," including JPMorgan and Wells Fargo. Activists kicked off the campaign with civil disobedience at JPMorgan's Manhattan headquarters, followed by rallies outside of shareholder meetings in Texas and Delaware. Last July, activists working with the campaign held a protest outside the New York City home of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon that led to eight arrests.

Meanwhile, more than 80 organizations from immigrant rights groups to social investing firms came together last year as part of the Families Belong Together campaign to create a corporate accountability committee targeting big banks through strategies aimed at both industry insiders and consumers. At the same time, activists intensified scrutiny of the industry's other financing. For example, a national initiative called Real Money Moves is calling on athletes, actors, artists, and activists to keep their money out of private prison companies, and a growing number of public pension funds are divesting from the industry, whose stock prices have soared under the Trump administration and its punitive immigration policies.

Then last month, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York called for hearings on banks' funding of private prisons that hold undocumented immigrants. "We're going to hold oversight hearings to make these banks accountable for investing in and making money off of the detention of immigrants," she said at an event hosted by an immigrants' rights advocacy group in New York City. "Because it's wrong." While just over 8 percent of all U.S. prisoners are held in private facilities, over 60 percent of those in U.S. immigrant detention are, with CoreCivic and The GEO Group together holding about 15,000 people in immigrant detention each day.

Under mounting pressure from critics, private-prison firms are stepping up their already-considerable political influence operations. The industry spent over $3.8 million on lobbying at the federal level in 2018 alone, and over $1.9 million on campaign contributions during the 2018 campaign cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org. That's a significant increase over the industry's spending of $2.1 million on lobbying and $522,000 on campaign contributions in the 2014 cycle.

CoreCivic's latest lobbying hires

CoreCivic, the second-largest U.S. private-prison company after The GEO Group, last month retained the lobbying services ofThe Vogel Group, an influential bipartisan lobbying firm headquartered in Washington, D.C, as ITPI reported in its latest weekly privatization report. The issue code on the lobbying registration paperwork? Banking.

The move expands CoreCivic's already-considerable lobbying operation. In 2018 alone, the company spent over $1.2 million lobbying at the federal level, with that money split between six prominent firms: Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, the largest U.S. lobbying firm by revenue; Gephardt Group, the Atlanta-based labor consultancy of former U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri; Greenberg Traurig, another of the largest U.S. lobbying firms; Hobart Hallaway & Quayle Ventures, whose partners include the son of former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle; Miller Strategies, whose CEO previously worked for former Texas governor and current U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry; and Simmons & Russell Group, whose principals have served as chiefs of staff for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

The Vogel Group lobbyists who'll be working with CoreCivic are CEO Alex Vogel, who previously lobbied for the company from 2010 to 2014, and principal Brian M. Johnson. The two men bring a wealth of conservative political connections and experience.

Vogel served as chief counsel for U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, a Republican who represented Tennessee from 1995 to 2007. He also served as general counsel for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and deputy counsel for the Republican National Committee, according to LittleSis, a database that tracks power networks. Vogel is married to Virginia state senator and former Republican lieutenant governor candidate Jill Holtzman Vogel and is a partnerin her law firm, Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, which is currently embroiled in an ongoing lawsuit over its role in wrongly accusing Democratic voters of felony voter fraud in the 2016 North Carolina gubernatorial election.

Johnson previously headed federal relations for the American Petroleum Institute, a leading oil and gas lobby, and for Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax advocacy group founded and led by Grover Norquist, a prominent Republican political operative who has said his goal is to bring America back to what it was "up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that."

Johnson also used to direct the Alliance for Worker Freedom, now called the Center for Worker Freedom (CWF), a project of Norquist's group that opposes labor unions. In 2014, for example, CWF led a public relations effort against the United Auto Workers (UAW) effort to organize a Volkswagen manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, using tactics that included billboards claiming the UAW is a cover for the "United Obama Workers." The union lost that vote, but the following year a group of skilled trades workers at the plant voted to form a micro-union, though the company has refused to bargain with it. A union foe like Johnson would likely feel at home working on behalf of the private prison industry, where few workers belong to unions and typically make much less than workers in public prisons.

The statement CoreCivic released in response to JPMorgan's announcement offers a hint of what the industry's messaging strategy might look like as the political fight over private prisons continues. The company said that it is "disappointed" with the bank's decision, as Bloomberg reported, which it claimed had played "an important role in creating better conditions for inmates entrusted in our care."

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divest PIC 3/19

a host of efforts to push big banks to divest from private prisons, including by the Families Belong Together coalition led by MomsRising, the #BackersOfHate campaign, and Freedom to Thrive, notched a big victory when JPMorgan Chase recently announced that it will stop financing CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest private prison corporations. LittleSis partnered on the research to identify private prison profiteers that was used by the Families Belong Together coalition and the #BackersOfHate campaign. Wells Fargo, another target of the campaign, has also indicated that it is pulling back from financing private prisons.

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https://www.freedomunited.org/

omg

Being detained is punishment but being forced to work for the benefit of a private corporation is against international law. This is what is happening at the Otay Mesa immigration detention center in California, run by $1.7bn company CoreCivic. Since launching our campaign, rather than hearing messages that their practices will change,shocking new cases of forced labor have emerged.

Join our call and tell CoreCivic this is unacceptable.

Five asylum-seekers detained at Otay Mesa brought a legal case against CoreCivic for forcing them to work, ironically under their “Voluntary Work Program.” They allege that CoreCivic secured their labor by threatening them with solitary confinement, byrevoking family visitation rights, and by withholding mail delivery.

Since we learnt of that case and launched our campaign, new even more shockingallegations have emerged. A victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation, who on escaping contacted US authorities, rather than getting the support she needed, was detained in a CoreCivic detention center in Texas and forced to work for $1 a day.

Just last month a wide-ranging new case was brought against CoreCivic on behalf of all civil immigration detainees who performed forced, uncompensated work for CoreCivic.

Tell CoreCivic it’s time to change.

We should be amazed that this company, contracted by the US government, faces such wide-ranging allegations of forced labor and has failed to act. Sadly, it is much less surprising in this deeply disturbing ‘zero tolerance’ climate towards immigration, which has already seen nearly 2,000 children separated from their parents.[1] However, this does not dampen our outrage.

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"detainees began to work in the kitchen just so they could eat more…one detainee lost 68 lbs. Their ‘volunteering’ involved literally working for food.”:{1:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:

Immigrants detained in a private prison in San Diego allege that they have been subjected to forced labor and threatened with solitary confinementor restricted visitation rights if they refused to work.:{2:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:

The complainants say the company that owns the prison, CoreCivic, one of the largest private prison companies in the US, pays at most $1.50 per day, and sometimes nothing at all, for their work as kitchen staff, janitors, barbers and in various other roles.

But reports of forced labor are not isolated to immigration detention centers. In Oklahoma, offenders sentenced to rehabilitation end up forced into labor on chicken farms, without any recourse or access to an actual recovery program.:{3:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Prisoners in California are forced into labor and made to risk their lives fighting the state’s wildfires for a dollar an hour or less.:{4:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:

Forced labor in prisons is not an immigration issue, it’s an American one, replicated worldwide.

The United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, housing 25% of the world’s prisoners but only 5% of the global population, and spends more than $80 billion a year. Incarceration rates in the United States have increased by 700% in the last four decades, even though crime has dramatically decreased.:{5:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: Among those incarcerated, more than 60% are people of color. And Black men are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men.6

1. https://www.thenation.com/article/ices-captive-immigrant-labor-force/ ↩
2. https://www.thenation.com/article/ices-captive-immigrant-labor-force/ ↩
3. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-bc-us–reveal-recovery-centers-forced-labor-20171004-story.html ↩
4. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/how-much-longer-will-inmates-fight-californias-wildfires/547628/ ↩
5. https://aflcio.org/2016/4/5/lets-get-serious-about-mass-incarceration ↩
6. https://aflcio.org/2016/4/5/lets-get-serious-about-mass-incarceration ↩
7. https://www.thenation.com/article/ices-captive-immigrant-labor-force/ ↩
8. http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/amendments/13/essays/166/abolition-of-slavery:{11:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:  It does not provide for the use of slavery against civil detainees in immigration centers. Additionally, regulations introduced in 2015 aim to end trafficking in government contracting.:{:{ }:

}:

Minimum international standards around the use of prison labor are outlined in the International Labour Organization’s Forced Labor Convention. It states that prisoners, just as free persons, must not be forced to work under threat of penalty or loss of privileges. Furthermore, wages should be comparable to those of free workers and health and safety measures should be taken as well.:{12:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}:http://www.ilo.org/empent/areas/business-helpdesk/faqs/WCMS_DOC_ENT_HLP_FL_FAQ_EN/lang–en/index.htm#Q3 ↩

9. http://correctionalnews.com/2018/01/09/corecivic-class-action-tennessee/ ↩
10. http://correctionalnews.com/2018/01/09/corecivic-class-action-tennessee/ ↩

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https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/trumps-first-year-has-been-private-prison-industrys-best

Exactly 17 months ago, in August of 2016 -- back when most election polls had Hillary Clinton clinching the 2016 presidential election -- the Obama administration announced that it would end the Justice Department’s (DOJ) reliance on private prisons. The announcement came seven days after the DOJ’s inspector general (IG) called on the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to more rigorously oversee its contracts with private prison companies. The IG’s report found that private prisons at the federal level consistently fail to measure up to federal standards in preventing dangerous conditions, intercepting contraband, and ensuring internal accountability for staff misconduct.

Shares of the private prison titans tanked.

CoreCivic and GEO Group’s stocks both ended the day down more than 35 percent and 39 percent, respectively -- an indication that the nation’s largest for-profit prison corporations' profitability might be on the wane. The day after the announcement, GEO Group CEO George Zoley stated in a conference call, “There’s been an overreaction to the news about the contracts. We think, in time, this will correct itself.” Even George Zoley couldn’t have predicted today’s turnaround.

With the election of Donald Trump to the White House a few months later, Zoley’s prescient statement of an “overreaction” made him look like a fortune teller.

On Nov. 7, 2016, when the closing bell of the American Stock Exchange rang and before any sense of who the 45th president of the United States would be, CoreCivic traded at 14.36 and GEO Group stood at 15.93. Following Trump's electoral victory, private prison company stocks skyrocketed. Today, CoreCivic is trading at  23.19 (a 61 percent increase) and GEO Group is trading at 23.03 (a 45 percent increase). And for good reason. The Trump administration is a godsend for the private prison industry.

First, there is the dangerous and misguided rhetoric that President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions constantly spew -- despite evidence to the contrary -- about how the nation’s violent crime rate is rising and America’s streets are filled with carnage. Second, along with this bombastic language are their calls for harsher sentencing and draconian enforcement of drug and immigration offenses. Third, federal spending on private prisons has remained steady, despite Republican support for across-the-board budget cuts to other federal programs. Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2018 budget calls for $1.2 billion in new spending on detention, transportation and deportation of undocumented immigrants to expand detention capacity to more than 48,000 beds a day. Finally, in February of 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked the Obama-era initiative to phase out the use of private contractors to run federal prisons, delivering the industry its biggest victory yet.

Private prison corporations have publicly expressed enthusiasm for the current administration’s aggressive stance on crime and immigration. In a 2017 third-quarter earnings call, a GEO official noted that the government’s need for additional detention space should benefit company revenues.

Here is how the private prison industry fared during Trump’s first year. Today, 65 percent of detainees held by the Department of Homeland Security are housed in privately run facilities. With the administration’s plans to increase the capacity to hold undocumented immigrants behind bars, the private prison industry’s revenues will surely follow suit. And in an unprecedented move, in late 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) asked for information from contractors who can provide additional immigration detention space in the interior of the nation, in major cities such as Salt Lake City, Chicago, Detroit and St. Paul, along with an expected request for information on contractors who can provide additional capacity along the southern U.S. border in Texas.

CoreCivic’s CEO Damon Hininger publicly touted the administration’s move as a source of potential revenue to his company, noting in an August’s earnings call with investors, “ICE expects the average length of stay for detainees to increase as a result of increased interior enforcement. While immigrants arrested at the border typically are detained for 27 days, those arrested in the interior of the country are detained for roughly 52 days.” More days behind bars in their detention centers translates into more profits for the company.

The current administration and the private prison industry are also doing more than just merely talking. In April, ICE awarded GEO Group with a $110 million contract to build a new immigration detention center in Conroe, Texas, 40 miles north of Houston. At the time, the Associated Press reported that this contract award took many by surprise because GEO had “a surplus of 3,000 beds across its nationwide network of prisons.” And in December, CoreCivic filed plans with government officials in Elkhart County, Indiana, to construct an approximately $100 million detention facility. The move sparked candlelight vigils from area residents distraught by the development. CoreCivic has not yet received final approval from the Elkhart County Commissioners or ICE.

In April, the administration -- sticking to the message from Attorney General Sessions’ one-paragraph memo to the BOP reversing the Obama administration’s intent to reduce reliance on private prisons -- posted a notice requesting proposals from private prison companies to house prisoners in Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) facilities. CAR prisons are privately managed prisons. There are 11 CAR prisons across the country run by three companies: GEO Group, CoreCivic and Management & Training Corp. The solicitation signaled a planned increase of 1,607 beds over BOP’s then-current population of privately imprisoned people -- 21,287 in total, as of May 2017. And on May 26, GEO Group announced that it had been awarded renewed contracts with the BOP for CAR facilities at the company’s prison complex in Big Spring, Texas. The 10-year agreement for 3,532 beds is worth up to $664 million.

My new book, "Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration," notes that given today’s political realities, the private prison industry is not disappearing any time soon. Given the current administration’s penchant for privatizing government services -- including increasing its reliance on private prisons -- we owe the thousands of people who cycle into and out of private prisons and immigration detention centers a duty to constantly monitor their conditions and ensure that private entities that perform public functions should be subject to the same transparency, accountability and oversight as public entities. And for those worried about the private prison industry’s lack of transparency and accountability (in just one example, private prisons at the federal level are not subject to Freedom of Information Act Requests), if the first year of the Trump administration reflects the next three years, we need to act quickly to ensure that the ever-growing number of people behind bars in private prisons and immigration detention centers are the beneficiaries of improved conditions of confinement and better transparency. How? We need to ensure that state and federal laws are changed to require these corporations to comply with open records requests. And state and federal governments need to rewrite contracts with the private prison industry to require better programming, transparency, accountability and conditions of confinement.

While most of the coverage on private prisons has focused on the federal contracts, the administration’s rhetoric on reviving the war on drugs is starting to have a domino effect at the state level. Most recently, in Kentucky, the state signed a contract with CoreCivic to reopen a shuttered prison -- the Lee Adjustment Center in Beattyville --  and move about 800 inmates there. The opioid crisis in Kentucky pushed state policymakers to draft more draconian drug penalties that played a role in increasing its prison population to a record high of more than 24,000 inmates. With full prisons and jails, Kentucky felt it had no choice but to contract with CoreCivic to house almost 1,000 men it doesn’t have room to keep behind bars.

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/how-jp-morgan-chase-cashing-private-prisons

JPMorgan Chase, like so many corporations, is trying to have its cake and eat it under the Trump administration. In the last few weeks, it has invested time, public relations' efforts and money in presenting itself as a defender of human rights. But the$2 million Chase pledged to fight racism is a drop in the ocean compared to the potential yield from its massive investment in the private prison system: one of the starkest manifestations of racial injustice in the U.S. today, profiting primarily from the detention of immigrants seeking a new life in the U.S. The DACA cancellation last week will only further boost the huge profit to be made from keeping yet more people under lock and key.

Now Trump has canceled DACA, JPMorgan Chase must decide how serious it really is about this newly discovered sense of social consciousness. For its stance on human rights to have real meaning, the corporation must divest from the private prison system. Taking a real public position might hurt profits, but may help convince critics that the company means business when it comes to standing up for racial justice.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is increasingly vocal in public about his newfound ethical concerns. He made a very public statement distancing himself from President Trump over Trump’s failure to condemn white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. He has also described himself as “pro-immigrant”: an opinion that is hard to square away against his roles as a financier, underwriter and bond-holder of private prison corporations like GEO Group and Core Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). Both corporations oversee Immigrant Detention Centers throughout the U.S., many of which house undocumented migrants.

JPMorgan Chase’s investments in private prisons certainly make economic sense: the private prison industry is worth about $5 billion, and the election of Donald Trump has caused the profits of the sector to balloon further. Almost immediately after Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Justice rescinded the Obama administration’s order to phase out federal private prisons from the criminal justice system.

In fact, the day after Trump won the election, the stock price of Core Civic, one of the largest private detention centers in the U.S., jumped 43 percent as investors clamored to capitalize on the sector’s reversal of fortune after the Obama administration’s sustained attempts to stifle the private prison industry. Perhaps JPMorgan Chase was wringing its hands in the face of such a clear backwards step on human rights in private, but its investments in the sector suggest otherwise.

It’s also important to note that investors like JPMorgan Chase are not simply passive beneficiaries of a grossly unjust immigration system. Their financing actively encourages the private prison sector to grow. Private prison corporations rely on debt financing from banks like JPMorgan Chase to expand their control of the criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems. In turn, the banks generate revenue from collecting interest and fees on CCA’s and GEO Group’s debts.

Not unusual for one of Trump’s corporate cronies, Jamie Dimon is considerably bolder with his words than his actions. Despite being "pro immigrant" and his recent attempts to distance himself from Trump, Dimon served on Trump’s business advisory council, even after Trump’s disparaging statements about immigrants throughout his presidential campaign. Dimon will certainly have been aware of the egregiously offensive rhetoric President Trump used on the campaign trail, and since taking office, the president has been overtly hostile to immigration in almost every form, leading to increases in immigrant detention throughout the U.S.

His reversal of DACA takes this attitude to new heights of inhumanity, as thousands of young undocumented Americans face deportation from the country where they were raised and in which they belong. JPMorgan Chase’s $2 million donation to charity seems a rather anemic response to millions of lives disrupted and families fragmented as a result of a campaign promise made in the spirit of venal self-promotion and self-interest.

Dimon’s behavior suggests that he believes the public and the press can be distracted from his profiteering from human rights abuses through large donations that are frankly minuscule compared to the personal wealth of most JPMorgan Chase senior employees, let alone the corporation itself.

SumOfUs members are working together to demonstrate that Dimon is mistaken. Earlier this year, the former CEO of Uber and the CEOs of Tesla and Disney were forced to step down from Trump’s Business Advisory Council after immense public pressure, including a 100,000 signature SumOfUs petition. Chase is the largest consumer bank in the United States, which means it is particularly susceptible to consumer pressure. If people make their voices heard through public pressure, including shareholder advocacy and grassroots organizing, Dimon will be forced to address these issues in public.

The private prisons industry is a horrifying manifestation of some of the worst injustices in the U.S., and in the rest of the world; it destroys lives, shatters families and sacrifices fundamental principles of human dignity in deference to favorable entries on a balance sheet. It is an often-repeated tenet of human rights theory and practice that when the rights of one person or group of people are diminished, ultimately we are all diminished. Perhaps it is this insight that has inspired JPMorgan Chase’s toe-dip into the water of human rights advocacy. Until it really puts its money where its mouth is, we will have no way of knowing.