Today in America, there is a large-scale policy debate regarding immigration. For the last several years many people on both sides of the political spectrum have argued that we have a crisis at the border albeit for different reasons. Often this debate distills down to two camps, those who believe immigrants improve the nation and those who do not. However, there are many common factors that people should agree on regardless of their political beliefs. One unifying idea is the notion that major corporations should not profit from the exploitation of the vulnerable. Another is that wealthy private interests should not persuade the government into taking action that is objectively bad for the public. Yet, in the case of private detention centers, both of these issues occur. To understand the factors involved we need to look at two main histories: the origins of private incarceration, and the modern expansion of U.S. deportation. The confluence of these stories leads us to today. For the duration of this essay, I will provide a historically grounded argument for why the U.S. government should not use private detention centers.
While it might seem like institutions of mass incarceration have always been a part of American society, this is not the case. To understand how they have become ingrained in American life the history of how they came to be must be understood. At least in the United States, mass incarceration is a historically modern phenomenon which has been normalized recently. Evidence of this can be seen in the prison population which has skyrocketed in comparison to normal population growth over the last century. This sudden increase means that today the U.S. boasts the largest incarcerated population per-capita, exceeding authoritarian nations such as China and Russia. Another interesting element of American incarceration is the use of government outsourcing to private companies.
The practice of mass incarceration was in a sense, born from abolition. As African Americans gained their freedom there became a vacuum in dirt-cheap labor to work the plantations. The existing elites quickly figured out that they could exploit the work of the next most vulnerable population, many of whom had only recently obtained freedom, prisoners. This cycle never truly ended and while people of every color have entered American carceral institutions, the current prison population is still disproportionately black. Today, two corporations dominate this multi-billion dollar industry; the GEO Group and CoreCivic. The latter was founded by a man named Terrell Don Hutto who many credit with forming the modern-day private prison industry. Both the GEO Group and CoreCivic are technically classified as “Real Estate Investment Trusts” which means they own the properties they manage and sell public shares on the New York stock exchange. However, there is a key difference between these corporations and a traditional REIT. Hypothetically, a normal commercial manager might hope that by bringing in a new restaurant to their mall they can increase customer traffic and in turn profit margins. In contrast, Terrell Don Hutto and George Zoley, the CEOs of these two companies, rely on a steady supply of government contracts to operate and human bodies to fill their cells. However, these factors only focus on income maximization.
Beyond maximizing income, another way to make money is cutting costs. This is something these companies know all too well. Over the course of modern history, many famed economists like Milton Friedman have spoken highly of capitalism’s ability to decrease the cost of goods and services. The best-case scenarios of this involve companies innovating in some way or another, which allows the public to buy a cheaper product. One example is Ikea: by choosing to ship furniture un-assembled, Ikea decreased the cost and made things more affordable. The reason this capitalist competition works is that there are a great number of companies competing in any given field. The same cannot be said of the private prison industry and there are two reasons for this. The first is that more than 50% of the marketplace is controlled by three corporations. This alone eliminates any possibility of free-market competition. The U.S. government (the customer) must essentially choose between either GEO Group or CoreCivic for most of its needs. Both will demand high prices and as long as they remain the only options, neither is preferable. The second issue relies on the same capitalist principles. To provide a better service, the company must cut costs. In the case of private prisons, the cost-cutting directly affects the prisoners. The financial principles may remain the same but the moral equivalency between an Ikea desk and a CoreCivic detainee should be weighed differently. Unfortunately, they are not and the results are devastating.
In the early years of private U.S. prison labor, it is estimated that “throughout the South, annual convict death rates ranged from 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags”. As I have stated, this industry was born from the abolition of slavery and in some important ways, it was worse. Where slave owners of the antebellum South maintained some financial incentive to preserve their ‘property,’ the executives who manage private prisons do not, at least as long as there is a steady supply of prisoners. People like Terrell Don Hutto hold no personal stake or interest in the wellbeing of government detainees and prisoners. There are no restraints to stop them from systematically understaffing the facilities and under-reporting their issues. One example is medical emergencies. Due to certain economic incentives individuals residing in private prisons receive significantly worse health care. The reason is that the corporations are responsible for footing the medical bill themselves. Why pay for a necessary procedure or medicine when you can pretend like it was never needed to begin with? Another example is the lack of personnel and training. It was discovered that over the span of a few months in one of its Louisiana prisons, CoreCivic found “some 200 weapons, 23 times more than the state’s maximum security prison”. These cost-cutting tactics dramatically increase the amount of violence and suffering in these facilities. Prisoners and detainees in these circumstances are already facing the repercussions of their actions, they should not be damned to an environment of sickness and death.
Following private prisons came massively consequential business of for-profit deportation. Unsurprisingly, the same corporations which evolved to make profit on American prisoners, have taken the next step and evolved to make profit on America’s prisoners. It is widely accepted that between the years of 1892 and 1997 the U.S. government deported around 2.1 million people. The number of deportations during this period of more than 100 years was exceeded during the sixteen years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama alone. These deportation numbers have remained high despite the fact that, “illegal crossings from Mexico have fallen to near their lowest levels since the early 1970s”. With that said, one thing is for certain, U.S. government policy, as well as funding over the past two decades, have dramatically increased the number of deportations and detainees each year.
The source of this policy shift can be identified in legislation like “The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986”. It was passed by congress under the Raegan administration. In essence, it advocated for the deportation of immigrants based on a variety of crimes and sought to wrestle control away from the discernment of judges. While that may have set everything into motion, a number of other important legislative actions have further muddied the situation. One such example is the “detention bed quota”, which was mandated by Congress in 2009. Essentially, as a stipulation for Department of Homeland Security funding, the agents over at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as “ICE”, must maintain at least 34,000 detention beds daily. Appallingly, this number of 34,000 detainees was not decided by law enforcement experts but rather by members of Congress. This brings us to the root cause of the expansion of border security. There is a lot of money to be made in this field and companies are willing to lobby politicians to secure the lucrative government contracts attached.
Always the opportunists, companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group have solidified their role in influencing the growing business of deportation. Specifically, they developed intimate lobbying relationships with the government officials who perpetuate their business. However, since most government contracts are public record it leads to discoveries like this one, “In FY 2017, GEO Group received $184 million, followed by CoreCivic that received $135 million for immigration detention related service obligations”. This may seem like a hefty price tag with well over $300 million dollars of taxpayer money being spent on “immigrant detention related service obligations”. In reality, these government-mandated “obligations” include detaining a minimum of 34,000 prisoners each night, a number they generally exceed. With this in mind, it is shocking that Congress agrees to spend so much money on a field that existed in a much smaller capacity a mere three decades ago. The reason is that politicians have found a convenient ally in the private prison industry. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump ran on an anti-immigrant, populist message. Under the law, government contractors are prohibited from contributing to federal elections. However, this did not stop a GEO Group subsidiary from donating $225,000 to Trump’s primary super PAC. Following Trump’s win, GEO stock skyrocketed and they were awarded contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars. This occurrence should not be taken lightly. The donations did not come from executives at GEO Group, although they most certainly contributed vast sums to Trump’s campaign, they came from the company itself. These donations were viewed as a business expense in the same way a traditional REIT might pay for a leasing expert to fill their apartments. The difference is that in this case GEO was paying Trump to fill their prisons.
Private prison corporations, which control a multibillion-dollar industry, are inextricably linked to the politicians that provide the funding. This relationship means that despite the obvious downsides of privatized detention, congress will continue not only to authorize the harm of immigrants but encourage it. Regardless of one’s opinion on immigration, private prison corporations offer serious disadvantages relative to government-run detention centers. As a public policy issue, government money should be focused on maximising public good not private profits. Due to their cost-cutting practices, private prisons are dangerous and irresponsible. Beyond this, they cede the moral high ground by profiting on human life and using illegal donations to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. This country was founded by immigrants on the principle of protecting themselves against the dangers of government. It is for this exact reason, the president has the ability to pardon but lacks the authority to execute. Yet many presidents, including our most recent, are complicit in letting immigrants die under suboptimal conditions. The evidence is overwhelming; ending the use of for-profit detention centers should be an unequivocally bipartisan issue.
Written By: Caden Cutter, a History Major in his Junior year at LMU.
For Further Reading:
Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. “Shadow Prisons: Inside Private Immigrant Detention Centers.” In Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration, 137-68. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018
Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana, and Jens Manuel Krogstad. “U.S. Deportations of Immigrants Reach Record High in 2013.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, May 30, 2020.
Villalobos, José D. “Promises and Human Rights: The Obama Administration on Immigrant Detention Policy Reform.” Race, Gender & Class 18, no. 1/2 (2011): 151-70.
