Trump Is Going To Make Private Prison Companies Rich And They Couldn’t Be Happier
Trump's first presidency brought a lot of latent human ugliness to the surface. It stayed there during the four years he sat, sulked, broke laws, lost lawsuits, and continued to stoke the fires of hate. Now, he's leveraging the hatred his last term in office turned into part of everyday politics to inflict further misery on anyone and anything he personally doesn't care for.
Trump has always been anti-immigration. He's preyed on irrational fear and even more irrational bigotry to portray thousands of immigrants seeking nothing more than a better life as an invading horde mostly comprised of hardened criminals.
The private companies running dozens of prisons and detainment centers around the country couldn't be more thrilled. With Trump back in office, there's an immediate need for more detention facilities and prison complexes, what with Trump promising to engage in mass purges of anyone who may be here illegally, as well as anyone who simply looks like they aren't a natural born citizen.
Earnings calls by private prison companies have been especially awful since Trump's non-consecutive ascendance to the Oval Office. Last November - one week after the election - CEOs of CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, couldn't help gloating about this turn of fortunes despite knowing pretty much anyone had access to these public earnings calls.
Journalists from the Huffington Post detailed some of the most egregious bits of triumph over because of human suffering expressed by these companies. GEO Group founder George Zoley had this to say:
Elsewhere in the call, he referred to a potential sea change" in interior and border enforcement an unprecedented opportunity" to assist with what he described as the much more aggressive" policy framework from the incoming Trump administration. Speaking generally, he said, We're looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services."
CoreCivic said it's own future was so bright it might be possible that OSHA would institute the wearing of tinted lenses at the company's facilities.
It feels like with this election this year, we're heading into an era that we really haven't seen, maybe only once or twice in the company's history, where the value proposition of the private sector for both our state partners and our federal partners are going to be not only strong today, but even stronger as we go in the next couple of years," Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, said on that company's ownearnings call.
The gloating continues. As Matt Sledge reports for The Intercept, the passage of the exuberantly harmful Laken Riley Act means Trump's combined anti-immigration forces (which now include members of the FBI, DEA, and ATF, on top of all the usual DHS components) no longer need to pretend they're only trying to remove the worst of the worst" from the country. The new law allows arrest, detention, and ejection of immigrants for non-violent misdemeanors like shoplifting.
If CoreCivic sounded happy in its last earning call, it now sounds positively gleeful that it will make millions more per year for the foreseeable future, thanks to this administration's antipathy towards anyone who isn't as white as the people stocking the president's cabinet.
CoreCivic is so excited by its daily calls with the Trump administration that it is spending at least $40 million to renovate facilities even before inking new contracts, CEO Damon Hininger said on the call for investors.
I have worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company," Hininger said, adding that he expects perhaps the most significant growth in our company's history over the next several years."
According to the call, the company has been in daily contact" with the Trump Administration and has promised to expand capacity to hold another 28,000 people almost immediately. How it plans to do that has yet to be explained, which likely means just cramming as many of those 28,000 into existing, over-crowded, under-supervised facilities while it bangs together temporary" detention facilities that will just become permanent even if they're not up to the (extremely questionable) standards of permanent detainee housing.
The only thing keeping this glee from being completely unrestrained is Trump's push for shipping even non-violent immigration-sweep detainees to Guantanamo, a facility best known for indefinite imprisonment, torture, and the massive amount of rights violations committed by those staffing the facility.
There's no reason this so-called immigration crisis" needs to be handled this way. Immigration was already declining before Trump took office and suddenly accelerating deportations without facilities and logistics in place just means inflicting maximum pain to score political points with a voting bloc most politicians - until very recently - wouldn't have bothered to cater to. That these companies are happy they'll get to profit from this misery doesn't make them better or worse than other companies that do the same thing. But you'd think company leaders might want to wipe a little bit of their saliva from their mouths before making public statements to shareholders.