Private Prison Industry Drools Over Latino Bodies
Correcional corporations see profits in Trump’s mass deportations
This story was first published in November 2024 and explains what is going on now. This is the Prison Industry Complex 2.0.
Donald Trump hasn’t begun his second term and some of his cronies are already salivating at the profits about to flow their way. A few days after Trump was named winner of the 2024 presidential election, the private prison industry rejoiced.
“One HUGE winner from Trump’s win: Private prison companies GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc.,” said Bloomberg News’ Steven Dennis. “Their stocks, which could benefit from Trump’s plans for rounding up millions of immigrants, rocketed higher today 41% and 29% respectively.”
With Trump promising to stage mass deportations, this would mean increased profits for correctional corporations. White nationalist Stephen Miller, who’s currently been named deputy White House chief of staff, is a rabid xenophobe. He hates the idea of any non-European immigrant. He’s made deporting predominantly Latino immigrants a major goal in Trump’s second term.
He will be aided by former Immigrations and Customs Enforcement chief Tom Homan. He bragged about his plans to deport American citizens along with their undocumented parents.
Mass Deportations Are Expensive
Trump has promised to rid the country of undocumented immigrants. But this is expected to be an extremely costly endeavor. A recent “60 Minutes” episode estimated the cost at $88 billion per year. But there’s another problem. The federal government doesn’t have enough correctional facilities to hold all these people. And that’s where the private prison companies come in.
“I mean, there are several requests for, proposals, information for new detention centers around the country, seven, eight detention centers. And what we know is that one of the ways that deportation is facilitated is by having detention capacity. This is one of the reasons we argue for shutting down detention centers,” said Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, on “Democracy Now!”
The Trumpists will use a familiar right-wing trick to solve this governmental problem; they’re going to privatize it. This is seen as a conservative silver bullet. The government does a lousy job, so let’s give it to the corporate sector. But this usually doesn’t work because corporations are first and foremost charged with making money for investors, not providing a service.
The only way a corporation can make money in the service industry is by cutting overhead and scrimping on the service. So, privatizing government services rarely works. This is seen in the education sector, where charter schools don’t necessarily get better outcomes than public schools.
Profiting Off Pain
Private prisons are problematic for several reasons. One could argue that it’s a morally questionable industry because it makes money off people’s pain and misery. Unfortunately, prisons are a fact of life. We need facilities to punish criminals and segregate them from civil society. But that doesn’t mean that we have to make money off them.
And the services provided by private prisons are far from stellar. They comes with all kinds of problems and potential corruption. For example, if a private prison makes money from keeping a person locked up, they are incentivized to keep them behind bars. And being a private corporation, they are also motivated to make a profit by cutting back on salaries.
Private prisons have the unique situation of being loathed by both inmates and correctional officers. The inmates complain about the lack of services such as phone calls, rehab facilities and education. And correctional officers complain about having to do more with less. Corporations cut staff and expect them to look after even more prisoners as those profits go back to the shareholders.
Cut Costs, Increase Risks
A 2016 Department of Justice study found private prisons had much higher rates of inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff assaults than public prisons.
Why do I know so much about this? The Black community has already been through this before. During the War on Drugs, which began in the ’70s and dragged on through the ’80s and ’90s, we saw the rise of private prisons. This was a new arm of the Prison Industrial complex and even more insidious.
Many Black men who’ve been through private prisons said they felt like slaves because corporations were making money off their bodies. Black men’s bodies were raw materials for the private prison industry. And now they’re looking at a new market; Latino bodies.