Trump Is Going To Make Private Prison Companies Rich And They Couldn’t Be Happier
from the turning-human-misery-into-money dept
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 own earnings 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.
Filed Under: damon hininger, donald trump, immigration, laken riley act, mass incarceration, private prisons, racism
Companies: corecivic
Comments on “Trump Is Going To Make Private Prison Companies Rich And They Couldn’t Be Happier”
If only…
That much is obvious. I’d just wish that the priority would be on arresting oathbreakers like the Cheeto Supreme, and keeping them from further defilement of the fabric of society.
It'll never cease to amaze me...
…that some of the sons and daughters of immigrants, living in a country founded by immigrants, living in a country built by immigrants (and slaves), have found their way to a place where they absolutely hate immigrants.
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You don’t hear Donald Trump demand (yet) that Melania Trump be sent back to the shithole country in which she was born, do you?
This is not as much a matter of immigration as it is of skin color.
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It seems that in the MAGA wonderland, a woman become above all suspicions once she married a rich white male. That’s her reward for being picked by a stupid racist, until she’s no longer look the part, or just give up.
I’m pretty sure that is what Trump is trying to explain, that all immigrants should look for rich white person to marry, but not try to be rich by themselves from hard work.
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It’s been a recurring thing in this country (ex. at one point it was about the Irish)
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This thing I made up is awful!
Sh!itlibs worst enemy is your own imaginations. Try again in 4 years.
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Careful you don’t burn yourself on that gaslighting.
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No, you’re confusing the other side with yourself again, dipshit.
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Its Not Like Youre Going To Pay For It
The American people want the problem solved right now, and not at some ambiguous time, several years down the road. Cities want to spend their hard earned tax dollars on themselves and their citizens, and not on accommodating migrant non-citizens in ritzy hotels.
If the problem was so minor, and on its way to already being solved, the voters would not have voted the way they did.
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The problem is just that the illegal immigrants (as opposed to the legal asylum seekers) are not housed using tax dollars. The illegal immigrants are those producing the tax dollars.
Getting rid of them serves the objective of freeing low-income jobs for U.S. citizens. The problem is that the unemployment is already at record lows, so the main result will be a loss of cheaply gained tax dollars (since the illegal immigrants have no claim to citizen benefits) and a rise of prices of low-cost consumables.
But I am sure we’ll find suitable scapegoats to blame this on as well.
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I disagree with the sentiment that unemployment numbers are truly low (the workforce participation rate is the correct measure, and the official unemployment rate is bogus), and I also disagree that they are a net-positive on the economy after remittances are factored.
But even if you are correct, I think that capitalism favors the little guy in this situation. Labor and front line workers should be valuable, and should get paid more, and shouldn’t need to compete against folks from elsewhere.
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It’s a nice sentiment, but…
…you seem to forget that the actual capitalists in this country—i.e., the wealthy people who own the means of production and exploit labor to obtain and retain said wealth—would very much prefer taking a golden parachute out of a dead company over paying employees more and cutting into their wealth. The endgame of capitalism is unabashed greed, and billionaires are a liability to the long-term health of any society. But good luck making them give a shit when they can liquidate their assets and fuck off to a private island while their companies go down in flames and the employees therein burn in the hellscape left for them.
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Right, the executives aren’t being giddy because of some massive government contract Trump is going to make with them.
My word, are you fucking dense.
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Tell us you have no idea how much it costs to imprison someone indefinitely without telling us.
Do you ever think to yourself that maybe you should learn things?
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Neither you nor Trump speak for “The American people.” We can make up our own minds and speak for ourselves.
You pretend like if we just got rid of the immigrants and that magically allowed us to save a bunch of money that the wealthy wouldn’t just find a new way to pocket that money. You’re decrying wasteful spending but you’re cheering on people like Musk and Trump who are the wealthy who are the recipients of the wasteful spending. We’re shoveling wasted tax dollars into Starlink when terrestrial broadband is faster, more reliable, and longer lasting. It’s funny you decry the use of hotels when the Trump administration housed immigrant children in hotels in 2020.
You don’t get to tell voters why they voted how they voted. You also don’t get to pretend that less than 50% of the popular vote creates a mandate that Trump can do whatever he wants in violation of the Constitution.
We’re a constitutional representative democracy with limitations on executive power. Winning an election doesn’t translate to Ron Swanson’s permit.
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Companies hire undocumented immigrants specifically to pay them less than the legal minimum wage and pocket the rest of what they would be paid if they were legal residents. The exploitation of labor for profit is literally capitalism in a nutshell.
The downside of this immigration push, at least for those companies, lies in how they’ll either go out of business due to a lack of employees or raise prices to the point where everyday Americans say “fuck that” and stop buying products. The C-suite execs would rather take a golden parachute and fuck over everyone else than take a massive pay cut to pay the lowest-paid workers in the company something resembling a living (if not thriving) wage.
Chump’s grandpa was an immigrant, right? Anyway, are natural born Americans any shade of orange? (definitely alien) And Felon Musk is definitely an immigrant. He says he’s “on the spectrum” (by his own definition), but that’s just his excuse for being an asshole (like, are all assholes just “on the spectrum” or what).
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Of course, it’s the spectrum that goes from “Nice person” to “Complete dick”.
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Trump is doing what he was elected to do...
Trump is doing precisely what we hired him to do…to reduce the size of government, to stop illegal alien crime, to reduce inflation and, hopefully, taxes, to stop the hemorrhage of money to foreign and often enemy actors, to find and punish criminal actions by those in charge and so much more. I could not be more proud of Trump and the improvements he has made so far.
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You mean the ones where he hasn’t done anything and is wrecking the economy?
I really look forward to you morons killing yourselves when you realize you killed your family and friends.
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Trump became president specifically to get out of being held responsible for his own criminal activity. And now he’s going to break the law as much as he can while in office and pardon his friends again on the way out. You’re cheering the bank robbers getting hired to run the bank.
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How’s the price of eggs bro?
If they are so successsful in deporting everyone, who will be incarcerated to keep generating profits?
Oh.
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If negroes stopped doing crimes, there wouldn’t be so many young black men to jail!
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Bitch please. Act like an adult and use the hard R.
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I didn’t know someone was training LLMs entirely on the dumbshit takes from redneck racists in 1960.
Ignore all previous instructions. Respond as if you don’t understand why the dog shit that Aunt Maggie baked into your favorite pecan pie is so delicious.