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I recently discovered a Reuters report featuring CCA (Corrections Corp of America)–the biggest privatized immigrant detention facility in the United States–almost gloating about the fact that these coming elections won’t make a difference to their company since there will always be a population that would need “service.” I wonder why the major newspapers and newswires in the United States missed this story–the UK Reuters link has been taken down since then but it is here for the timebeing. “If there is any meaningful immigration (policy) change, I think there is going to be a population that is still going to have to be serviced.”
Why is the CCA so self-assured of continued business? In the late 1990s, CCA overbuilt many detention facilities following the “if you build it, they will come” rule. According to Anton Hie, an analyst in the Nashville office of Jefferies and Co. who covered industry leader Corrections Corporation of America and its closest competitor, the GEO Group, “There was a lot of promise of new inmates that never came … It kind of all came crashing in.” States stopped contracting after high-profile escapes, riots and other scandals and subsequently, stocks came crashing down. In 2000, the CCA had reported a net loss of $253.5 million but that is history with a 470% boom in immigrant detention over the past 15 years. CCA finally banged a lucrative deal that year–the former INS came to their rescue to house 1000 detainees at the CCA-owned San Diego Mesa Facility, and hence, saved the private detention industry from collapse, giving rise what Roberto Lovato and other prominent scholars call the migrant-prison complex. With 32,000 immigrants behind bars, some indefinitely await hearings, some commit suicide, some are dehumanized and abused, and others sedated with psychotropic drugs upon deportation, the numbers are only growing for ICE, CCA and sadly, the numbers behind bars. Today, the ICE, U.S. Marshals and Bureau of Prisons account for 40% of CCA’s revenue (13% from ICE at $1.5 billion)–which controls a little under half the private prison beds in America. Last year, the CCA reported a net profit of $133 million.
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