Trump's mass deportation agenda means a huge payday for private prison profiteers

[babylonsister]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/25/1767106/-Trump-s-mass-deportation-agenda-means-a-huge-payday-for-private-prison-profiteers

Trump's mass deportation agenda means a huge payday for private prison profiteers
Gabe Ortiz
Daily Kos Staff
Friday May 25, 2018 · 3:46 PM EDT


Nearly 75 percent of the 300,000 immigrants who are arrested and thrown into detention by federal immigration authorities every year are held in privately run prisons. There is money for private-prison profiteers in the incarceration of black and brown bodies, and under the mass deportation policies of the Trump administration, they will make even more:

In the week following the 2016 election, stock prices for the country’s two biggest prison companies rose by around a third, largely on the promise that the new administration would reverse the Obama administration’s move away from doing business with prison companies.

During the 2016 election, a subsidiary of GEO Group, one of these profiteers, gave “$225,000 to a pro-Trump super-PAC.” GEO Group and a second group, CoreCivic, also donated “$250,000 to President Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.” It’s probably pure coincidence, but which private prison companies also hold over half of every 100 detained immigrants, according to Mother Jones? You guessed right.

It’s a fact that alternatives to detention are not just far more humane, they’re also far cheaper, totaling about $4 a day. “A spectrum of alternatives to detention has long existed as the option the government should use in place of mass detention,” said the American Immigration Lawyers Association:

Many apprehended immigrants and asylum seekers already have strong community ties. Asylum seekers and those with credible legal claims and family and community in the United States have strong incentives to appear in immigration court and comply with requirements. Consequently, for many, release on recognizance or a minimal bond is appropriate because they pose little flight risk or risk to the community.

Meanwhile, the maximum cost of holding a detainee in for-profit facility can go up to $148 a day. Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “told Congress that it expects to hold a record 51,379 detainees in 2018, at a total price tag of $2.7 billion.” But it’s not that private prisons aren’t just hugely expensive, they’re deadly. Last year, three immigrants died within the span of three months at California’s Adelanto Detention Facility, a prison run by GEO.

We need less detention facilities, not new ones (two lawmakers, Congressmember Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), have introduced legislation doing just that), but under a mass deportation president and his complicit Republican Congress, GEO and CoreCivic continue to flourish, with Mother Jones reporting “they’re “already planning to expand, with proposals for new private detention centers from Minnesota to Texas.”

[dhol82]

1. I believe that Sessions and DeVos both have their fingers in the private prison filth

There are probably many in congress who are also heavily invested.

[stuffmatters]

2. A major argument that mainstreamed legalizing pot was the enormous,needless costs to taxpayers

That coupled with the wanton cruelty argument really changed the tide on pot IMHO. The costs to taxpayers of this inhumane incarceration/deportation machine should be a bigger campaign issue for Dems ...esp in blue states.

[Uncle Joe]

3. For profit prisons are the 21st century version of slavery,

there is no economical, logical, moral or functional reason for their existence.

They're nothing but a corrosive, growing malignancy against honest government and a fair justice system



Thanks for the thread babylonsister