For-Profit Prisons: They Are Who We Thought They Were
Last November, I wrote about how for-profit prisons stood to gain a substantial financial benefit from the Trump administration as it intensified mass deportations. The stock chart below shows the recent price history for GEO Group (GEO: NASDAQ), a global private prison contractor. The arrow indicates the surge in the company’s stock value on the day Trump appointed Tom Homan as his border czar—apparently with good reason.
In February, GEO Group signed a 15-year contract with ICE to open the administration's first detention facility at Newark's Delaney Hall. The agreement is worth nearly $1 billion. The facility, which GEO already owns, has 1,000 beds and is the largest federal immigration detention center on the eastern seaboard. If Delaney Hall rings a bell, it should.
That’s because last month, Newark’s Democratic mayor, Ras Baraka, who is also a candidate for governor, was arrested at Delaney for trespassing. The charges were dropped a few days later, resulting in a reprimand of federal prosecutors by the judge for bringing the charges in the first place. Yesterday, Mayor Baraka filed suit against Alina Habba, Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, for defamation and malicious prosecution related to his arrest at Delaney.
It is also worth noting that in my November post, I predicted that, rather than immediately deporting migrants, prisons could use them as forced labor, or farm them out for low or no wages. Based on a Colorado case going before the Supreme Court, that may be exactly what’s happening:
The Supreme Court agreed Monday [June 2] to hear an appeal from a private prison company facing a lawsuit claiming immigration detainees were forced to work and paid $1 a day in Colorado. The GEO Group appealed to the high court after a judge refused to toss out the 2014 lawsuit saying the detainees had to perform both unpaid janitorial work and other jobs for little pay to supplement meager meals.
The company says the lawsuits are really a back door way to push back against federal immigration policy, and its pay rates are in line with Immigration and Customs Enforcement regulations. They say the migrants can’t sue because it’s running Aurora, Colorado, facility on behalf of the government, which is immune from such lawsuits.
Attorneys for the migrants say the lawsuit is only about people being paid “almost nothing” for their work, and the contract didn’t require them to pay so little.
The Colorado case isn't the only instance in which GEO Group has been accused of forcing migrant detainees to work for very little pay. In 2021, the company faced a similar lawsuit and was ultimately ordered to pay over $23 million.
Unfortunately, inmates are the only people who aren't entitled to fair wages for their work. From Wikipedia: "Penal labor is permitted under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery except as a punishment for a crime where the individual has been convicted." The fact that for-profit prisons are using barely paid inmate labor shows how greedy their owners and shareholders are.
Great work Sir! Really good read.💪🏾👍🏾