Trump Admin Scraps Plan To Abandon For-Profit Prisons — Stocks Hit Record High

February 24, 2017

By Jack Burns
The Trump Administration’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a one paragraph memo to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Thursday, reversed an Obama administration directive to phase out and ultimately end private prison corporations’ partnership with the federal government. The Federal Bureau of Prisons contracts with the private prisons to house inmates largely convicted of immigration violations. “The 14 private prisons currently contracted by the federal government almost exclusively incarcerate low-risk inmates who were convicted of immigration offenses. The prisons house around 22,000 people at an annual cost of $600m,” writes The Guardian.
The move by Sessions came less than a year after the Justice Department concluded, as a result of an extensive investigation, the private prisons were unsafe, understaffed, overpopulated, and often placed prisoners in punitive solitary confinement, simply because the prison was overpopulated.
Their use is not without controversy and justifiable objections. The Orlando Sentinel explains the conflict of interests inherent in using private companies to punish prisoners convicted in the public’s judicial system. “Many public agencies use for-profit vendors, and rightly so,” meaning it’s one thing to use a wholesale food supplier to supply the prison’s cafeteria, “But incarcerating and rehabilitating a human being is not the same as delivering office paper,” writes the Sentinel. “In the case of criminal justice, the profit motive creates incentives,” to jail more prisoners by lobbying legislators to pass tougher penalties for laws, thereby bringing in more prisoners and keeping them in prison for longer jail sentences.

Those “values,” writes the Sentinel, “conflict with the public interest” and lead to the industry known as the Prison Industrial Complex, an industry which exists only if it has inmates to house. “The States should follow the lead of the Department of Justice and phase out private prisons,” concludes Orlando’s most influential newspaper.

In August, the Obama administration notified the private prisons their services would no longer be needed going forward. As a result, the nation’s largest prison corporations suffered financial losses when their stocks sank and were devalued, with one company losing over fifty percent of its share value. All that changed after Trump was elected, writes Forbes.
The term Private Prison is a farce from the get-go.
A truly Private prison would not be solely funded by taxpayer dollars. These Private prisons are nothing more than a fascist mixture of state and corporate, completely dependent upon the extortion factor of the state, i.e., taxation, as a means of their corporate sustenance.
A truly Private prison would have a negative incentive to boost its population for the simple fact that it is particularly expensive to house inmates. On the contrary, these fascist, or more aptly, corporatist prisons contractually require people to break the law!


It’s unclear, given the fact all the private prisons affected incarcerate illegal immigrants if the policy change is any indicator the Trump administration is preparing for mass deportations as some critics charge. Trump promised, during his campaign for presidency, to deport illegals, even those with family ties in the states, and force them to apply for readmission to the country.
But speculation already exists and is taking place in the stock market already as a result of Trump’s election as president. According to CBS News, “Mr. Trump’s directive to crack down on illegal immigration has led analysts to predict big profits in 2017 for major private prisons companies such as CoreCivic and Geo, due to increased demand for facilities. In fact, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey analyst Tobey Sommer picked CoreCivic among one of his best investment picks for the year.”
Jack Burns writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.