Stocks for private prison companies have surged in the two weeks since President Trump signed an executive order calling for expansion of immigrant detention facilities at or near the border with Mexico, specifically authorizing the use of private contractors to construct, operate, or control facilities in what is expected to be a substantial ramp-up of the massive detention system that thrived under the Obama administration.
...
With the number of immigrant detainees already at historic levels, critics warn that rapidly expanding prisons will only exacerbate squalid living conditions and substandard medical care. The big beneficiaries, they say, will be stockholders and executives of for-profit prison companies.
...
The idea for an immigrant detention center was born 15 years ago, when a large construction company approached local officials with a pitch to revitalize their economy: borrow $65 million from the public debt markets to build prisons.
In 2006, as President George W. Bush pushed to crack down on illegal immigration, the county hired a Texas construction company to build the detention center on a cotton field on the outskirts of town. It then contracted with a Utah-based company, Management & Training Corp., to run the complex.
This has become a common arrangement. As ICE detention has exploded in recent years reaching more than 41,000 beds last November about 65% of ICE detainees are now held in facilities operated by private, for-profit contractors.
...
In December, Willacy County sued Management & Training Corp., claiming its abysmal management cost the county tens of millions of dollars in damages. In its lawsuit, the county claims MTC was only interested in the money and turned a blind eye to the enormous problems that plagued the prison.
It was a message that critics of private prisons and detention centers had pushed for years, and it came after activists had managed to win a string of victories across the country: Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who previously had accepted donations from private prison lobbyists, had pledged to end for-profit prisons and detention centers; the Department of Justice had announced it would begin phasing out the Board of Prisons use of for-profit prisons; stock prices plunged for prison contractors.
Trump, though, had spoken highly of for-profit prisons. And in December, a Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council subcommittee recommended continuing to use of private detention facilities for immigrant detainees because theyre cheaper and allow officials to adapt to sudden surges in immigrant detention.
_/¯
