In U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, the prison system is not just a tool for justice but the centerpiece of his populist strategy, as he promises Americans safer lives under his watchful leadership.
Behind it all, private prison companies are ready to cash in.
Companies like the GEO Group and CoreCivic are big Trump backers. They donated over a million dollars to his campaign in 2024. That’s because they know a second Trump term could mean big business.
Highlights
- Private prison companies, like GEO Group and CoreCivic, stand to profit massively from Trump's policies.
- In 2023, 43% of GEO Group's revenue came from ICE, and is expected to grow significantly under Trump's second term.
- Shuttered prisons like FCI Dublin and California City Correctional Facility may reopen despite past abuses to house more detainees.
- The private prison model profits from incarceration has roots in post-Civil War penal labor exploiting black prisoners.
- Tough-on-crime policies since the 1980s 'war on drugs' fueled mass incarceration, boosting private prisons' profits.
These companies run many of the U.S. immigration detention centers. With Trump promising mass deportations and more border crackdowns, they see a chance to make hundreds of millions in profit.
Donald Trump’s policies could mean big business for America’s private prison system
Image credits: The White House/ Flickr
In 2023, 43% of the Geo Group’s revenue came from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With Trump’s hardline anti-immigrant policies, this number will only grow higher.
So much so that GEO Group bosses estimated that they expected to make up to $400 million a year if Trump won the election.
Private prisons are not just preparing for more detentions; they’re planning to offer full services like GPS tracking for millions of migrants, prisoner transport, and expanding their facilities.
GEO and CoreCivic are already reaching out to towns across the country, trying to reopen jails that were shut down due to bad conditions or prisoner abuse.
Some of these include:
- FCI Dublin, a federal women’s prison that was closed after staff were accused of sexual assault.
- California City Correctional Facility, a CoreCivic-run prison that could hold over 2,000 detainees.
- North Lake Correctional Facility in Michigan, owned by GEO, which could become the Midwest’s biggest migrant jail.
Image credits: John Moore/Getty Images
Many of these facilities were shut down because they were dangerous, inhumane, or corrupt. But under Trump, they’re being brought back without any promise for improvement.
But this incarceration-for-profit model isn’t new. It has deep roots.
Before founding CoreCivic’s predecessor, Corrections Corporation of America, Terrell Don Hutto ran a massive prison plantation, the size of Manhattan, in Texas in 1967.
This was built on the back of a clause in the 13th Amendment’s “exception clause” that abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime.”
Image credits: John Moore/Getty Images
States seized the opportunity to rebuild their wealth after the Civil War by arresting thousands of Black men, often on fabricated charges, and leasing them out as forced labor.
“As long as black men were convicted of crimes, Texas could lease all of its prisoners to private cotton and sugar plantations and companies running lumber camps and coal mines, and building railroads,” Shane Bauer wrote in his book ‘American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment.’
States eventually cut out the middleman, buying up plantations themselves and continuing to run penal labor farms well into the 20th century.
This legacy laid the groundwork for Hutto’s next move: launching a private prison company that would profit off of incarceration and sell shares on the stock market.
The prison industry boomed during the ‘war on drugs’ in the 1980s
Image credits: SPL Center
The industry boomed during the ‘war on drugs’ in the 1980s. The police cracked down on drugs, and longer sentences for minor offenses quickly overwhelmed public prisons.
This is when private firms stepped in, offering “solutions” and billing the government per inmate, per day. The result: a system that profits from more people being behind bars.
From 1970 to 2000:
- Black incarceration rates tripled.
- Latino incarceration rates nearly tripled.
- White incarceration rates more than doubled.
These trends weren’t accidental. Political leaders from Nixon to Clinton used tough-on-crime laws and drug crackdowns to appeal to voters and boost incarceration rates. The rise in U.S. incarceration, and the growth of both public and private prisons, was a direct result of the war on drugs.
At one point, even the CIA was accused of flooding Black and Latino communities with crack cocaine to fund foreign conflicts. This was exposed by the San Jose Mercury News’ ‘Dark Alliance’ series.
In a series of three investigative articles, journalist Gary Webb uncovered a secret government-backed scheme to immerse Black and Latino communities in drug abuse in the 1980s and early 1990s.
This profited CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras by funding them with millions of dollars, and it also created a surge of prisoners.
Private prisons profited immensely from the higher incarceration rate—and their model has remained consistent ever since: the more people locked up, the better the returns.
Today, the prison system in the U.S. holds 2 million people—making the U.S. the country with the most prisoners in the world.
Under Trump, private prisons are smacking their lips at the thought of more migrant arrests, which would mean more people sent to ICE detention centers, many of which are owned by The GEO Group and CoreCivic.
Adding to this is the fact that cities in Texas and California are bringing back anti-homeless laws. In Vermont, retail theft penalties are becoming harsher. These policies will lead to more arrests—and a bigger demand for prison beds.
Image credits: Bob Jagendorf/Wikimedia