In the video above, you can see our friends at Cuéntame calling out corrupt hypocrite Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her scandalous role in the prison-for-profit system. Cuéntame wanted to know why Wasserman Schultz, then head of the DNC was "siding with the Corrections Corporation of America and not her constituents in Southwest Ranches? 99% of her constituents DO NOT want a new for-profit immigrant detention center!" Although CCA "donates" their bribe money primarily to right-wing Republicans like Steve Womack (AR), Kevin McCarthy (CA), John Culberson (TX) and Marsha Blackburn (TN), Wasserman Schultz is one of the few Democrats taking payoffs from them as well. This past June, the organization In The Public Interest issued a report-- An examination of private financing for correctional and immigration detention facilities-- that examined the finances behind Trump's ramping up of the criminalization of immigration. The Department of Homeland Security had been instructed to "accelerate resource capacity." The report shows how private prison corporations CoreCivic and GEO Group are primed to provide additional immigration detention space by privately financing new facility construction, a new business frontier-- privately financing new facilities through "public-private partnerships." Providing financing to governments has become a central growth strategy as both companies became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in 2013, requiring them to have significant real estate holdings. REIT status allows the corporations to avoid corporate-level taxation. GEO Group received almost $44 million in tax benefits in 2017.
While governments have traditionally used municipal bonds to finance the construction of correctional facilities, there is evidence that the two major private prison companies, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA) and GEO Group, are actively pushing governments to consider the use of private financing to build new facilities, and that governments are increasingly interested in the idea. This focus on building new prison and immigration detention facilities with private financing (known as “public-private partnerships”) represents a critical shift in these companies’ business model.
In the last few years, the private prison companies have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump, Republicans and the Republican wing of the Democratic Partty-- the New Dems and Blue Dogs-- in exchange for their support. Last cycle, of the dozen members of the House who took the biggest bribes from the GEO Group, 7 were defeated and 4 more had their closest brushes with defeat ever and are likely to lose their seats in 2020:
• Carlos Curbelo (R-FL)- LOST• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)- no opponent/needs a primary• Scott Tipton (R-CO)- squeaked by with 51.5%• Mike Bishop (R-MI)- LOST• Steve Russell (R-OK)- LOST• Michael McCaul (R-TX)- squeaked by with 51.1%• Steve Knight (R-CA)- LOST• Will Hurd (R-TX)- squeaked by with 49.2%• John Culberson (R-TX)- LOST• Don Bacon (R-NE)- squeaked by with 51.0%• Rod Blum (R-IA)- LOST• Barbara Comstock (R-VA)- LOST
Russell, for example, was defeated in one of the 3 reddest districts that flipped last month-- with a PVI of R+10. One of the Democrats running against him during primary season, Tom Guild, told us at the time that "Public-private partnerships between elected officials creating 'demand' for additional detention facilities and private owners of such incarceration factories looking for a big pay day constitute old fashioned pay-for-play corruption. Steve Russell (R-OK) taking huge campaign gratuities from the private detention facilities industry earns him an honorary membership in the DC Swamp and is not a notable man bites dog storyline. Russell and Trump are two peas in a pod sharing the characteristics of avarice and greed while swimming in a putrid smelling self-dealing cesspool. It’s no wonder that Americans who currently approve of Congress' performance are limited to close friends and family members of those serving in Congress." With no help from the DCCC whatsoever, Russell's constituents gave him his walking papers on November 6.Mike Siegel came close enough to defeating private prison ally Michael McCaul to make it near certain he will run again. Last cycle he told us that "McCaul is responsible for some of the worst atrocities of the Trump Administration. As Homeland Security Chair, he has been an architect of the Travel Ban, a proponent of the Border Wall, and a defender of Family Separation. Not only are his actions immoral, but his acceptance of campaign contributions from the private prison industry-- and his advocacy to demand full occupancy of detention centers-- is downright corrupt. I am confident that the voters of the Texas 10th will not look kindly on his actions." Siegel nearly beat him-- again, with ZERO help from the DCCC-- and is likely to win the seat in 2020.Private prison corporations and their executives also put mammoth amounts of cash into directed PACs-- $170,000 into Trump Victory, $50,000 into another Trump front group-- Rebuilding America Now and then $50,000 each to Republican Super PACs and Dark Money committees like Win In 2016, NRSC Targeted State Victory Committee and the Florida First Project and $25,000 each to House Majority 2016, Conservative Congress Now!, NRCC, Growing A Sustainable Future, and the Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. They also ponied up big bucks for several shady groups like Kevin McCarthy's Victory Fund, various GOP building funds (over $100,000), and $10,000 each for John Culberson's PAC, Rick Scott's PAC, Henry Cuellar's PAC. Paul Ryan's PAC and, hold your nose, the DCCC. Among the biggest recipients from this pot of sewer money were some of Congress' most notoriously corrupt members:
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog, TX)- $10,000• John Culberson (R-TX)- $10,000• John Carter (R-TX)- $10,000• Scott Taylor (R-VA)- $6,000• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- $5,000• Matt Gaetz (R-FL)- $5,000• Tom Graves (R-GA)- $5,000• winning well-connected candidate Greg Pence (R-IN)- $5,000• Robert Aderholt (R-AL)- $3,500• Vicente Gonzalez (Blue Dog-TX)- $2,500• Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM)- $2,500
Yesterday, writing for the Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman and Adam Rawnsley, emphasizing that "detention for migrants is big business-- reported that $800 Million in Taxpayer Money Went to Private Prisons Where Migrants Work for Pennies. It's a very lucrative business model. "These are dangerous times for undocumented immigrants," they wrote. "ICE has been super-charged by the Trump administration. And ICE’s empowerment has been lucrative for the companies that both cage and employ immigrants... A Daily Beast investigation found that in 2018 alone, for-profit immigration detention was a nearly $1 billion industry underwritten by taxpayers and beset by problems that include suicide, minimal oversight, and what immigration advocates say uncomfortably resembles slave labor."
Being in the U.S. illegally is a misdemeanor offense, and immigration detention is technically a civil matter, not a criminal process. But the reality looks much different. The Daily Beast reported last month that as of Oct. 20, ICE was detaining an average of 44,631 people every day, an all-time high. Now ICE has told the Daily Beast that its latest detention numbers are even higher: 44,892 people as of Dec. 8. Its budget request for the current fiscal year anticipates detaining 52,000 people daily.Expanding the number of immigrants rounded up into jails isn’t just policy; it’s big business... [T]he private prisons giant GEO Group, expects its earnings to grow to $2.3 billion this year. Like other private prison companies, it made large donations to President Trump’s campaign and inaugural.Pinning down the size and scope of the immigration prison industry is obscured by government secrecy. But the Daily Beast combed through ICE budget submissions and other public records to compile as comprehensive a list as possible of what for-profit prisons charge taxpayers to lock up a growing population, and how many people those facilities detain on average. The result: For 19 privately owned or operated detention centers for which the Daily Beast could find recent pricing data, ICE paid an estimated $807 million in fiscal year 2018.Those 19 prisons hold 18,000 people-- meaning that for-profit prisons currently lock up about 41 percent of the 44,000 people detained by ICE. But that’s not a comprehensive total, and the true figures are likely significantly higher. The National Immigrant Justice Center estimated that for November 2017, roughly 71 percent of immigrant detainees, then a smaller total figure, were held in 33 privately operated jails like the Joe Corley detention center in Texas... In response to the Daily Beast’s queries, ICE said it could not provide a full breakdown of contractor-operated immigration prisons.“Ensuring there are sufficient beds available to meet the current demand for detention space is crucial to the success of ICE’s overall mission. Accordingly, the agency is continually reviewing its detention requirements and exploring options that will afford ICE the operational flexibility needed to house the full range of detainees in the agency’s custody,” said ICE spokesperson Danielle Bennett.But Mary Small of the Detention Watch Network says the public still lacks “incredibly basic information about immigration detention and how private prison companies are profiting from it.”“Even though billions of taxpayer dollars are being obligated to private prison companies, the contracts between them and the federal government aren't publicly available, so we don't know how much these companies are being paid, how many people they're holding or how long their contracts last,” Small said. “This culture of secrecy-- bolstered by revolving door politics and political contributions-- have paved the way for a rapid and reckless expansion of the detention system.”GEO Group, which owns the Corley center, is just one example. It held a daily average of 973 people in the previous fiscal year at Corley. Beyond Corley, it detained roughly 11,000 immigrants at 17 prisons. The 10 GEO Group facilities the Daily Beast could find pricing data for charged an average of about $101 per prisoner per day, compared to ICE’s overall projected $121.90 average daily rate for adult beds in fiscal year 2018. But the Government Accountability Office warned in April that ICE consistently lowballs its detention costs through dubious accounting.While for-profit immigration detention by no means began on Trump’s watch, the Trump administration has been very good for the corporation. In November, GEO Group reported that it expects to earn $2.3 billion this year, including immigration detention revenues-- an increase of nearly 1.8 percent from the $2.26 billion it reported in 2017 and up 5.5 percent from the $2.18 billion it earned in 2016... That same year, GEO gave $281,360 to Trump’s campaign.In 2004, GEO Group spent $120,000 on federal lobbying. By 2016, it was spending $1.2 million. Fellow private prisons giant CoreCivic spent nearly $10 million between 2008 and 2014 just to lobby the House appropriations subcommittee that controls immigration-detention funding. Together, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the two corporations dished out a combined half-million dollars to Trump’s inauguration committee.In essence, immigration advocates say, the detention corporations pay Trump and his congressional allies, whose enthusiasm for treating immigration as a crime ensures delivery of a growing population of captives to companies that pay them far below a minimum wage.ICE’s internal detention standards set pay for “voluntary” immigrant labor at only “at least $1.00 (USD) per day.” (“The negative impact of confinement shall be reduced through decreased idleness, improved morale and fewer disciplinary incidents,” ICE contends, even though immigration detention is supposed to be administrative, not punitive.)Lawsuits over the past few years present an alarming accumulation of accounts that labor within the private prisons is less “voluntary” than the corporations insist. A class-action lawsuit against GEO Group, initially by nine detainees in Colorado, claims that tens of thousands of immigrants have been forced to work for their $1 daily wage. A different lawsuit against a GEO Group facility in California claims “systematic and unlawful wage theft, unjust enrichment, and forced labor,” including a scheme in which the corporation requires work to “buy the basic necessities-- including food, water, and hygiene products-- that GEO refuses to provide for them.” Washington State sued GEO Group in 2017 for paying its detainees $1 a day-- or sometimes in what the complaint calls “snack food”-- rather than the $11/hour state minimum wage. GEO Group has vigorously contested the suits, though not always successfully.“To the extent that the industry is in the business of expanding the system so they can make more money off holding more immigrants that can be confined, and doing everything possible to profit off of it by labor processes like getting detainees to work and paying them a dollar a day, there is very little distinction you can draw between slave labor and what they’re doing,” said Emily Ryo, an associate professor at the University of California’s Gould School of Law. The differences between for-profit immigration prisons and public immigration prisons are substantial, according to recent research by Ryo and colleagues based on data from fiscal year 2015. Even though for-profit companies operate only an estimated 10 percent of ICE detention facilities, both Ryo and the National Immigrant Justice Center found that more than two-thirds of all detainees have been held at least once at a privately run prison. Those for-profit prisons “consistently and substantially” hold immigrants longer than public ones—about 87 days on average for people ultimately granted relief, versus 33.3 days in public prisons.Fifteen of the 179 detainees who died in ICE custody between October 2003 and February 2018 were held at a single private immigration detention center, run by CoreCivic in Arizona, according to the Migration Policy Institute. At another privately run immigration detention jail, GEO Group’s Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, there have been seven suicide attempts between December 2016 and October 2017, and at least one success. A September DHS inspector general’s report showed photographs of bedsheets hanging as improvised nooses inside Adelanto cells. A detainee told inspectors, “I’ve seen a few attempted suicides using braided sheets by the vents and then the guards laugh at them and call them ‘suicide failures’ once they are back from medical.” Another detainee death classified as a suicide occurred at CoreCivic’s Stewart Detention Facility in July 2018, also using a bedsheet noose.And ICE turns what its own watchdog warns is a blind eye to detention conditions. It even contracts out substantial amounts of oversight over its detention centers. A June report by the DHS inspector general found that the inspections contractor, Nakamoto, uses practices that “are not consistently thorough,” and its inspections don’t “fully examine actual conditions or identify all compliance deficiencies.” While ICE’s additional in-house inspectors are more thorough-- they found 475 deficiencies at the same 29 detention sites where Nakamoto found only 209-- the inspector general found those inspections “too infrequent to ensure the facilities implement all corrections.” The result, the inspector general says, is that ICE doesn’t “ensure adequate oversight or systemic improvements in detention conditions.”
GEO and CoreCivic looked carefully at non-incumbents to support in 2018. They screened candidates carefully, looking for the most corrupt and most likely to look the other way even though their business model is based on slavery. And which non-incumbents-- who won their races-- did they find who met their draconian criteria? GEO:
• Rick Scott (R-FL)• Josh Hawley (R-MO)• Greg Pence (R-IN)• Ross Spano (R-FL)• Dwight Evans (D-PA)
And here's the list of the top non-incumbent recipients of CoreCivic bribes for the cycle-- only the candidates who won their races:
• Mitt Romney (R-UT)• Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)• Greg Pence (R-IN)• Mike Braun (R-IN)• Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-IN)• Josh Hawley (R-MO)
Don't get the idea that they only gave to corrupt Republicans. The biggest recipients of their sewer money among Democrats were conservatives Henry Cuellar (TX) and Claire McCaskill (MO). GEO gave significant money to 3 crooked conservative Democrats: Henry Cuellar (TX), Vicente Gonzalez (TX) and Ben Ray Lujan (NM). I hope you've noted that Mike Pence's bro-- just elected to Congress in Indiana-- takes a lot of money from every pot that comes from the slavery lobby. But slavery was ok in the Buy-Bull the Pences worship, wasn't it?Greg and Mike-- good with slavery... as long as they get their cut
