Private Prison Companies Are Absolutely Thrilled Donald Trump Won The Election

Well, these entities deserve each other. The problem is we really don’t deserve either of them.

Trump spent a lot of his campaign touting a logistical nightmare of a policy that sounded a lot like an collapse-of-the-Weimar-Republic sort of thing: the mass detention and deportation of immigrants, whether they’re here legally or not. All that’s missing now are the rail cars and the genocide.

It’s an ugly plan that’s going to have extremely ugly outcomes, all based on bigotry and demonstrably false claims about the inherent “danger” posed by undocumented immigrants. Ignorance and hatred are going to be weaponized to tear apart families, destroy communities, and undermine the ideals this country used to hold dear.

More prisons, more beds, more detention facilities, more logistical support, more transport of detained immigrants — what looks like a horror show to many of us is being greeted with unrestrained glee by the CEOs of this country’s two largest private prison companies. Presumably, many of their shareholders are equally thrilled with this development as well, making them equally complicit in what’s to come.

Listening in on earnings calls was Matt Shuham, who has detailed the contents of these calls for the Huffington Post. It’s pretty harrowing to see something this awful being greeted with this much joy.

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s– country’s history, and the opportunity that it will bring,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman of the company’s board of directors, said on the call. 

[…]

Elsewhere in the call, he referred to a potential “sea change” in interior and border enforcement ― an “unprecedented opportunity” to assist with what he described as the “much more aggressive” policy framework from the incoming Trump administration. Speaking generally, he said, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”

Yep, sounds truly fantastic. The head of CoreCivic, which is infamous for running understaffed and under-supervised facilities that create dangerous situations for inmates, was equally thrilled to be a part of Trump’s nihilistic mass deportation plans.

“It feels like with this election this year, we’re heading into an era that we really haven’t seen, maybe only once or twice in the company’s history, where the value proposition of the private sector for both our state partners and our federal partners are going to be not only strong today, but even stronger as we go in the next couple of years,” Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, said on that company’s own earnings call.

It’s truly inspiring to hear private prison company CEOs gloat about their contribution to the misery of millions of people. In between the gloating are the details: just how much “growth” they can expect to profit from as Trump moves back into the Oval Office and his compliant party starts putting this plan in action.

GEO Group says it expects to increase the number of beds it supplies to ICE to jump from 13,500 to “over 31,000 beds,” with an expectation that number may hit as high as 85,000 once the program is fully implemented.

CoreCivic will also see its profits increase greatly, since it will possibly now be able to get into the ankle-monitor market now solely handled by GEO Group. ICE appears to believe it can’t rely on a sole source to handle the amount of monitoring it will be doing and is asking around (with its freshly posted Request for Information) to see what other companies might be able to contribute monitors and monitoring services to the mass deportation program. Presumably, ICE expects enough of an increase in need that it simply won’t be possible for GEO Group alone to handle it.

But it’s GEO Group that claims the prize for the most chilling response to what are likely to be some of the nation’s darkest days in American history:

“We believe we have the capabilities to expand the provision of these services to assist ICE in moving several hundreds of thousands of additional individuals if needed.”

Several hundreds of thousands of people being detained, moved, and ejected against their will solely because the incoming president and his administration believes they shouldn’t be here. And the response from these companies is that they’re excited they’re going to be able to profit directly from a program that’s based on nothing but vibes emanating from a cadre of extremely powerful bigots. Fuck them. And fuck Donald Trump. It’s great to know that if this country accelerates its slide toward fascism, it will partially be due to GEO Group and CoreCivic pushing the nation from the back.