The True History of America's Private Prison Industry (Must-read from Time, 9/25/2018. Relevant again because of ICE.)

[highplainsdem]

Just ran across this because of a Bluesky message about it reposted by someone I follow. I did a quick search of DU, using both DuckDuckGo and Advanced Search in GD, and didn't see any OPs about it, including when it was published in 2018.

I knew the private prison industry was a nightmare, and it was mentioned again and again about 15 years ago when I was posting a lot about ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, set up to let businesses direct state legislation.

More recently it's been in the news because of ICE.

But I hadn't read about the industry's history before.

https://time.com/5405158/the-true-history-of-americas-private-prison-industry/

Before founding the Corrections Corporation of America, a $1.8 billion private prison corporation now known as CoreCivic, Terrell Don Hutto ran a cotton plantation the size of Manhattan. There, mostly black convicts were forced to pick cotton from dawn to dusk for no pay. It was 1967 and the Beatles’ “All you need is love” was a hit, but the men in the fields sang songs with lyrics like “Old Master don’t you whip me, I’ll give you half a dollar.” Hutto’s family lived on the plantation and even had a “house boy,” an unpaid convict who served them.

At the time, most prisons in the South were plantations. In some states, certain inmates were given guns and even whips, and empowered to torture those who didn’t meet labor quotas. Hutto did such a good job in Texas that Arkansas would hire him to run their entire prison system–made entirely of plantations–which he would run at a profit to the state. His ability to run a prison that put money into state coffers would later attract the attention of two businessmen with a new idea: to found a corporation that would run prisons and sell shares on the stock market.

Prisons had been privatized before. Louisiana first privatized its penitentiary in 1844, just nine years after it opened. The company, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward ran it as a factory, using inmates to produce cheap clothes for enslaved people. One prisoner wrote in his memoir that, as soon as the prison was privatized, his jailers “laid aside all objects of reformation and re-instated the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.” Much like CoreCivic’s shareholder reports today, Louisiana’s annual penitentiary reports from the time give no information about prison violence, rehabilitation efforts, or anything about security. Instead, they deal almost exclusively with the profitability of the prison.

Like private prisons today, profit rather than rehabilitation was the guiding principle of early penitentiaries throughout the South. “If a profit of several thousand dollars can be made on the labor of twenty slaves,” posited the Telegraph and Texas Register in the mid-19th century, “why may not a similar profit be made on the labor of twenty convicts?” The head of a Texas jail suggested the state open a penitentiary as an instrument of Southern industrialization, allowing the state to push against the “over-grown monopolies” of the North. Five years after Texas opened its first penitentiary, it was the state’s largest factory. It quickly became the main Southern supplier of textiles west of the Mississippi.

-snip-

This piece in Time was written by investigative journalist Shane Bauer, whose research included going undercover as a prison guard at a CoreCivic prison in 2014. CoreCivic has been the subject of recent news headlines like these:

Sick Detainees Describe Poor Care at CoreCivic ICE Facilities
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/business/ice-health-care-corecivic-immigrants-detention.html

The Cruel Conditions of ICE's Mojave Desert Detention Center
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-cruel-conditions-of-ices-mojave-desert-detention-center

[jfz9580m]

1. I posted this a while back

Many migrants are being held in horrific conditions and the last count I saw was up to 90,000.

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/28/private-prisons-are-cashing-in-on-trumps-ice-crackdown-theyre-just-getting-started/

Private prisons are cashing in on Trump’s ICE crackdown. They’re just getting started
Over 90 percent of detained immigrants languish in prisons that aren't actually run by the government
By NICHOLAS LIU
Reporter
PUBLISHED JANUARY 28, 2026 6:30AM (EST)

While Congress and state legislatures have passed reform to soften criminal sentencing laws, immigration detention remains, technically, a civil jurisdiction and outside their scope. Inside the facilities, the distinction is meaningless. In private prisons across the country, detained persons are herded through secure checkpoints, forced to wear color-coded uniforms, and locked in cells. CoreCivic facilities in Tennessee have come under repeated scrutiny for allegedly allowing violent threats and extortion to run rampant, with guards accused of being unable or unwilling to stop them. In 2023, after officials at GEO Group-operated Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center ignored a recommendation for his release, immigrant Ernesto Rocha-Cuadra was found dead after repeated allegations of physical abuse, medical neglect, and solitary confinement.

“The private prison industry and the federal government are feeding off each other.”
But these stories of abuse and neglect usually only see the light of day under extreme circumstances. The primary difference between public and private prisons, experts told Salon, is that private prisons operate in an even more impenetrable black box than public prisons. Kristie Puckett, a lobbyist who pushes against mass incarceration and the barriers for reentry into society, said that private prisons have “long found success hiding information” about their treatment of people detained in their facilities.

“Private prison companies can justify their non-transparency by saying it’s a proprietor to sensitive information and trade secrets, so it’s harder to get those public records,” she continued. “It’s much harder to enter those facilities to monitor conditions, and when abuse happens, when the company faces a lawsuit, they tend to settle those quietly rather than create any meaningful systemic change. If they decided to just terminate the contract in a certain jurisdiction and walk away from the problem, they can do that rather than fix the problem across the system.”

Pretty horrific stuff.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/migrants-face-dire-conditions-and-prolonged-waits-in-u-s-detention-centers

Migrants face dire conditions and prolonged waits in U.S. detention centers

Nation Feb 9, 2026 2:10 PM EDT
MIAMI (AP) — Felipe Hernandez Espinosa spent 45 days at " Alligator Alcatraz," an immigration holding center in Florida where detainees have reported worms in their food, toilets that don't flush and overflowing sewage. Mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.

Prolonged detention has become more common in President Donald Trump's second term, at least partly because a new policy generally prohibits immigration judges from releasing detainees while their deportation cases wind through backlogged courts. Many, like Hernandez, are prepared to give up any efforts to stay in the United States.

"I came to this country thinking they would help me, and I've been detained for six months without having committed a crime," he said in a phone interview from Fort Bliss. "It is been too long. I am desperate."

But for Hernandez, the Nicaraguan asylum-seeker, desperation led him to request to be returned to the country he had fled.

"I've experienced a lot of trauma. It's very difficult," Hernandez said from Fort Bliss. "I'm always thinking about when I'm going to get out."

[pansypoo53219]

2. wall street crapitalism.