Corrections Corporation of America. Note that one of the principle founding investors was Jack Massey, who also co-founded the notorious Hospital Corporation of America.
https://nashvillebanner.com/2024/10/18/corecivic-prison-crisis-tennessee/
"In the early 1980s, Tennessee’s prison system was in crisis. A federal judge had declared the state’s prisons “unfit for human habitation” in 1982, citing overcrowding, poor medical care and regular violence. That echoed a state judge’s opinion four years earlier that the conditions across the system were unconstitutional.
It was amid that tumult that an idea began to percolate among a group of well-connected businessmen in Nashville. One of them was attorney Tom Beasley, who’d served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party from 1977 to 1981. His pitch, according to an article in the November 1983 issue of the American Bar Association Journal: if prisons already contracted with private companies for food and healthcare, why not create a company that could run the whole thing?
Along with Nashville real estate executive Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto — who later led the American Correctional Association —Beasley went on to start Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the for-profit prison operator now known as CoreCivic. A 1986 article in The Journal of the Southern Regional Council quoted Beasley’s straightforward goals for the company — “solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time.”
More than 40 years later, CoreCivic has certainly made a lot of money. Through state and federal government contracts, the company operates dozens of prisons and jails across the country. It runs four prisons in Tennessee, for which it now receives $233 million annually. In 2023, CoreCivic brought in $1.9 billion in revenue with a net profit of more than $188 million. "....(more)
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