Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass...

Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America {CCA}, the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report "Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and 'Low-Crime Taxes' Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations" that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups {PACs and super PACs}, the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation's largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61

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