Donald Cohen of “In the Public Interest” reports that operators of private detention facilities are delighted with the Trump crackdown on immigrants . It is generating huge revenues and profits!
Last fall, Chief Executive Officer George Zoley of the publicly traded private prison corporation GEO Group told shareholders he was “very pleased” with recent financial results after the company “experienced improved occupancy rates across a number of our ICE [immigration detention] facilities” — and now we know why.
In an early March filing to those shareholders, GEO Group divulged that total compensation last year for its top corporate executives nearly doubled, jumping from $10.9 million to $20.3 million. Zoley really made out. Stock awards, which the corporation gives out when it profits more than it expected, boosted his compensation from $5.1 million to $9.6 million.
The GEO Group CEO better have thanked President Donald Trump for the big payday.
Trump deported less people last year than the Obama administration did in 2016, but he arrested 30 percent more suspected undocumented immigrants. That means more people were held in immigration detention centers, which are primarily run by GEO Group and its main rival, CoreCivic (formerly CCA). GEO Group also manages the electronic monitoring used on some undocumented immigrants through its subsidiary BI Inc.
There are big bucks in privatization, whether it is prisons, schools, or veterans’ hospitals.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I see privatization as the loss of the “common good” and gradual unraveling of our society.
Sad.
The Kerner Report Revisted: https://archive.org/details/kernerreportrevi00asse
Privatization of public services is enclosure of the commons continued into the 21stC. By its very nature it eliminates democracy, removing the public from decisions that affect their daily lives significantly. Fences with private entrances, excluding some, admitting others, so that citizens compete to be winners or losers instead of sharing the commons: me vs the other. This results in widespread insecurity (easily fanned into fear, hatred, ethnocentrism, extremism).
Truth revealed: with the feeling of a widespread (and quickly spreading) insecurity, the nation can be fanned into taking its new-found fear and turning it into blind obedience to the dictates of those who tell them to be ever more afraid. Talk about LORD OF THE FLIES playing out one step at a time…
George Zoley, a Greek immigrant and Trump donor, has realized the “American Dream” by locking up others seeking the same opportunity he has, but lacking his money and connections to get papers. GEO makes millions by making deals with significant politicians and keeping operating costs and overhead low. “In 2017 the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a troubling report that showed contract prisons had far higher rates of violence and lockdowns, and poorer access to medical care, than comparable federally run facilities.” This is a fine example of American capitalism at work. There’s gold in those immigrants, school children and veterans!http://www.philly.com/philly/news/crime/private-prisons-sessions-yates-geo-assault-death.html
Turns my stomach.
Privatization means you manage your business privately, without the government funding. “Private prisons” are managed privately but funded by the government, so not exactly private. Should we call them charter prisons?
No, privatization means that what was once owned by taxpayers via their government and operated by a government entity operating only in the in the public sphere has been sold off or transferred to private ownership. Saying that private prisons are government funded is similarly diseingenuous, they are funded ENTIRELY by the tax payers, the government merely writes the check. The private prison industry does not provide more bang for the buck, less actually. It does lead to the further concentration of wealth via trickle up economics with some of that wealth “kicked back” via campaign contributions to the politicians who betrayed the public trust by selling off a public asset. It’s a feedback loop far more damaging than the howl from holding a mike in front of an amplifier speaker.
At the end of the Obama administration, the Justice Department released a report saying that it was closing its for-profit prisons because they cost more and provided fewer rehabilitative services, less educational opportunities, spent less on food. Cost cutting meant a bad atmosphere and more prison violence.
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Reblogged this on The Most Revolutionary Act and commented:
Last fall, Chief Executive Officer George Zoley of the publicly traded private prison corporation GEO Group told shareholders he was “very pleased” with recent financial results after the company “experienced improved occupancy rates across a number of our ICE [immigration detention] facilities”
This Is How Bad The Health Care Is In Private Prisons
ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN
APR 8, 2015, 12:00 PM
Hundreds of nurses who work for the for-profit prison health care company Corizon in Alameda County, California are threatening to go on strike if the company refuses to put enough nurses on duty and give them enough resources to adequately care for the thousands of men incarcerated there, especially after inmates have died on the company’s watch.
ThinkProgress spoke this week to one of the jail nurses, who we will identify by the pseudonym Clara because she fears losing her job. Clara, who works as a Registered Nurse at the jail, described abysmal conditions including broken or dirty equipment, rushed procedures and severe understaffing…
https://thinkprogress.org/this-is-how-bad-the-health-care-is-in-private-prisons-6657e5ae0293/