Private prison companies like the GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA), have preyed on rural towns with promises of economic development in exchange for land to build and operate their facilities. Increasingly, private prisons are being used to incarcerate immigrants via contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to data obtained through a Freedom of information Act (FOIA) request, as of 2017, 71% of people in ICE custody are detained in private prisons.
Private prisons have a long history of abuse, neglect and deaths in custody. While systemic abuses in private prisons are well documented, some elected officials have chosen to enter into relationships with private prison companies. Many localities enter into contracts with private prison companies with the expectation that this will lead to increased tax revenue and job creation. In fact, there is a robust body of research indicating that private prison employees receive below average wages and face unsafe working conditions; private prison companies do not contribute their fair share of local, state and federal taxes; and subsidies to private prisons drain the budgets of hosting localities.
Thanks to a provision written in California state law Dignity not Detention (SB29), the cities of Adelanto, McFarland, and San Diego must hear public comments before deciding to re-purpose and/or expand existing private facilities to detain immigrants. This mandate is an opportunity for the cities’ planning commissions to learn about how harmful private prisons are for people in their custody and for communities. These hearings are also an opportunity for concerned citizens to refute the economic arguments private prison companies use to justify their relationships with local governments.
Currently, GEO is targeting the cities of Adelanto and McFarland to repurpose the Desert View Modified Community Corrections Facility and the Golden Star Facility. GEO is fronting a campaign of economic opportunities for local residents, promising to bring high wage jobs, property taxes and community development. In January 2019, GEO representatives said that if the McFarland city planning commission didn’t approve the permits needed to repurpose the Golden Star Facility, the city would lose “entry-level wages that increase from the current $16.75 an hour to $46.57 per hour for officers, more than 300 jobs, $500,000 in property taxes, and thousands of dollars in scholarships ($71,000 since 2015) totaling $511,000 in fiscal mitigation.” Yet, private prisons like the ones GEO is trying to reopen are not good investments; these private prisons bring bad jobs and lead to mismanagement of local tax dollars, missed opportunities to invest elsewhere in the community, and contributes to community disenfranchisement.
Prisons Bring Bad Jobs
The private prison industry has marketed themselves as a driving force of economic development, particularly for depressed rural areas. However, multiple studies indicate that the presence of private prisons in lower income and rural communities does more harm than good. In 2010, a study from the Washington State University (WSU) found no links to employment growth in rural communities that hosted new prisons. Similarly, a 2007 University of California Press study found that, in California, only about 20% of the new jobs generated after a prison opens go to county residents, with the rest filled by residents of nearby cities. A 2002 study found that most “prison employees often choose not to live in small rural towns, opting instead to commute from urban and suburban areas.” Local residents don’t even benefit from low wage job opportunities, as private prisons cut expenses by using detained people’s labor to fulfill janitorial and kitchen jobs. In many of GEO’s facilities, detained immigrants receive as little as $1 a day for their work maintaining facilities. Geo and CoreCivic/CCA have both been sued for wage theft and forced labor.
The 20% of jobs that are left for local residents tend to be both underpaid and dangerous due to cost-cutting practices in the private prison industry. In 2012, the Sentencing Project released a report on private prisons in the United States. According to the report, personnel costs account for about 60-70% of a private prisons’ operating budget. Thus, private prison companies are economically incentivized to keep personnel costs as low as possible. In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BSL) reported that, on average, private prisons paid $9,000 less per year for the same roles than those earned by public prison employees. According to a 2004 U.S. Courts report, private prisons require 58 less hours of training for correctional officers than their publicly employed counterparts, a cost saving strategy that results in employees not being under-trained and leads to safety concerns. A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that private contractors “incurred [in] more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP employees” in the majority of the areas monitored, including lockdowns, grievances, contraband, and assault rates. This systemic under-resourcing and unsafe working conditions also leads to high turnover rates among personnel.
The first hand experiences of former GEO employees corroborates this research. For example, in a 2017 Glassdoor post reviewing Geo Group McFarland California, a former employee reported a $20 per hour rate after working with GEO for five years and describes a culture of disregarding laws, pushing issues under the table, frequently working 16 hour shifts, and passing inspections when the facility didn’t meet the standards. The former employee further describes that GEO’s McFarland facility is “deliberately understaffed, underpaid, and overworked,” which leads to a high turnover rate where “few stay more than a year.” GEO’s Adelanto Detention Center has an employee rating of 1.6 out of 5 on Glassdoor. A Registered Nurse (RN) at the Adelanto Detention Center wrote on the website that she was always afraid of losing her practicing licence due to a culture of lying on medical records and poor documentation. The RN also said that employees often didn’t last for more than 6 months. Other former employees commenting ton Glassdoor echoed that GEO mandates overtime for low pay and that there is a culture of sexisim and racism. Former employees from CoreCivic/CCA’s Otay Mesa Detention Center also posted about bad labor conditions. In 2018, a former Detention Officer said that the facility does “the minimum to get by until there is an audit. All of a sudden a post has the right amount of officers on audit day.” Another Detention officer said that the company “works [them] to death” and cited that sexual harassment is prevalent.
These systemic issues have led to GEO being sued in 2019 by a former employee who alleges “sexual assault; sexual harassment; failure to prevent harassment; discrimination, a hostile work environment, retaliation, failure to prevent discrimination, harassment and retaliation; infliction of emotional distress, wrongful termination; and violations of labor codes, including failure to provide rest periods, meal periods, and overtime wages.” This includes an attempt by Adelanto Detention Center’s Warden to run over the former employee with his car. The lawsuit also echoes employees testimonies of a work culture of discrimination and malpractices at GEO managed facilities.
Local residents footing the bill
Private prison companies also seduce localities into contracts by promising increased contributions to the local tax base. Yet, at least since 2013, the largest prison companies, GEO and CoreCivic/CCA, have used a loophole to avoid paying for their fair share of taxes. These large corporations register as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). Companies registered as REITS are exempt from most forms of income tax. In 2017, Representative Gregory Meeks introduced the “Ending Tax Breaks for Private Prisons Act” in order to prohibit private prison companies from receiving REIT tax breaks meant to “enable small investors to generate real estate income and spur community development.”
In California, property taxes remain in the county where they are collected and are used by the local government. However, in addition to evading federal income taxes, private prison companies have a history of not paying their share of local property taxes. The American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees (AFSCME) points at several examples where private prison companies sought to circumvent local property taxes. For example, in 1998, CoreCivic/CCA pulled out of a contract with the city of Cleveland, Ohio because the company didn’t want to pay the local property taxes, even after the city had already reduced the required property taxes by 50%.
Localities can also end up losing money via subsidies paid to finance private prison company operations. In 2001, Good Jobs First conducted a study of 60 private prison facilities that incarcerate 500 people or more across the country. According to the study, 78% of CoreCivic/CCA and 69% of GEO facilities received subsidies, most of which were paid by local and state governments. The Institute of Policy Studies and the New Mexico Dream Team released a 2019 report showing that the Cibola County Detention Center, managed by CoreCivic/CCA, was operating with a net loss of over $2 million, which the county sought to offset by transfers from portions of the county budget dedicated to “Governmental Activities.”
In some instances, private prison companies have even asked taxpayers to foot the bill for legal fees incurred as a result of abuses inside detention. In July 2018, the city of Adelanto was sued along with GEO and two GEO employees in their individual capacity due to allegations of violent attacks and retaliation in the form of solitary confinement against detained men engaging in peaceful protest. The city was dismissed from the lawsuit before it settled in 2020. As of July 2019, there were at least six lawsuits against GEO and CoreCivic/CCA by detained people who claim that the companies are in violation of laws against human trafficking and forced labor. In correspondence obtained through FOIAs, high level executives ask ICE for support paying legal fees claiming that “GEO cannot bear the costs of this defense on its own.” Localities like Adelanto and McFarland already struggle with tight budgets and cannot take the risk of being on the hook to pay private prisons’ legal fees.
As of February 2020 GEO is worth almost 2 billion dollars and has a yearly revenue of over 500 million. Money paid to private prison companies via subsidies and direct budget transfers would be better invested in the community.
Unstable Investment and Missed Opportunities
Private prisons are not stable or “safe” investments. Before 2017, the federal government announced that it intended to stop using private prisons to incarcerate people in federal custody. Though this policy was overturned by the Trump administration, a rising number of states, including California, oppose using private prisons and are pursuing policies to limit their use. Additionally, several prominent presidential candidates have announced their intentions to phase out the use of private facilities in both the criminal justice and immigration sectors. In response to pressure from advocates and changing political support for private prisons, some of the biggest banks in the United States- such as Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo etc.- have moved to cut ties with private prison companies. This growing movement to abolish private prisons translates into instability for any jobs generated through new or expanded contracts with private prison companies as well as lost opportunity to invest in other industries, such as renewable energy.
Economic Harm to Families
In addition to bad, unstable jobs and potential loss of revenue to the community, immigrant detention comes at a devastating economic cost to families and communities. A January 2020 report by the High Country News surveyed 125 households impacted by detention. According to the report, when a person is arrested and detained on immigration grounds, families spend an average of $24,000 on costs related to detention and loss of wages. Because a large majority of the families surveyed were separated from the primary breadwinner as a result of detention, immigrant families report that their annual income dropped by $22,000 after an immigration arrest. This is a huge loss for cities such as McFarland, which has a foreign born population of 35% and an average annual income of $35,000, and Adelanto which has a 20% foreign born population and average annual income of $34,400. Community disenfranchisement resulting from the immigration detention system leads to immediate economic loss to local residents; less spending on local businesses, tax contributions and civic engagement; and risks trapping families and future generations in a cycle of poverty and economic and political disenfranchisement.
Conclusion
There is ample evidence about how private prisons are bad investments for communities. The few jobs they offer are low quality, dangerous, underpaid, and unstable. Promised tax revenue fails to materialize, and communities may end up footing the bill for prison or be on the hook for abuses committed within their jurisdictions. Fundamentally, private prisons enable separation of families and economic and political disenfranchisement. City planners must invest in communities over wealthy corporations with extensive histories of abuse.