America has a prison problem. As part of the slew of sweeping changes President Donald Trump issued immediately after taking office, he countermanded former President Joe Biden’s executive order that prohibited the Department of Justice (DOJ) from renewing contracts with private prison firms. The reversal coincides with Trump’s mass mobilization of the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to find and arrest millions of “migrant criminals,” as the President has described them.
Private prison firms are now scrambling to maximize the profit potential from such an upsurge in arrests. Massive players in the industry have already seen their stocks skyrocket; the stock of CoreCivic Inc., a prominent company that manages private prisons, rose by more than fifty percent since Trump’s victory in November, while the GEO Group—another private prison firm—saw their stock value nearly double.
Everything has been lining up for these companies to capitalize on Trump’s aggressive approach toward “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” In July 2023, more than ninety percent of people held in ICE detention were housed in private prisons, as found by the ACLU. As ICE raids play out across the country, more and more immigrants will be outsourced by the government to private prisons, where inhumane conditions and improper treatment persist as a result of poor government oversight.
In 2016, the DOJ released a review stating that private prisons “incurred more safety and security incidents per capita” than government-regulated prisons and often lacked basic medical services. Since that review, Trump has pushed for more cooperation with private prisons during his two terms, likely in order to house more illegal immigrants.
While the current number of federal prisons is not sufficient to house all of America’s criminals, turning to private prisons only exacerbates the problem. Many of these contracted prisons have quotas for their number of inmates, leading to increased incarceration rates for the wrong reasons. Many contracts between states and private prisons ensure the state will have to pay a fine to the prison if it does not supply enough inmates to keep 80 to 100 percent of the prison beds filled. This incentivizes incarcerating Americans and could contribute to corruption or malpractice in the judicial system.
No prison or organization should be financially incentivized to increase the number of Americans incarcerated—the idea runs counter to the most basic idea of judicial progress. Through the use of lobbyists, these corporations do everything in their power to fight against increased inmate care or meaningful attempts to improve the judicial system—after all, they’re both bad for business. At its core, private prisons seek to benefit off the misfortunes of others—a distinctly corrupt system that only perpetuates the problem.
One of the main reasons private prisons exist and collaborate with the government is to serve as an outlet for when there is a surplus of inmates that the federal government can’t handle. However, it would be far more effective and far less immoral to abandon the private sector and build more public prisons. Federal prisons already held 92 percent of all inmates in the US in 2022, meaning constructing the space for the remaining eight percent wouldn’t be an unreasonably expensive endeavor.
Rather than focus on stopping crime only once it happens, we should be intent on preventing it before it can materialize. Prisoners are meant to be rehabilitated and released—not sold and used like products on a shelf. If America is to fix its prison problem, it starts by taking the lock and key away from the rich and back to the people.
