A boom behind bars: Private jail operators are making millions off the crackdown on illegal aliens

By Graeme Wood


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Then, as quickly as ICE detained him, it released him. His freedom lasted about 10 seconds — the time it takes to walk from the ICE building on Greens Rd. to its neighboring building, the Houston Processing Center, a prison owned and operated by Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America. A publicly traded company, CCA is the largest private prison contractor in the U.S. ICE pays CCA about $90 a day per person to keep immigrants behind bars and to manage every aspect of detainees' lives, running its prison much as the government does. The main difference is that CCA locks people up for profit.

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CCA's opponents, such as human rights and pro-union groups, say the firm is run by amoral penny-pinchers who are in a business best left to the state because of the perverse incentives prison companies have to lobby the government to adopt policies that will increase America's already high rate of detention. When every prisoner is a daily $100 bill, say these opponents, you'll do everything you can to get as many of them as you can.

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One critic of CCA, Bob Libal, the Texas coordinator for anti-private prison coalition Grassroots Leadership, says the corporation devises ways to skim the better-behaved (and therefore cheaper to control) inmates from the general population, leaving government facilities to deal with a more violent and expensive group. For inmates with medical costs, for example, expenses that exceed a certain threshold are often marked for payment not by CCA but by the states that have contracted the facility out. CCA counters that it houses the prisoners it is sent, and the government chooses which ones to send. Along these lines, a study by the Auditor General of the state of Arizona found that the inmates who end up in CCA facilities tend to cost less to handle than the population in state facilities.

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In 2010, National Public Radio reported that the company had lobbied successfully for the passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which permits police to detain suspected illegal immigrants and bring them to a federal facility. According to the report, the controversial legislation was proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that brings together legislators and industry members like CCA. When Arizona's Senate passed the law, it created a potentially enormous new reservoir of civil detainees for CCA-operated ICE facilities.

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