4 Disturbing Reasons the Private Prison Industry Is So Powerful

By Aaron Cantú

April 23, 2014 | Since the early 1980’s, incoming revenue for private prison corporations has steadily grown, even through times of deep recession. As long as lawmakers were passing punitive laws to keep mostly young men locked in cages indefinitely, it seemed like the party would never end.

However, there’s been something of an awakening in the last few years. Today over 2.3 million people are locked away in prisons, a number so extreme that lawmakers are now actually considering piecemeal changes to the system of mass incarceration. And just last week, three major corporations (Scopia Capital Management, DSM North America, and Amica Mutual Insurance) announced that they were divesting $60 million [3] from the two largest prison corporations in the nation thanks to a Color of Change campaign urging companies to drop their private prison investments: Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, worth $3.2 billion in total. As a consequence of all this movement, some have portended the eventual demise of the private prison industry.