In the hardscrabble desert hamlet of Milan, New Mexico, incarceration is the biggest game in town.
Not far from Interstate 40, among fragrant sage and creosote bushes, stands a sprawling outpost of CoreCivic Inc., one of America’s biggest for-profit prison companies. The 1,200-bed facility, formerly a lockup for car thieves and drug dealers, is being transformed into a detention center for immigrants fleeing Mexico and Central America. It will be opening just as Donald Trump becomes president.
Immigrants are a growth business for Milan and the U.S. prison-industrial complex. Trump’s pledge to clamp down on illegal immigration and deport millions has given the private-prison industry its biggest boost in years. Since the Republican was elected, CoreCivic stock has jumped 78 percent. Rival private-prison company Geo Group Inc., is up 53 percent.
The reasons are clear. A crackdown like the one Trump has proposed would cost the federal government from $400 billion to $600 billion. Prison contractors would get a slice of the pie.
“You can anticipate a massive enhancement of the use of the criminal-justice system to combat immigration,” said John Sandweg, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He and others drew comparisons to the nation’s decades-long war on illegal drugs that led to mass incarceration.
Path to Profit
Stricter laws, tougher enforcement, more incarceration, longer sentences: for private prisons, that’s a path to profit. In Trump and his choice for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions, the prison industry now has important boosters in Washington.
Just a few months ago, the outlook wasn’t so bright. An August report from the U.S. Department of Justice recommended phasing out prison contractors because of poor performance, insufficient cost savings and falling inmate population. The agency found that private prisons were more dangerous and less hygienic than government facilities, citing higher instances of assault, inappropriate use of solitary confinement and inadequate medical treatment.
With marijuana legalization and Congress’s easing of drug sentencing causing the first prison-population decline in three decades, it looked as if the government’s experiment of outsourcing the incarceration business was drawing to an end.
Nashville-based CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corp. of America, announced it would idle the Milan facility, putting 300 jobs on the line. So important was the prison to the community of fewer than 13,000 that New Mexico’s Democratic U.S. Senator Tom Udall wrote a letter urging the Obama administration to reconsider.