CoreCivic donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee in December, according to lobby disclosure forms.
Just a few months ago, the outlook for those companies wasn’t bright. The Obama administration said it was phasing out the contractors because of poor performance, insufficient cost savings and falling inmate population. The Justice Department under Obama 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.
‘Terrible Record’
"They already have a terrible record," Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project said Thursday in a phone interview. There’s a "good chance" that cramped prison conditions resulting from the crackdown on undocumented immigrants could result in lawsuits, she added.
The U.S. prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could handle at its own facilities, then-deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in August. By 2013, with both the federal prison population and the proportion of federal prisoners in contracted facilities reaching their peak, the bureau was housing about 15 percent of prisoners, or almost 30,000 inmates, in privately operated facilities.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.