Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When it comes to for-profit, private corporate incarceration of immigrants, making lots of money is like drinking salt water, the more they drink, the thirstier they get. Roman proverbs say that the more money a rich man has, the more driven and addicted he becomes to accumulating even more money. Wealth addiction is at the root of giant private prison corporations domination of the U.S. government as communities take a back seat to the need for private profit. Many government leaders from both political parties share the same ‘profits over people’ ideology. The industry is preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings. The U.S. private incarceration system is a deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention every year.

Just like large. private health insurance corporations, the U.S. private-profit incarceration system has the inherent tendency to invent new needs, disregard all boundaries and turn everything into big profit. Limitless greed for money becomes a disease where a person may become over-saturated with food….but no one or private prison corporation ever has enough wealth. Wealth addiction is a greedy compulsion to obtain more and more wealth, and specifically obtain what belongs to others. The effect is to injure others because it is adversarial/harmful to society as a whole..The private prison industry pushes for harsh immigration policies intended to drive up immigration detention. And private immigration detention centers suffer from many of the same problems as private prisons and jails, but the people held in them have even fewer rights and thus, at times, can suffer even more abuse.

What is Private Immigration Detention?

Emerging from the Reagan administrations advocacy of privatization of public services, immigration detention is now a booming business for private prison corporations. Today’s profiteering involves the complete outsourcing of the criminal legal system to the highest bidder. Corruption of money in politics allows greedy corporations to decimate families in disproportionately black, brown, and Indigenous communities.

With burgeoning anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislative crackdowns at all levels, private prison corporations are increasing their hold on U.S. detention policy. Today about 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest percentage in U.S. history. In a for-profit prison, jail or immigrant detention facility, people are imprisoned by a private third party that contracts with a government agency. Contractual agreements between........

© CounterPunch