During the 2016 election, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the abolishment of private prisons. Noting the dropping prison population and an existential political threat, the GEO Group—the largest private prison company in the United States—doubled down on its support for President Donald Trump, giving his super PAC $225,000.
In all, GEO’s spending on the 2016 election was greater than the sum of its spending over the seven years preceding. And it didn’t stop in November 2016. Following his election, GEO funneled another $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. In 2017, GEO held its annual leadership conference at Trump’s Miami golf resort. The rewards of GEO & co.’s 2016 support were obvious: Trump’s administration reversed a move away from private prisons and scaled up practices that boost incarceration and detention.
Come 2018, private prison companies wanted to make sure that things stayed profitable. After all, ICE immigration detention funds made up one-quarter of GEO’s 2017 revenue. GEO spent almost as much on the midterm elections as it did the presidential: a staggering $1.6 million. Mind you, that’s only what’s publicly disclosed. Dark money contributions remain private. That’s three times more than private prisons have spent on any other midterm election.
The prison industrial complex is a big fan of Republican candidates and officials, from federal to local. The federal piece isn’t mysterious. Beyond the major DOJ-level decisions that determine whether and how private prisons stay in play, GEO & co. target members of the Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee; it’s that subcommittee that oversees ICE’s detention budget.
As Mother Jones reports:
Members of the subcommittee are some of the top congressional recipients of private prison campaign cash. That includes Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas)—who received $44,000 in contributions from the industry this cycle, only to be defeated by Democratic upstart Lizzie Fletcher. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) won reelection after taking $36,400 from the prison industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Cuellar is perhaps the industry’s most vocal Democratic defender; in July he praised GEO for playing “an important role in maintaining our public safety,” adding that “without them, rapists, murderers, and other offenders would not be incarcerated.”
GEO’s offensively overt in acknowledging the tie between the midterms and their financial fate, as if no lives were involved. They held an earnings call the morning after the election. The report? The “company didn’t expect to see much change in Homeland Security funding for the time being,” a source of disappointment. But CEO Zoley suggested that “opportunities within our detention sector, in particularly [sic] with ICE,” were a cause for optimism.
GEO pursues the support of local and state-level politicians because they’re “often involved” in making prison and detention deals. In Mother Jones’s Madison Pauly’s words, “counties act as middlemen between private prison companies and the federal government.” Then there’s the change that state legislators can make: Take Florida Republican state Rep. Mark Keough, who proposed legislation—written by GEO—to license a GEO detention center as a “child care facility.”
The good news is, Democrats won the House. With the exception of outliers like Rep. Cuellar, there’s plenty of room to make positive change—to scale back detention and the use of private facilities for incarceration and detention both.