The Private Prison Pipeline: How Money Shapes Mass Incarceration Policy

Mass incarceration in the United States is often framed as the result of crime trends, public fear, or political ideology. But that framing is way too simple. I’ll go one step further and say it’s not just simple, but it’s deceptive, because it actually obscures one concrete driver: money.

Over the last several decades, incarceration policy has been shaped not only by lawmakers and courts, but by a dense financial ecosystem in which private prison operators, service vendors, and political institutions reinforce one another. Corporate campaign contributions, model legislation, and procurement contracts have created significant incentives for mass incarceration, rewarding punitive policy choices, expanding detention capacity, and normalizing longer sentences, regardless of public safety outcomes or cost effectiveness.

By the end of this article, you may finally have a better idea of why the “Land of the Free” incarcerates more people than any other country (including Russia) on the planet: the almighty dollar.

This analysis traces how companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic use political spending and policy partnerships to shape incarceration outcomes; how organizations like American Legislative Exchange Council translate corporate interests into law; and how peer-reviewed research, federal investigations, and budget analyses consistently show worse outcomes for safety, cost, and rehabilitation.

The result is not some abstract conflict of interest. This is a very real structural pipeline that converts incarceration into revenue, policy into product, and human confinement into a growth strategy.

Money in Motion: The Scale of Political Influence

Private prison companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) have invested heavily in political influence through donations, PACs, and lobbying. In the 2016 election cycle alone, private prisons gave a record $1.6 million to candidates, parties and outside spending groups, nearly triple what they’d given in 2014.

The financial engagement has only intensified. 

During the 2024 election cycle, GEO Group employees and its political action committees contributed a total of $3.7 million to candidates, outside spending groups and other political committees, with the company contributing $1 million to Trump’s Make America Great Again super PAC. GEO Group became the first corporation whose PAC maxed out to former President Donald Trump’s campaign in late February 2024, and that same month, the company used a subsidiary to give an additional $500,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC.

The industry’s partisan alignment is stark. Republicans received 92 percent of $3.7 million in contributions affiliated with GEO Group and 96 percent of the $785,000 in contributions affiliated with CoreCivic during the 2024 cycle. The GEO Group Inc. Political Action Committee contributed more than $670,000 to Republican candidates and aligned PACs over two years, while contributing approximately $17,500 to Democratic candidates and causes; CoreCivic’s PAC saw more than $277,000 of its $300,000 in contributions go toward Republican candidates and political action committees.

Under the Trump administration, this investment paid dividends. GEO Group’s revenue grew from $2.17 billion in 2016 to $2.35 billion in 2020 as ICE opened 40 new detention facilities. After Trump was reelected in 2024, GEO Group’s stock price soared by about 41 percent and CoreCivic’s by nearly 29 percent.

Who’s Receiving the Money? Top Political Recipients

According to data from OpenSecrets and the National Institute on Money in Politics, key recipients of private prison contributions include:

Federal Level (Career Totals): The industry has concentrated its giving on members from states where they operate facilities, particularly Texas, Tennessee, and Florida.

2018 Election Cycle Top Recipients: While specific dollar amounts for individual recipients vary by cycle, Democratic incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas has received at least $9,700 from GEO Group’s PAC and $6,000 in donations from CoreCivic between 2017 and the end of 2019, making him one of the few Democrats to receive substantial support from the industry.

State Level: An analysis of state-level contributions from 2009-2016 found that California Governor Jerry Brown received a total of $122,100 in private prison-related contributions, making him the top gubernatorial recipient during that period. This is particularly notable given that the private prison industry flourished in California under his direction, with prison contracts expanded even as other states started to pull back.

The Policy Impact: ALEC and Model Legislation

These financial ties directly translate into policy influence. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded organization where lobbyists and special interests vote as equals with elected representatives on templates to change laws, behind closed doors with no press or public allowed, has been instrumental in driving mass incarceration.

ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws; literally all of the things that are now bleeding the system dry and harming communities across America. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. Truth in Sentencing laws imposed mandatory minimums and in many states, have been struck down as unconstitutional.

CCA has long held a co-chair position on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force, as has the National Association of Bail Insurance Companies.

Leveraging a cache of leaked documents containing a staggering total of 800 model bills, researchers found that ALEC seeks to expand the private prison industry through three pathways:

• promoting greater use of private prisons, goods, and services
• promoting greater use of prison labor,
• and increasing the size of the prison population.

Looking on, it sure does resemble legalized slavery, doesn’t it?

The Academic Evidence: Legislative Behavior and Financial Rewards

Multiple peer-reviewed studies have documented the connection between private prison interests and punitive legislation:

Immigration Policy Research: Researchers Loren Collingwood, Jason L. Morín, and Rachel Torres found that private prison companies typically make political donations after House members cosponsor punitive immigration legislation. Yes, you read that right. The private prison industry sends off money to legislators who support immigration policies penalizing or disciplining undocumented immigrants.

Their research, published in the journal Business and Politics, reveals a troubling pattern: financial payoff is higher for members of Congress who face more severe political risks when supporting legislation aligned with special interest groups.

A complementary study found geography plays a role as well. Legislators representing districts where private prison companies contract with ICE to manage or own detention facilities disproportionately co-sponsor punitive immigration legislation designed to increase immigrant detention via tough enforcement laws.

Systemic Impact: As the private prison industry continues to prioritize political influence as part of its long-term growth strategy, it contributes to the growing privatization of the immigration detention system and solidifies the punitive nature of U.S. immigration enforcement and policymaking.

Case Study: Mississippi’s “Operation Mississippi Hustle”

The dangers of this system are not merely theoretical. Operation Mississippi Hustle was a federal investigation that revealed a long history of corruption and bribery beginning as early as 1997, resulting in indictments against Chris Epps, long-serving Commissioner of the Department of Corrections, who had received bribes and kickbacks worth at least $1.47 million, based on contracts worth $868 million with private prison operators and related services.

In February 2015, Epps pleaded guilty to bribery and filing a false income tax return after federal prosecutors said he accepted at least $1.4 million in bribes and kickbacks while in the top position of commissioner in exchange for steering more than $800 million worth of state prison contracts. U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate sentenced the former commissioner to just under 20 years behind bars and called it “the largest graft operation in the state of Mississippi.”

Attorney General Jim Hood settled all eleven lawsuits filed against government contractors involved in the Chris Epps bribery case for a total of $26.6 million, with major corrections contractors including Management and Training Corp., GEO Group and Global Tel Link (GTL) being part of these settlements.

The Myth of Cost Savings

One of the primary justifications for private prisons has been cost savings to taxpayers. However, comprehensive research reveals this claim to be entirely flat and largely unfounded.

As early as 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office reviewed multiple studies and found inconclusive evidence for cost savings, concluding that researchers couldn’t determine whether privatization saved money. More recently, a meta-analysis by the University of Utah’s Criminal Justice Center found that cost savings from privatizing prisons are not guaranteed and appear minimal, concluding that prison privatization provides neither a clear advantage nor disadvantage compared with publicly managed prisons.

The Bureau of Prisons claims private facilities cost on average 17 dollars a day less per prisoner to operate. But how do they do it? A 2016 study by the Brookings Institution found those savings are achieved primarily by hiring fewer correctional officers and paying them less, raising significant questions about safety and quality of service.

State-level analyses expose the myth even more clearly. Although Florida law requires prison privatization to result in a 7% cost savings, analysis of the state’s private prisons by the Florida Center for Fiscal and Economic Policy found that there was no compelling evidence that any cost savings have actually occurred.

In fact, when considering long-term costs, private prisons may actually be more expensive. A dynamic analysis considering the tradeoff between cost efficiency and recidivism rates over a 25-year time horizon found that total inflation-adjusted costs are approximately 1.5% higher for private prisons than public prisons, and over a 40-year time horizon, private prisons are 3% more costly than public prisons.

A 2016 Department of Justice Inspector General report documented serious problems with federal private prisons, finding that in most key areas, contract prisons experienced more safety and security incidents per capita than their federal counterparts, and revealing improper billing practices by the contract facilities that result in improper payments by the government.

Quality of Service: Violence, Safety, and Recidivism

Beyond cost considerations, private prisons consistently underperform public facilities on critical quality metrics:

Violence and Safety: Multi-prison studies have found higher rates of violence in private prisons than in public prisons, with an analysis by Bloomberg Business finding that assaults were three times more frequent at Mississippi’s four private prisons than at the state’s public prisons.

A study using the 2011-12 National Inmate Survey found that respondents in private jails reported higher levels of gang activity in their facility, more had belongings stolen while detained, and fewer individuals believed the facility was adequately staffed or that corrections officers ended fights quickly.

Recidivism Outcomes: Not sold yet? The research on recidivism is even more damning. Most studies conducted in different states found either no significant difference in recidivism rates between private and public prisons or higher recidivism rates after incarceration in a private facility.

A Minnesota study using propensity score matching found that offenders who had been incarcerated in a private prison had a greater hazard of recidivism in all 20 models tested, and the recidivism risk was significantly greater in 8 of the models.

Studies demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% and 22% higher when compared to public prisons.

Perverse Incentives: Research found that prisoners in private facilities had an increase in their sentence of four to seven percent, which equaled 60 to 90 days for the average prisoner, and that prisoners in every demographic, offense, and sentence length category accumulated more infractions if they were assigned to a private prison—receiving twice as many infractions as those in public prisons. Since infractions are used by parole boards in assessing early release, this creates a financial incentive to keep people incarcerated longer.

Exploitation Beyond the Prison Walls: The Hidden Profit Centers

While debate over private prisons often focuses on facility operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic, these companies represent only a fraction of corporate profiteering in corrections. Private prisons only hold about 8.5% of the total U.S. prison population; in public prisons, however, private corporations provide a wide range of services including phone calls, video conferencing, messaging, programming, food services, commissary, and security.

Telephone Exploitation: Two companies, Securus Technologies and Global Tel Link (GTL), have bought out almost all their competitors in the last several decades to gain control of over seventy percent of the prison call market, bringing in over $1.2 billion dollars per year through their contracts.

Incarcerated people and their families often have to pay $1/minute or more for a phone call because prisons and jails profit by granting monopoly telephone contracts to the company that will charge families the most. While many state prison systems have lowered their call rates in the last several decades, phone providers have taken advantage of the weak contracting and budgeting approach of small jails to set rates that are many times higher than those in prisons; for example, in Illinois, a phone call from a jail costs fifty-two times more than a call from a state prison, and in Michigan, a fifteen minute call from a jail can cost as much as $22.

The human cost is staggering. Nationally, one in three families with an incarcerated loved one goes into debt due to the fees associated with trying to stay connected, and of family members responsible for incarceration-related costs, 83 percent were women, with women of color disproportionately affected.

Commissary and Financial Services: Commissary vendors that sell goods to incarcerated people (and who rely largely on money sent by loved ones) is an even larger industry that brings in $1.6 billion a year. Prisons take a cut, deducting fees and charges before money is deposited into an inmate’s account, and they allow phone and commissary vendors to charge inflated prices in exchange for kickbacks to the agency.

The Structural Problem: Economic Incentives and Policy Outcomes

The relationship between private prison profits and policy is systematically distorted by economic incentives. Detention or release decisions made by DHS in individual cases must account for the need to keep numerous detention beds full to satisfy the contracts made with powerful private prison companies, and DHS regularly sets bond amounts at levels that are not correlated to flight risk or danger, but rather to the length of time that the individual must be held in detention to keep the available space full.

Vulnerable Populations: The Devastating Impact on Youth

The private prison industry’s impact on juvenile justice is particularly troubling. Research consistently shows catastrophic outcomes for incarcerated youth:

Mental Health and Trauma: While researchers estimate that upwards of two-thirds of young people in detention centers could meet the criteria for having a mental disorder, a little more than a third need ongoing clinical care—a figure twice the rate of the general adolescent population. Studies found that 51 percent of youth in detention met the criteria for one or more psychiatric disorders, with 46 percent of males and 57 percent of females having two or more psychiatric disorders.

Increased Criminal Justice Involvement: A 2013 study of more than 35,000 youth in the juvenile justice system of Cook County (Chicago), Illinois, found that incarceration in a locked juvenile detention facility resulted in a 22-26% increase in the likelihood of subsequent incarceration in an adult jail or prison, and a 2022 report in Michigan found that confinement in a juvenile detention center as a youth resulted in a 39% increase in adult arrests for violent offenses and a 40% increase in adult arrests for all felony offenses.

Abuse and Violence: One report found that almost one in ten incarcerated juveniles reports experiencing sexual abuse in juvenile correctional facilities, with rates nearly three times higher in facilities that house more than 25 juveniles at one time. Surveys of incarcerated youth consistently report high levels of violence and abuse during their confinement.

Long-Term Health Consequences: A national survey that tracked health outcomes from adolescence into adulthood found that any length of incarceration was associated with higher odds of having worse adult health, with incarceration for 1-12 months increasing the likelihood of poor general health in adulthood, and incarceration for more than 12 months increasing the likelihood of functional health limitations.

Pulling it Together: The Case for Comprehensive Reform

The cyclical relationship between private prison profits and political influence is neither theoretical nor minor; it’s completely entrenched in legislative behavior, campaign finance, corruption cases, and systematically poor outcomes for incarcerated individuals. The evidence from campaign finance data, peer-reviewed academic research, criminal prosecutions, and operational studies paints a disturbing picture of an industry that has:

1. Systematically shaped policy to expand its customer base through legislative influence and model bills
2. Failed to deliver on cost savings while cutting corners on safety, staffing, and services
3. Produced worse outcomes in terms of recidivism, violence, and rehabilitation
4. Exploited vulnerable populations including incarcerated individuals, their families, and especially children
5. Created perverse incentives that prioritize occupancy rates over public safety and rehabilitation

This system demands transparency and accountability, and comprehensive reform must include:

• Campaign finance reform to eliminate private prison political contributions
• Contract transparency requiring full disclosure of costs, outcomes, and fee structures
• Performance standards with enforceable quality metrics and independent oversight
• Prohibition of kickbacks from telephone, commissary, and other service providers
• Protection of vulnerable populations including eliminating private juvenile detention
• Evidence-based alternatives to incarceration, particularly for youth and non-violent offenders
• Fair pricing for essential services like telephone calls and commissary items

Breaking this destructive cycle requires recognizing that justice cannot be commodified without corrupting its fundamental purpose: protecting the public, rehabilitating offenders, and upholding human dignity.

Key Academic Sources:

• Collingwood, L., Morin, J.L., & Torres, R. (2021). “Cosponsoring and Cashing In: US House Members’ Support for Punitive Immigration Policy and Financial Payoffs from the Private Prison Industry.” Business and Politics, 23(4), 492-509.
• Collingwood, L., Morin, J.L., & El-Khatib, S.O. (2018). “Expanding Carceral Markets: Detention Facilities, ICE Contracts, and the Financial Interests of Punitive Immigration Policy.” Race and Social Problems, 10, 275-292.
• Duwe, G. & Clark, V. (2013). “Effects of Private Prison Confinement on Offender Recidivism: Evidence From Minnesota.” Criminal Justice Review.
• Lambie, I. & Randell, I. (2013). “The impact of incarceration on juvenile offenders.” Clinical Psychology Review, 33(3), 448-459.
• Liotti, M. (2016). “Hidden corporate profits in the U.S. prison system: the unorthodox policy-making of the American Legislative Exchange Council.” Contemporary Justice Review, 19(3).
• Mamun, S., Li, X., Horn, B.P., & Chermak, J.M. (2020). “Private vs. public prisons? A dynamic analysis of the long-term tradeoffs between cost-efficiency and recidivism in the US prison system.” Applied Economics, 52(41), 4499-4511.
• Mukherjee, A. (2021). “Do Private Prisons Distort Justice? Evidence on Time Served and Recidivism.” Journal of Law and Economics.
• Spivak, A. & Sharp, S. (2008). “Inmate Recidivism as a Measure of Private Prison Performance.” Crime & Delinquency, 54(3), 482-508.

Data Sources:

• OpenSecrets (Center for Responsive Politics): Federal campaign finance data
• National Institute on Money in Politics (FollowTheMoney.org): State-level campaign finance data
• Federal Election Commission: Official contribution records
• U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General: Federal prison oversight reports
• In the Public Interest: Private prison cost and quality analyses
• Prison Policy Initiative: Comprehensive corrections industry research