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Comment by anonshadow | Hacker News Reader

This is the money shot : "Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.

The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense."

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GEO Group also operates similar facilities in Australia, and is publicly traded in the US stock market under the symbol GEO. For the quarter ending 12/31/2024, they had top line revenue of 608M, but pre-tax income came in at 24M, and carrying debt of 2.3B. Somehow with such thin profit margins, their stock is trading at a 4B market capitalization and carrying a 128 P/E (by comparison, Google carries a 20 P/E, Meta 24), i.e. "richly overvalued". It would be a damned shame if Australia started re-evaluating those contracts. Oh - and some of the risk factors that GEO notes in their last 10-K annual filing:

Efforts to reduce the U.S. federal deficit could adversely affect our liquidity, results of operations and financial condition.

We partner with a limited number of governmental customers who account for a significant portion of our revenues. The loss of, or a significant decrease in revenues from, these customers could seriously harm our financial condition and results of operations.

We are subject to the loss of our facility management contracts, due to terminations, non-renewals or competitive re-bids, which could adversely affect our results of operations and liquidity, including our ability to secure new facility management contracts from other government customers.

and also - this amazing level of self-awareness:

Adverse publicity may negatively impact our ability to retain existing contracts and obtain new contracts.

10-Ks are one of the last places to find actual honesty in business. We partially have SOX to thank for that.

You still do see plenty of trash in the 10-K's with all of the massaged messaging, but yeah.

I don't get the " tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights" and a foil blanket thing though. Why be so nasty? If you are making a business improperly detaining people it would only be likely to cause outrage and get it shut down?

I'm curious as a non American why no one stops this. I mean presumably both political parties have not bothered. Do people in the US think it's ok? I think if that stuff happened in the UK there would be a lot of protests.

Cost optimization.

Simple. It doesn't cause (genuine) outrage and it doesn't get them shut down. AOC for example, protested these private prisons during Trump's first term and went silent on them when Biden didn't close them.

Here is a tweet from soon after Biden took office in January 2021:

> People must understand the depth of what’s happening here: the President of the United States has ordered a halt to deportations. ICE, a federal agency, is refusing to comply.

> There’s no reforming this rogue dept. It’s time for a new, just vision.

https://x.com/AOC/status/1354211627940384768

A month later she was criticizing DHS for still having Patriot act powers, and lumped ICE with the same criticism:

> People have been writing about the deeply concerning issues with the structure of DHS for a long time.

> This is from 3 years before I was even elected.

> It’s not “fringe” to ask why FEMA & ICE are in the same Dept operation. Or question ICE’s operations

https://x.com/AOC/status/1364619004921413633

A day earlier she called for the abolition of ICE:

> It’s only 2 mos into this admin & our fraught, unjust immigration system will not transform in that time.

> That’s why bold reimagination is so impt.

> DHS shouldn’t exist, agencies should be reorganized, ICE gotta go, ban for-profit detention, create climate refugee status & more.

This one is very apt given OP.

https://x.com/AOC/status/1364349732760518657

She continued, this on is in April 2021:

> A lot of people who are just now suddenly horrified at the dehumanizing conditions at our border are the same folks who dehumanize immigrants + helped build these cages in the 1st place.

> When we tried to stop this infrastructure over a year ago,we were overruled by BOTH parties.

> Fact is a lot of the politicians crying right now don’t work to solve either.

> They vote to grow ICE + CBP cages and they do everything to avoid addressing the root: US foreign policy and interventionism that destabilizes regions, the climate crisis, and unjust economic policy.

https://x.com/AOC/status/1377652851191787532

Your statement that Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez stopped protesting these private prisons while Biden was in office is simply factually wrong. And it was not hard to check it.

[flagged]

1) Tweets are not substantive action. I was actually involved in abolish ICE actions in real life and watched it die.

2) Tweets are even less meaningful when in real life she supported at every step the people who were actively propping up ICE. Including Bernie, who just recently said Biden could have done more on illegal immigration. (Biden deported more people than Trump 1).

AOC actually has a long track record of saying one thing and doing another, like the controversy over her “present” vote on weapons to Israel. This is the major reason why the Squad broke up. The most charitable interpretation of it is that she wants to gain cache within her party. But she doesn’t realize her party hates her.

If you want to continue to champion someone like that, I have no problem with it, at the least she’s effective at bringing people to the left after they are inevitably disillusioned by something her or Bernie does.

> I don't get the " tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights" and a foil blanket thing though.

It's cheaper, would be my guess.

These conditions though, it reads like the Standford experiment.

This is properly tantamount to prisoner abuse.

A lot of America (even parts of the left) still fall for the "hard on crime" narrative. They assume the sentences are just, and thus bad people deserve the worst. Even if our constitution has a clause agaisnt "cruel and unusual punishment".

never-mind that we've had decades of initiatives using such prisons as a form of soft racism, something so longstanding that is publicly declassified information. And people still don't care.

They would go further, and argue that it’s the people who argue against this narrative, are supporters of criminals.

I.e. - It’s gone from “you are too soft on crime”, to “you are supporting criminals.”

> If you are making a business improperly detaining people it would only be likely to cause outrage and get it shut down?

On the contrary. In the US in particular, there is a large and outspoken segment of the voting base that love to see this sort of thing.

> I think if that stuff happened in the UK there would be a lot of protests.

A lot worse happened in UK prisons in Northern Ireland and people in Great Britain widely cheered it on. Target the right minorities and there'd be no shortage of supporters in Westminster.

CoreCivic & Co. then sounds like a good target for a DOGE analysis.

follow the money as always. Same reason why US has the highest incarceration date. Incentivize people to be put in cells, and they'll optimize for it.

Hence why I'd rather revamp the incentives towards punishing recidivism and completely nailing petty imprisonments.

Makes complete sense to me. That's how every other business works. Number of detainees is a mostly linear input (aside from the real estate) to opex.

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