CoreCivic Inc | AFSC Investigate (2024)

In 1984, CoreCivic became the first U.S. company to build and operate a private prison. As of 2021, the company operates its prisons under federal, state, and county contracts in three business models. Under the first model, the company owns and manages prisons; under the second, it manages government-owned prisons through manage-only contracts; and under the third, it leases some of its prisons to third parties for use by government agencies.

CoreCivic operated a total of 46 prisons and jails as of the end of 2021, 41 of which the company also owns and five are government-owned which the company only operates. 26 are for the criminal punishment (non-immigration) system: Six for the U.S. Marshals Service and one for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), four for the State of Tennessee, three for the State of Georgia, two for Colorado, two for Ohio, one each for Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Montana, Oklahoma, and two for counties in Florida and Indiana.

In January 2021, President Biden issued an executive order ending federal use of private prisons. The company reported this as a major risk factor for its investors. CoreCivic has sought ways to circumvent limitations to its federal contracts by contracting with county and state facilities that hold federal prisoners. For example, in May 2021, when one of its contracts with the USMS expired, CoreCivic signed a contract with Mahoning County, Ohio, to hold USMS detainees.

CoreCivic’s prisons have long faced allegations of inhumane living conditions, excessive use of force, prolonged use of solitary confinement, forced prison labor (see more below), medical negligence, physical and sexual abuse, spying and voyeurism, overcrowding, understaffing, and other problems. In Tennessee, for example, a 2020 audit revealed that CoreCivic often fails to investigate sexual abuse and harassment allegations; keeps inadequate medical and mental health records; and frequently closes down prison programming and services, including recreation time and transportation to and from medical appointments, due to understaffing.

Other CoreCivic prisons have become particularly infamous for their high rates of violence and instances of medical negligence. When managed by CoreCivic, Dawson State Jail was deemed “the worst state jail in Texas.” At least seven individuals incarcerated at Dawson died while the jail was operated by CoreCivic. In 2013, after Texas state lawmakers decided not to renew the contract, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice closed down the jail.

Similarly, Idaho’s largest prison, which was built and operated by CoreCivic, was once nicknamed “Gladiator School” because of repeated violent incidents allegedly caused by CoreCivic’s decision to cede “control to prison gangs so that [it] could understaff the prison and save money on employee wages.” Idaho lawmakers severed the contract with CoreCivic in 2013 and announced that they would search for a new company to operate the prison. As of 2022, the prison is operated by state authorities, however in 2020 Idaho started incarcerating people in a CoreCivic prison in Arizona.

In addition to its operations in the U.S., CoreCivic owns 50% of AgeCroft Prison Management, a joint venture with Sodexo that operates a prison—HM Prison Forest Bank in Salford, England—for the UK government. The prison was constructed by CoreCivic in 2000 and is under contract with the company until 2025.

CoreCivic has owned and managed private immigration jails since its inception. In fact, the company’s first prison in 1984 was a Houston motel hastily remodeled to incarcerate immigrants. The company owns and/or manages 12 immigration jails for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as of 2021. Combined, these jails have the capacity to incarcerate 16,398 people.

ICE is the single largest client of CoreCivic, and its contracts alone generated 30% of the company’s 2021 revenue. Following the Trump administration’s 2018 announcement of its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy and plans to add 15,000 more beds to facilitate family detention, CoreCivic’s stock prices increased by 13%. The company’s CEO reported to shareholders that these policies have created “the most robust kind of sales environment [the company] has seen in probably 10 years.”

CoreCivic lied about its involvement in family separation. Since 2014, CoreCivic has operated ICE’s largest immigrant jail, the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, TX. The jail, which CoreCivic leases from its owner Target Hospitality, has capacity to hold 2,556 people and until 2021 was designated for mothers and children. In 2020, CoreCivic filed a defamation lawsuit in an attempt to silence reporting on its participation in family separation. The lawsuit was dismissed, finding that the company “did, in fact, operate detention facilities for parents separated from their children.” ICE released the last families that were held at Dilley in 2021 and started using the prison to jail adults.

CoreCivic’s immigration jails have been implicated in numerous human rights abuses, including sexual and physical abuse, forced labor, medical neglect, excessive use of solitary confinement, deprivation of food and water, and transfers to “harsher facilities” or deportations of individuals who protest these abuses. A 2020 congressional investigation found that CoreCivic’s negligence and systemic failures in medical care resulted in various injuries and the deaths of at least two other immigrants in 2017 and 2018.

Similarly, a 2021 investigation into the 2018 suicide of Efraín Romero de la Rosa, who was held at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, found that CoreCivic staff had falsified documents, improperly confined de la Rosa to disciplinary solitary confinement, and neglected to follow proper mental health care procedures. A 2020 lawsuit—Jane Doe v. CoreCivic—filed in Texas alleged that three women held at a CoreCivic immigration jail were denied medical and mental health treatment after they were assaulted by three men held at the same jail. Hours after the assault, ICE deported the three women to Mexico via a CoreCivic-owned TransCor bus.

Immigrants jailed at CoreCivic prisons throughout the country have engaged in multiple hunger and labor strikes to protest such abuses, which were exacerbated by the company’s inadequate response to COVID-19. During 2020-2021, strikes broke out in CoreCivic immigration jails in California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Ohio. A lawsuit filed on behalf of nine individuals who participated in hunger strikes at New Mexico’s Torrance County Detention Facility reveals that CoreCivic guards have retaliated against strikers by attacking them with pepper spray and moving them to poorly ventilated, confined spaces.

CoreCivic routinely uses prison labor as part of its prison operations, paying incarcerated people as little as 10 cents per hour to work as groundskeepers, janitors, landscapers, food servers, painters, orderlies, barbers, shoe shiners, and education or library aides. These jobs are exempt from most of the workplace protections and benefits that apply to workers who are not incarcerated. This cheap, or sometimes free, labor saves CoreCivic millions of dollars each year.

Some people incarcerated by CoreCivic work for specialized industries, including carpentry, construction, masonry, plumbing, and electrical engineering. The company’s Crowley County Correctional Facility in Colorado, for example, operates a carpentry training program, which makes furniture for the non-profit Habitat for Humanity. Because they are labeled “students,” workers in the program are not compensated for their labor.

While CoreCivic portrays prison jobs as “voluntary work programs” or vocational training, some workers have been forced to perform labor under the threat of punishment. For example, a 2020 lawsuit filed against the company by four individuals incarcerated at one of its Colorado prisons alleged that they were forced to work for 42 cents per day. Refusal to comply with work assignments, such as sweeping kitchen floors for 10 cents per hour, resulted in the loss of visitation, good time earnings, commissary access, or other punishments.

In another case, people incarcerated at CoreCivic’s Northwest New Mexico Correctional Center were reportedly forced to sew face coverings and other personal protective gear at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Although the New Mexico Department of Corrections claimed that those who made these garments did so voluntarily, its own policy states that individuals may be assigned work “without their consent (...) in order to meet the Department’s needs for inmate labor.”

Forced labor extends to CoreCivic’s immigraiton jails. Similarly to criminal punishment (non-immigration) prisons, immigrants at CoreCivic jails perform the day-to-day maintenance of their jail. They are forced to wash laundry, clean their jail, prepare and serve meals, cater law enforcement events, perform clerical work, provide barber services, manage jail libraries, and maintain the jail exterior and landscaping. Regardless of how many hours they work, most report being paid only $1 per day. As such, forced labor programs at CoreCivic’s immigration jails are often referred to as “Dollar-a-Day'' programs.

Between 2017 and 2019, CoreCivic was sued at least six times by immigrants who were forced to work in its jails. Two lawsuits, Owino v. CoreCivic and Gonzales v. CoreCivic, were filed in 2017 in California; three others, Barrientos v. CoreCivic, Ndambi v. CoreCivic, and Martha Gonzales v. CoreCivic, were filed in 2018 in Georgia, New Mexico, and Texas, respectively; and another was filed in 2019 in San Diego.

Five of these lawsuits allege that the prison labor program in CoreCivic immigration jails, which the company claims is a “Voluntary Work Program,” violates the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s prohibition of forced labor. While these cases are still ongoing, courts ruled in the Gonzales and Barrientos cases that the anti-trafficking law applies to private immigration jails.

According to these lawsuits, immigrants who refused to work while imprisoned were threatened with punishment and the loss of basic necessities. CoreCivic requires the immigrants it imprisons to purchase everyday items, including soap, blankets, and toilet paper, from the company’s commissary, in addition to paying for phone calls. For many, the only way to afford basic necessities and phone calls is to participate in work programs. Those who refuse to work double shifts or work while sick, as well as those who protest unsafe work conditions, are threatened with solitary confinement, the loss of family visitation, and criminal prosecution.

Furthermore, individuals who refuse to work may be forced to remain in open-dorm housing units instead of safer, more private, two-person cells. Immigrants refer to these open dormitories as “El Gallinero,” or “the Chicken Coop” because of their overcrowded living quarters and harsh conditions.

CoreCivic’s use of forced labor extends beyond its prisons and jails to the company’s residential reentry centers. In 2020, a Denver councilwoman reported that she had received letters from residents and former employees of CoreCivic-owned halfway houses alleging forced labor.

CoreCivic is the second-largest “community corrections” company in the U.S. It owns and operates 26 residential reentry centers (halfway houses) as of 2021, through contracts with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP); the states of California, Florida, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming; and counties in Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. These centers have a total capacity to hold 5,049 people who are either in the final weeks of their sentence or who have been diverted there as an “alternative” to incarceration.

CoreCivic began its expansion into the “community corrections” industry in 2013, with the acquisition of Correctional Alternatives Inc, a small company specializing in residential reentry programs and “home confinement” in San Diego. This expansion was, in large part, a strategic response to increased public scrutiny surrounding the use of private prisons in the U.S.

Between 2015 and 2016, CoreCivic aggressively expanded this side of its business by acquiring Avalon Correctional Services Inc, Correctional Management Inc, and four facilities formerly owned by Community Education Centers Inc. In 2019, CoreCivic acquired Rehabilitation Services Inc, which comprised two residential reentry centers in Virginia that serve the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

In 2015, CoreCivic stated that the “residential re-entry space is an attractive place for [it] to be overall,” and that its continued expansion into the industry will build upon the capacity of its prisons, provide “attractive real estate investment[s],” and offer “solutions” to government agencies that may be resistant to the private prison industry.

Like its prisons, CoreCivic’s residential reentry centers have long-documented histories of abuse, neglect, and mismanagement. In 2019, for example, Colorado inspectors found that CoreCivic staff at two halfway houses failed to properly document 39 medical emergencies and 15 other serious incidents, eight of which were related to Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) standards. Residents and former employees of the centers also complained of the facilities’ unsanitary conditions, lack of sufficient food, and use of forced labor.

In Oklahoma, multiple violent incidents at a CoreCivic’s reentry center in 2019 resulted in the transfer of at least 15 individuals to higher-security centers. Before that, in 2016 and 2017, at least three people died at CoreCivic’s Tulsa Transitional Center halfway house. In 2017, families of two of the deceased filed a wrongful death lawsuit against CoreCivic, alleging that it repeatedly denied the residents’ requests for medical attention in the week leading up to their deaths.

Complementing its expansion into the “community corrections” industry, CoreCivic has also acquired several “electronic monitoring” companies over the years.

In 2018, CoreCivic acquired two such companies: Recovery Monitoring Solutions (RMS), and Rocky Mountain Offender Management Systems (RMOMS). RMS sells GPS tracking devices (such as ankle shackles), remote alcohol monitoring technologies equipped with facial recognition, and other surveillance tools to courts and other government agencies. As of 2019, the company claims that it monitors more than 33,200 people. RMOMS provides GPS monitoring devices and alcohol/drug testing technologies to more than 155 government agencies across eight states.

CoreCivic claims that its electronic monitoring systems and drug/alcohol testing technologies offer an “alternative to incarceration,” keeping individuals from returning to prison or from being incarcerated in the first place. However, activists, legal advocates, prison industry researchers, and individuals who have been placed under such monitoring and surveillance have argued that, instead of creating an alternative to incarceration, these technologies have created a new form of incarceration: open-air digital prisons.

CoreCivic provides “prisoner and detainee transportation,” including deportation services, to federal, state, and local prison agencies through its subsidiary TransCor America, which it acquired in 1994. Serving over 2,000 agencies across the U.S. since 1990, TransCor is one of the largest prison transportation corporations in the country.

Over the years, TransCor has faced numerous accusations that its drivers have physically and sexually assaulted incarcerated individuals during transport. For example, a 2020 lawsuit filed in New Mexico—Youngers v. CoreCivic— alleges that TransCor drivers’ negligence resulted in the death of Roxsana Hernandez during an 11-hour trip from San Diego to a CoreCivic prison in New Mexico. Hernandez, a transgender woman living with HIV, was denied access to a restroom, adequate medical care, and sufficient food and water, despite exhibiting visible symptoms of distress and illness. Just days after arriving at New Mexico, Hernandez died of a combination of septic shock, dehydration, medical starvation, and organ failure.

Other allegations of TransCor drivers sexually, physically, and emotionally abusing their passengers span some 30 years. In 2008, a TransCor driver employed in Florida was arrested after taking two incarcerated women to a hotel to have sex with them. In 1998, TransCor guards raped an incarcerated woman while she was being extradited from Texas to Colorado. Similar cases date back at least to 1993.

Through the for-profit model of private prisons, CoreCivic and other private prison companies are incentivized to increase their profits through the expansion of the criminal punishment system. Since 1998, CoreCivic has influenced policy through federal and state lobbying, campaign contributions, and participation in associations that draft policy. In 2021, the company employed 15 lobbyists, 10 of whom previously held government positions.

Between 1998 and 2021, CoreCivic spent over $30 million on lobbying Congress and federal agencies on issues such as the construction and management of privately-operated prisons and detention facilities; financial industry practices; “prisoner re-entry programs and facilities”; funding for the BOP, ICE, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, and the USMS; and tax reform and Real Estate Investment Trusts.

In 2021, 2020, and 2019, CoreCivic lobbied the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the agency in charge of regulating federal banks, which in 2020 proposed a “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule. If passed, the rule would have prevented national banks and federal savings associations from denying their services to “controversial” companies—including private prison corporation—based on “political reasons.” After being finalized in January 2021, the rule was put on hold and was not implemented.

In addition to lobbying federal agencies on issues affecting its bottom line, CoreCivic also spends significant amounts of money on influencing state politics and electoral campaigns. Between 2002 and 2020, the company spent over $6 million on lobbying in California alone. Through its Political Action Committee (PAC), the company spent $3.5 million from 1990 to 2020 on political candidates, with the vast majority of funds donated to Republican candidates.

For two decades, CoreCivic was a member and financial supporter of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was the initiator of much of the “tough on crime” legislation of the 1990s. During the 1990s, CoreCivic served as the Private Sector Chair of ALEC’s Public Safety Task Force. As part of this taskforce, CoreCivic worked with ALEC to pass Arizona’s 2010 infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070, which increased the number of immigrants sent to prison. In 2012, ALEC disbanded the Task Force due to public pressure and the departure of multiple corporate members. It is unknown whether or not CoreCivic is still a member of ALEC.