Captivity Should Not be For Sale
Most people I know who lean conservative share a common belief about the world. They trust private organizations more than government because they have seen how slowly government moves and how easily public systems lose sight of the individual. I understand that instinct. I grew up around it. I still think there is wisdom in the idea that power should be held in check, no matter where it lives.
But there is a corner of privatization that has drifted far beyond anything conservatives imagined. It sits inside the machinery of immigration detention. It is a system built on the appearance of efficiency, yet shaped by incentives that have nothing to do with public safety or justice. It is a place where private companies make more money when more human beings are locked away. And it raises a question that cuts through politics. What happens to a society when captivity becomes profitable.
The first private immigration detention contracts began in the early 1980s. The federal government turned to outside companies to handle a surge of migrants without building new public facilities. In 1984, for example, Corrections Corporation of America, now known as CoreCivic, turned a small motel in Houston into a makeshift immigration lockup under contract with the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. What began as a stopgap experiment quickly hardened into an ongoing business model.
Over the decades that followed, the number of detention beds expanded, and the role of private companies expanded with it. Today, the vast majority of people held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are in facilities that are owned or operated by private prison corporations, especially GEO Group and CoreCivic. Many of the largest detention centers in the country are run by these firms. Their business depends on a steady supply of detainees. Their revenue grows when more people are held and when they are held for longer periods.
This is not a free market in any meaningful sense. The government is the only customer that matters. For many facilities, contracts include guaranteed minimum payments for a fixed number of beds, whether those beds are full or not. In practice, that means the government pays for cages even when they sit empty. When the beds are full, the payments rise. When policy shifts toward more aggressive detention, the companies see higher earnings and higher stock prices. The incentive is simple. There is money to be made when more people are locked up.
The loop does not end there. The same companies that rely on these contracts also spend money in politics. Executives and subsidiaries make campaign contributions. They give to super PACs and political committees that support candidates promising tougher immigration enforcement and bigger detention budgets. Once in office, those candidates have the power to expand or renew the very contracts that feed the companies’ revenue. Public money flows in one direction. Political money flows in the other. The pattern repeats.
It looks nothing like the small government conservatism people say they believe in. It looks like a private version of the deep state they fear. A network of interests that feeds on public money while working quietly to shape public policy. The difference is that this network is not made of anonymous bureaucrats. It is made of corporations that only thrive when more people are placed in their custody.
Supporters of privatization often argue that the private sector is more efficient and responsive. In many areas that can be true. But efficiency means something different inside a detention center. The easiest way to reduce costs is to spend less on food, medical care, staffing, mental health support and basic living conditions. Every dollar withheld from those needs widens the gap between what it costs to run the facility and what the government pays per detainee. That gap is profit. Over time, profit begins to shape decisions inside buildings that most of the public will never see.
The consequences show up in reports of overcrowding, inadequate medical treatment and preventable deaths. They appear in inspections that document unsanitary conditions and chronic understaffing. They surface in testimony from people who describe retaliation, neglect and abuse. These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable outcome of a structure that rewards cost cutting and prolonged detention.
None of this is a simple story of government failure or private failure. It is a story about what happens when we hand one of the most serious powers a society can hold, the power to detain, to entities that are designed to maximize returns. Some functions belong firmly within systems that answer to the public. The ability to take away a person’s freedom should be one of them.
People often say government should stay out of the way. I understand that sentiment. The problem is not government as an abstract idea. The problem is any institution that operates without real transparency or restraint. Corruption grows in those spaces whether the institution is public or private. Ideology does not protect us from incentives that pull in the wrong direction.
If we care about individual freedom, we have to pay attention to the systems that restrict it. When a private company earns money every time another person walks into a cell, the value of human dignity shrinks a little. When political contributions flow upward from those same companies, the line between policy and profit begins to blur. At that point we are no longer talking about limited government or healthy entrepreneurship. We are talking about a structure that rewards captivity and markets it as efficiency.
Freedom requires more than the absence of interference. It requires institutions that do not depend on human suffering to balance their books. It asks us to look honestly at the places where our incentives fail, even when those places are wrapped in the language of law and order. If we ignore that responsibility, we will continue to confuse corruption with competition. We will continue to mistake profit for accountability. And we will continue to build a world where the power to punish is quietly outsourced to those who gain the most from using it.