PROFIT CENTERS
In 2015, I spent four months working undercover as a guard at a medium-security Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) with the aim of reporting on the conditions inside a private prison for Mother Jones. Shortly after I began, I was shown a short promotional video in which two of the company’s founders tell the origin story of their business. In it, T. Don Hutto and Thomas Beasley recount how in 1983 they won “the first contract ever to design, build, finance, and operate a secure correctional facility in the world.” Hutto looks frail, with a shiny white head and oversize glasses, but he speaks with enthusiasm, recalling the story of his company’s first immigration detention contract like he’s giving a blow-by-blow account of a winning high school touchdown. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice), gave Hutto and Beasley just 90 days to get the job done. From that deal, CCA would grow into a $1.8 billion company that helped build the immigration detention system that President Donald Trump now plans to expand.
Rushed for time, Hutto explains, they convinced the owner of a motel in Houston to lease his property to them, eventually hiring “all his family” as staffers to seal the deal. They surrounded the motel with a 12-foot fence topped with coiled barbed wire. They left up the “Day Rates Available” sign. “We opened the facility on Super Bowl Sunday the end of that January,” Hutto recalls. “So about 10 o’clock that night, we started receiving inmates. I actually took their pictures and fingerprinted them… Several other people walked them to their ‘rooms,’ if you will, and we got our first day’s pay for 87 undocumented aliens.” Both men chuckle.
A federal judge called the conditions of Arkansas prisons run by Hutto “sub-human.”
Today, the company Hutto helped create is the nation’s
