Amid escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislative crackdowns at the state and federal levels, private prison corporations are once again expanding their grip on U.S. detention policy. In fact, today roughly 90 percent of detained immigrants are held in privately operated facilities, the highest share in history.

This industry exists despite years of promises to phase out for-profit incarceration that started in 2016 with President Barack Obama and were renewed by President Joe Biden when he took office. Unfortunately, these promises focused exclusively on the Bureau of Prisons and excluded immigration detention. As such, through their presidencies most federal contracts with private prison corporations remained untouched in the immigration detention space.

Now, with another Trump presidency, the industry is instead preparing for explosive growth. On recent earnings calls, CoreCivic executives announced plans to triple the number of beds in their facilities within a few months. That would mean an additional $1.5 billion in revenue for the corporation, more than doubling its annual earnings.

Meanwhile, growing scrutiny of immigration detention practices has led to reports of abuse, medical neglect, and deaths in custody. Privatization, with the cost-cutting practices that define it, is the structural driver of human rights violations at these facilities.

We discuss this all at length in our recently released book, The Prison Industry: How it Works and Who Profits (The New Press, 2025). But as we also explain, private prisons corporations are just one piece of the sprawling prison industry. The U.S. carceral system is comprised of a vast and deeply entrenched network of public-private partnerships that make billions from incarceration and detention every year.

Commissary corporations mark-up basic hygiene items like toothpaste or tampons by 300 percent or more. Private healthcare providers routinely deny or delay treatment, contributing to suffering and preventable deaths behind bars. Private food vendors serve meals that are frequently expired or nutritionally inadequate, all in the name of cutting costs and maximizing returns.

To understand how we arrived at this moment, we must pause and get familiar with the larger machinery that gave rise to it. The private prison industry did not emerge in isolation; it is the product of decades of deliberate policy choices that fused mass incarceration and detention with private profiteering.