Knock LA

Over 30,000 immigrant detainees. More than 130,000 state and federal inmates. Millions in political spending. Billions in revenue.

The numbers depicting the privatized, for-profit prison industry are huge.

For a growing force of humanitarian and activist groups, those numbers don’t sit well.

Previously lowkey, high-profit corporate enablers of the United States’ sprawling detention and incarceration system are starting to come under greater scrutiny — in particular, for their relationship to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“If we want to abolish ICE eventually, we need to start also bringing awareness of the companies that support it,” said Brenda Gutierrez, a spokesperson for the #HumanityFirst Coalition, a collection of Southern California-based organizations who united in the months after Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies engulfed the national spotlight.

“As a coalition, that’s our main goal: making sure we hold these companies accountable for what they’re doing.”

#HumanityFirst has staged repeated sidewalk rallies outside an innocuous West Los Angeles office building where the regional headquarters for a company called GEO Group are tucked away on the 8th floor.

GEO Group and its duopolistic competitor CoreCivic are the market kingpins of planning, constructing, and operating private prisons and ICE detention centers, generating $4 billion in revenue between them in 2017.

This pair of prison giants has been on the margins of political consciousness for years. They’ve paid out millions in settlements and been the subject of several investigative exposés, which together point to patterns of forced labor, sexual abuse, and negligent deaths at their facilities.

Both companies are facing greater pressure than ever as rage against ICE continues to roil, a reasonable consequence given they combine to operate tens of thousands of immigrant detention beds.

But it’s 2018. Business-as-usual no longer exists. Focusing on the old foes doesn’t cut it. That’s why now, an even wider network of corporations that profit off the carceral state are coming under attack.

The head of AI at Amazon Web Services, Matt Wood, argued their facial recognition software’s Acceptable Use Policy would prohibit customers from “violating anybody’s Constitutional rights.”

Tech companies are one front. In June, over 300 Microsoft employees signed a letter condemning the company’s contracts with ICE when it came to light the software industry stalwart had touted its work helping ICE “utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.”

Microsoft responded by issuing a statement to distance itself from the family separation policy, but said nothing of renouncing ICE contracts. That wasn’t enough for employees, who crashed CEO Satya Nadella’s summer intern Q&A to deliver, via flash drive, a petition condemning the company’s ties to ICE.

Amazon received a similar letter from its employees and questions from Congressional lawmakers after the ACLU uncovered it was quietly selling facial recognition software to a smattering of police agencies.

But the attention hasn’t made an impact on Amazon policy.

Amazon gave no public comment other than “some quick thoughts” from the head of AI at Amazon Web Services, Matt Wood, who argued their software’s Acceptable Use Policy would prohibit customers from “violating anybody’s Constitutional rights.”

Separate from tech, another target has emerged more recently: big banks. In a demonstration that led to eight arrests, protesters gathered outside the Manhattan apartment of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon last week.

According to the policy group In the Public Interest, JPMorgan sustains the business models behind CoreCivic and GEO Group by loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, allowing the companies to run almost entirely on credit.

Organizers called out Dimon’s public-facing opposition to Trump’s immigration protocols, despite heading a business that plays a heavy hand in keeping the private prison industry afloat.

“It is time for Jamie Dimon to stop pretending to stand with immigrants while financing our suffering,” said Melissa Nunez, former CoreCivic detainee and member of the immigrant rights group Make the Road, in a statement for the group.

For now, there’s been little pressure on Dems to disavow the major banks and tech companies that make possible ICE’s mission and make profit for their efforts.

Whatever the CEOs of major banks may say in public, their institutions have made it clear that Trump’s prison and detention policies mean Big Imprisonment is a good bet going forward.

Spiegel reported that Deutsche Bank recommended in May 2017 that investors buy CoreCivic and GEO stock due to the exciting potential for “bed activations” — that is, more and more people being locked up.

JPMorgan Chase, also in 2017, asserted the stocks are still appealing despite the potential for “negative headlines” or lawsuits against the companies.

The political ramifications of a new movement to hound the private prison industry’s hidden facilitators — which altogether number in the thousands — are uncertain.

GEO Group and CoreCivic spend millions on powerful conservative lobbyists and donate generously to Senators, conservative PACs, and President Trump.

They occasionally cross the aisle and give blue, but since separations at the border began, Democrats have almost uniformly renounced or donated cash from the two companies.

For now, there’s been little pressure on Dems to disavow the major banks and tech companies that make possible ICE’s mission and make profit for their efforts. Of course, the lobbying and campaign contributions made by those sectors dwarf the spending of GEO and CoreCivic.

Monumentally important midterms and a bloodbath presidential primary on the near horizon may force Democrats up- and down-ticket to reckon with their connection to the imprisonment industrial complex.

Activists across the country are hoping intensified pressure on politicians and virtue-signalling CEOs will make a difference.

Some experts are skeptical of this belief.

“There’s a lot of business in incarceration that isn’t related to private prisons,” said Sharon Dolovich, Director of the Prison Law and Policy Institute at UCLA. “Well over half of public carceral facilities contract with private companies.”

Dolovich said those contracts include everything from medical care, food service, and laundry to manufacturing clear toothpaste tubes that cannot hide contraband. The wide-ranging and nuanced relationship between profit and imprisonment means eradicating private industry from the prison system may be impossible.

But at the very least, abolishing private prison operators would have palpable impact. In practical terms, it would mean the end of facilities with lower standards, higher rates of minority incarceration, and quotas for how many people must be locked up each night.

“Generally speaking, whatever is bad about public prisons is going to be worse in the private sector,” said Dolovich.

In philosophical terms, we would no longer live in a country where billion-dollar corporations profit off the “blind” justice system, brazenly lobbying for greater imprisonment of citizens and immigrants alike.

For now, there is a flash of anger galvanized by images of state-sponsored anguish. Time will tell what that becomes.

“We will show up at offices, we will write letters, we will do whatever we need to do,” said Brenda Gutierrez from #HumanityFirst.

“I do have some faith. It’s little, it’s small. But it’s there.”