November 9, 2016

Private Prison Stocks Are Shooting Up After Trump Win

They had declined sharply after the Obama Justice Department announced it would stop using private prisons.

An inmate at a private prison on Louisiana.Mother Jones

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Private prison stocks are shooting up following last night’s election of Donald Trump. CoreCivic (formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America) jumped 37 percent as of 11:30 ET; GEO Group went up 17 percent.

The leap stands in contrast with the trend over the past few months. After a blockbuster Mother Jones investigation of a private prison in Louisiana, the Department of Justice announced it would end its use of private prisons. CoreCivic and GEO Group lost roughly half of their stock value and continued to plummet after the Department of Homeland Security, which uses the prisons for immigrations detention, announced it would also review its private prison contracts. The department, however, ultimately decided to continue working with the prison operators.

While Hillary Clinton sharply critiqued the use of private prisons, Trump, who has run a campaign promising to deport the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, has publicly praised them. “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons,” he told MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews in June. “It seems to work a lot better.”

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate