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

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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.”

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