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Expanding Carceral Markets: Detention Facilities, ICE Contracts, and the Financial Interests of Punitive Immigration Policy

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Abstract

On the night of November 8, 2016, once election results showed an almost certain presidential victory for Donald Trump, private prison stock values increased. Trump’s harsh anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric, followed by his attempted crackdown on sanctuary cities (and immigrants more generally), had the potential to expand the carceral market to greater shares of undocumented immigrants. We develop a theory of carceral market expansion, arguing that private actors seek to expand carceral markets—for profit—just as in any other market. This paper examines whether private companies, like Core Civic and GEO, that contract with Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) to operate detention facilities exert influence over federal immigration legislation in the 113th and 114th Congresses. Specifically, we examine (1) whether campaign donations made by private prison companies and other contractors to legislators (carceral lobbying hypothesis), and (2) having a privately owned or managed ICE detention facility in a legislator’s district (carceral representation hypothesis) increases the probability that legislators will co-sponsor more harsh immigration legislation in the U.S. states. We find strong support for the carceral representation hypothesis but limited to no support for the carceral lobbying hypothesis. Implications are discussed.

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Notes

  1. While elections affect outcomes, stocks in green energy declined, and Walmart stocks remained stable.

  2. Interestingly, prison companies, such as CCA, have policies that prohibit them from “engaging in lobbying or advocacy efforts that would influence enforcement efforts” with respect to crime and illegal immigration. Yet, they have also admitted that they stand to benefit from legislation affecting their bottom line see http://ir.corecivic.com/static-files/01d82fd4-9aa6-41e5-b1ed-a5b76a3450ee.

  3. Future work will incorporate earlier Congresses, which will allow for a greater degree of causal inference by (1) assessing the change in probability of bill co-sponsorship among legislators who get shifted in and out of districts (due to 2010 redistricting) containing privately owned or managed detention facilities and (2) examining whether legislator bill co-sponsorship behavior changes as a result of new or closed detention facilities.

  4. See Appendix for the bill summaries

  5. We argue that bill co-sponsorship provides an excellent test of prison group influence. Unlike roll-call votes, bill co-sponsorship is more of a voluntary act in which legislators choose among a diverse set of policy issues. In this light, co-sponsorship serves as a stronger signal of legislative support (Rocca and Gordon 2010).

  6. Note, the length is a bit longer than 435 members by 2 years due to retirements, etc.

  7. Across the two Congresses, most districts-Congress observations do not have privately contracted ICE facilities (n = 814, 92%). 58 district-Congress observations have one facility, nine have two facilities, and three have four facilities.

  8. Table 8 in Appendix 2 presents coefficient estimates from a negative binomial count model. The substantive results remain unchanged.

  9. We also estimated models using just the money count from CCA/Core Civic and GEO Group as separate variables. These models also produced null results.

  10. We analyzed the data including MRP ideological estimates (Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2013). Our findings remained unchanged.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Breanna Javier for excellent research assistance, Becca Thorpe for her comments during the early phases of data collection, and Hannah Walker for organizing an APSA panel, and for her comments on an early draft of the manuscript. We also thank participants of the Immigration Research Group and Center for Social Innovation at UC Riverside, especially Karthick Ramakrishnan.

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  1. University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

    Loren Collingwood & Stephen Omar El-Khatib

  2. California State University, Northridge, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Jason L. Morin

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Correspondence to Loren Collingwood.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 4.

Table 4 Bills from 113th and 114th Congress used to create our bill co-sponsorship-dependent variable
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Appendix 2

See Tables 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Table 5 Model variable coding scheme
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Table 6 Model data summary statistics, minimum, maximum, mean, standard deviation
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Table 7 Predictors of punitive immigration bill co-sponsorship 113th–114th Congress
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Table 8 Predictors of punitive immigration bill co-sponsorship 113th-114th Congress
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Collingwood, L., Morin, J.L. & El-Khatib, S.O. Expanding Carceral Markets: Detention Facilities, ICE Contracts, and the Financial Interests of Punitive Immigration Policy. Race Soc Probl 10, 275–292 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-018-9241-5

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