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Featured Facts About Texas Private Prisons

  • The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in December 2005 there were 107,447 state and federal adult prisoners housed in private prisons, up 23% from 87,369 in December 2000.

  • By August of 1997 Texas had about 5,500 prisoners from other states housed in 22 facilities, generating revenues of more than $1,000,000 each week for private prison corporations.

  • Corrections Corporation of America lost $53.4 million in 1999, and cut nearly 40% of its workforce that year.

  • The Corrections Corporation of America – incorporated in 1983, and now the largest private prison company in the world – was launched in 1984 with a contract from the INS to open a 350-bed immigration “processing center” in Houston, Texas.

  • In 1997, Corrections Corporation of America pushed forward a proposal (for the second time in its brief corporate history) to take over the entire state prison system of Tennessee.

  • In 1993 The Economic and Social Council of the United Nations produced a report that reviewed the international human rights norms deemed relevant to the issue of prison privatization.  The author, Claire Palley, concluded that international standards require that prisons must be directly operated by public officials.

  • The Willacy County Processing Center is a 2,000-person private prison near Raymondville, Texas that was constructed in 90 days. The prison is a series of dome-structures made of a "synthetic-type" material. Source: MTC website

  • The private prison industry is capital intensive, and to finance and build new prisons, corporations have turned to a variety of “creative financing” schemes involving high-yield bonds, real estate investment trusts, and “securitization” schemes. (read more about prison financing)

  • In 1999, after two year's worth of highly publicized operational disasters in Texas, Ohio and New Mexico, private prison growth across the country began to stall, and in 2000 the capacity actually declined by almost 3,500 beds -- a three-percent decline from 1999. 

  • From 1984-1996 private prisons spread like wildfire across Texas. In 1984 the first private prison opened in Texas, and by 1996 there were 38 private prisons either operating or soon to open in the state.

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