34: Private Prisons: Where Prisoners Become Profit
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

This is an ad by BetterHelp. What?

What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better, even when it's impossible to make time for them. Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow.

Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory. Hi friends! How are you doing?

Great. I hope you're having a great day today. My name is Bailey Sarian, and I'd like to welcome you to the Library of Dark History. Oh, wait. Wrong show. This is a safe space. I had to finish it. Okay. This is a safe space. If you don't watch Murder Mystery Makeup, that's probably...

What are you doing, first of all? Um, second of all, theme song. Wrong show, different day. This is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who think, hey, is history really as boring as it seemed in school? Oh, nay, nay. This is where we can learn together about all the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories our teachers never told us about.

But we can't really blame them. It's like the system, the education system didn't teach us. Thank you. Okay. So for today's story, it's very heavy per usual. And well, to start it off, have you ever been arrested? Okay, great. It's kind of scary. People talk about prison being a place for rehabilitation. But I mean, is it? No. No.

The current system is set up for anything but being rehabilitated. And have you ever thought to yourself like, why? Why? Because other countries, they kind of focus on treatment. And here, we're more focused on locking people up and throwing away the key, you know? And why are we like that? Because there's a reason.

There's always a freaking reason. Okay, so, you know, first of all, a lot of us don't even know the difference between jail and prison and how it gets even more complicated when you throw a wrench in the gears, like the existence of private prisons. Yes, like what the hell is a private prison? Private prison, is that like private school? Is it exclusive? Is it for like rich people? Is it chic or something? Okay.

Honestly, if we're being very honest and transparent here, slavery really was the first form of a private prison. And this is a very important side note, just a very important note in general. This topic is very complicated. Okay, like I'm going to try and just give you the short streamlined version because private prisons as we know them today came about for tons of different reasons.

So you should definitely do some more digging on your own on this topic if it interests you. And yeah, so we're just like scratching the surface. Although private prisons started in the 1800s in New York, they didn't become popular until the 1800s in New Orleans. Yeah, New Orleans. Something fishy's been going on there.

Thank you. Let me open up my dark history book to the private prisons chapter. And we're going to try to scratch that little topic. It's not little. Spoiler. Hmm. That's not it. I'm surprised the book has made it this far. We rarely reference it or anything, but it's still, it's come a long way.

We appreciate you, book. Full of knowledge and sentences. Anyways, okay, so let's get into today's story. You ready? Buckle in, because it's a journey. So our story, once again, takes place in the 1800s. 1830s, if we're being exact. And it's the 1830s in New Orleans, to be even more exact. So, welcome to New Orleans, Louisiana. Gumbo, beignets, and Mardi Gras.

At the time, New Orleans was a huge trade hub with their biggest export being cotton. Now for our story, it's also very important to know that Louisiana was one of the only states in the United States where every enslaved person could go to jail instead of being sent directly back to the plantation if they escaped.

Got it. And if an enslaved person was sent to jail, the plantation owner would be compensated $300 by the state for their loss. Quote, unquote, loss. So yeah, plantation owners, the people enslaving themselves.

and torturing other humans would literally get paid by the state. So over time, the jails started filling up and they were running out of space. To fix this, Louisiana decided to build one of the nation's very first prisons in 1835. And let me point out there is a difference between jails and prisons.

Jails are only meant to hold people for less than a year or just until someone gets to their trial or bail. But prison is where you go for years. So jails at this time were usually just holding cells with metal bars, but prisons were a lot closer to what we think of today. The high fences lined with barbed wire, armed guards keeping watch and multiple cells inside of the prison instead of like just one or two at the sheriff's station.

Before we get much deeper into our story, this would be a good time to point out that the people benefiting from prisons were the same people who benefited from slavery. So when I get to the point where I'm talking about people exploiting the prison system for financial gain, it comes from the same greed and racism that created slavery.

And also because of that, there are two very different punishment systems in the United States. White people were sent to prison to repent for their crimes. Black people were sent to prison simply for existing crimes.

And in Louisiana in the 1800s, there were a lot of chances to just punish black people for existing. Now, the New Orleans prison wasn't the first of its kind, but it was definitely the most influential. It was completely run by the state of Louisiana, and the conditions here were about what you would expect from a prison in the early 1800s.

Prisoners would wake up at 4 a.m., march in a single file line to the factory floor, and work in complete silence from sunrise to sunset. That's right. They weren't allowed to speak to each other, the guards, or even the visitors. Oh yeah, the visitors.

These weren't normal prison visitors like friends or family. The prison was set up almost like a zoo for a 20, well, not almost like a zoo. It was like a zoo. For 25 cent fee, anyone could come watch the prisoners work the cotton looms in the factory. Holy shit. I know. What the hell? We could just end it there. I think that is shocking enough.

And across the street was a store. There was a store across the street where people could go buy items that the prisoners made at a discount. So like a gift shop? Yeah, before gift shops were a thing. At a prison. Great. And the quote-unquote zoo wasn't even the worst thing the prison did. For a fee, the prison would stow enslaved people away for traveling plantation owners. Like they were luggage or some shit.

And while these enslaved people were literally being stored, the guards would also discipline them for just 12 and a half cents. Plantation owners could have enslaved people whipped by guards. Holy shit. Yeah. For no reason other than they wanted them to. So yes, um, hi, this place or these places were very messed up, but they kept filling up.

And then in 1837, the U.S. economy hit the skids. Most historians agree it was because none other than Andrew Bathsalts Jackson didn't want to establish a central bank for the United States. And since the cost of trade was increasing every day, it created a Great Depression-type event called the Panic of 1837, where thousands of workers lost their jobs, farms, and their money.

Now, there was one industry that got hit pretty hard because of the panic of 1837, and that was cotton. And since Louisiana was the cotton capital of the world, they got hit the worst. And with the lack of cash, the state struggled to fund public services like prisons. So what was Louisiana to do?

Well, they allowed private investors to buy their very own prisons. The short answer to why Louisiana decided to sell their prisons to private investors? Money and racism. You see, Louisiana's prisons were filling up as more and more enslaved people were getting locked up for escaping the plantation. Plus,

Plus, it was getting more and more expensive to run the prisons, and they weren't bringing in the same amount of money because of the cotton crash. And this was becoming a giant headache for the government to run. Then the Louisiana government was approached by a wealthy investor with an exciting new idea. What if the government unloaded the responsibility and cost of running the prison onto the investor?

The investor would pay the government a small percentage of the profits from the prison labor and pocket the rest. Now, in exchange for taking on responsibilities like staffing, supplies, and maintenance, the new owner had full control over the prisoners. And this meant they could do whatever they wanted with them. They looked at this inmate population and were like, "Hey, what if we rented them out for like a little fee every day? Just another way to make some more cash."

And so they did exactly that.

This was called convict leasing, and it was extremely popular. Think about it like this. Let's say you own a big old prison that has 1,000 inmates. Knowing you have this workforce, you tell your friend who owns a cotton farm that you're willing to lease him a bunch of inmates to work his fields. Cheap labor for the farmer and easy money for you. And since prisoners weren't treated like actual human beings, there was no punishment if a leased prisoner died or

or maybe they were injured on the job. The prison owners didn't care what happened as long as they turned a profit. If that sounds a lot like slavery, that's because it kind of had the same goal.

Convict leasing was an intentional strategy to keep black Americans down. So if convict leasing was this popular when slavery was still going on, imagine what happened when slavery went away. Well, on December 6th, 1865, the 13th amendment outlawing slavery was ratified and the way prisons ran completely changed. But first let's pause for an ad break.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24-7, 365 days a year, so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.

Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere. And the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.

Now, I'm hoping that we're all familiar with the 13th Amendment and its slavery. But the 13th Amendment didn't actually fully abolish it. It actually just kind of complicated things. Because the first part says slavery in the United States is illegal. Yay. But then it also says slavery is illegal, quote, except as a punishment for crime, end quote.

So that means slavery isn't totally illegal. Someone just needs to commit a crime before they can be enslaved. Maybe you see where this is going. The 13th Amendment didn't establish the incentive to criminalize black people, but being black has always been criminalized in the United States. It was just the latest formation of what already existed. And that point can be driven home by the fact that at the same time, the 13th Amendment came into existence,

a bunch of laws started popping up across the country called black codes. Black codes were a set of laws that focused exclusively on ways to criminalize the actions of newly freed black Americans. That's not me saying that either. The language was literally written into the laws. For example, they often included the words, quote, end quote.

Indicating who the target was. One law in Mississippi criminalized black people from hanging out in large groups. In Florida, the formerly enslaved would be punished with the public whipping if they walked into an all-white church. And in Louisiana, all freedmen needed to have a job working for a white person or they could go to jail.

So the fact that the 13th Amendment states slavery can exist as punishment for a crime is a big freaking deal. So once the Black Codes were enacted, jails started filling up even faster. And when the jails filled up, inmates got sent to prison.

But while some people saw the exploding prison population as a problem, a lot of them, a lot of people, a lot of wealthy people saw them as dollar signs. Since plantation owners now had to actually pay their workers instead of enslaving them, operating costs increased rapidly. I know, paying for labor, what a freaking concept.

So many plantations and factories went out of business because they no longer had access to enslaved people. And one man saw a way to take advantage of all of this.

One man in every story. There's always one man. So let me tell you about this man. He was a former Confederate officer. He went by the name Samuel Lawrence James. Okay. And he was born on June 23rd, 1834 in Salem, New Jersey. But he moved to Louisiana at some point.

And Samuel L. James had become quite rich as a plantation owner before the Civil War. And now that the war was over, he was sitting on a huge mountain of cash that he wanted to protect. He knew the police, with the help of the Black Codes, were targeting the formerly enslaved with petty crimes like jaywalking and loitering. And since jails were filling up fast because of this, Sam had the idea to use his fortune to purchase his own prison.

But Sam wasn't like any of those other prison owners. Oh no, he was an innovator. Sam bought a ton of land, invested in heavy machinery, and built a full-blown factory right inside his prison. The factory was an immediate success because Sam was able to make cotton products for cheap. I'm talking real cheap.

And because he was able to do this, demand for products increased even more. And I'm sure maybe you can guess who is working the machinery for no money. Well, it's the prisoners. In some ways, the new system worked even better than slavery because it industrialized it. And at this time, industrialization was all the rage.

Suddenly, people like Sam were making bank off of all the goods his prisoners made. So Sam controlled Louisiana's entire convict labor force and supplied the state and all of its private businesses with labor. And this made him quite a rich man. He bought himself a lot of plantations,

but his favorite was a nine-bedroom mansion on a huge estate known as the Angola Plantation. This mansion was surrounded by billowing oak trees and open fields, and at the center of the estate was a lovingly cared-for garden. I know, it kind of sounds like a scene right out of a Southern romance novel, right? Well, unfortunately, it was all tended to by the inmates from Sam's prison. That's right, Sam rented out his whole inmates to himself.

His family used the inmates as personal laborers in their homes and on their property, housing them in a shack behind the estate. Now this sounds horrible because, um, yeah, hi, it was. And you might be surprised to find out the state of Louisiana actually thought so too. You see, in 1875, the Louisiana legislator actually banned convict labor from being used outside prison walls.

And they sent a letter directly to Samuel James telling him to give up his convict leasing program. So Sam stopped keeping prisoners at his home, right? No. He decides to convert his entire Angola plantation into a full-blown prison camp. This guy's a fucking idiot. And it's privately owned just like his other prisons. And this prison, why doesn't he just do the labor himself?

I don't know. It's just like an idea I just had right now. And this prison camp was a much cheaper racket to maintain, making him even more money. The government looked the other way because by this point, Sam was making the Louisiana government so much money, some historians say that he had become untouchable. Oh, gross. Now, wherever there is a huge profit, competition follows.

Convicts started being leased by imitators across state lines into Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama. At its peak in the 1890s, the prison-for-profit system had 27,000 convicts all over the South. But then two things happened. First, Samuel James died in 1894. Bye.

Second, by the late 1890s, convict leasing fell out of favor because inmates began to riot in response to being leased.

Fixing the prison became expensive, making it very hard for private prisons to maintain profitability. But private prisons themselves were never outlawed. They continued to exist in the background. But after a few decades, the legacy of Samuel James would rear its ugly head and the private prison system would claw its way back. But let's pause for an ad break. Hold on.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking. Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance.

It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts. Discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner and more.

So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year. So you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

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Hi, hello, welcome to the 1960s. The counterculture movement is raging. Flowers in people's hair, weed is everywhere, and the government is drugging college kids with LSD. You know, just normal 1960s stuff.

At this time, there was also a huge shift with policing and prisons because of the civil rights movement. That's largely because, as I mentioned earlier, prisons aren't really about reform or paying your debt to society. So prisons, in a way, are not so much about crime control as they are a

a form of controlling society. And the powers that be really wanted to control things when there was lots of unrest during the civil rights movement. The result, increased arrests and increased prison populations. So government-ran prison populations are increasing again,

And the entire time this is happening, the private prison system was just kind of chilling in the background. It wasn't the moneymaker it used to be, but it was ready for its moment back in the spotlight. It just needed to find someone to get it there. And that someone was Terrell Don Hudo.

But we're just going to call him Don. Now, Don was born on June 8th, 1935, in a place called Sinton, Texas. He was a son of a farmer who died when Don was only nine. And Don joined the army right out of high school and served for a few years before he left. And he was a very good man.

And then in 1967, he became the warden at the Ramsey Prison Camp in Texas. Now, the Ramsey Prison Camp wasn't a private prison and Don actually wouldn't get into the private prison game for a couple decades. But everything that happens next sets the stage for when he does. Don was known as a smooth-talking diplomat.

but also had a reputation for being tough as nails. This guy wanted to disrupt the system, shake shit up, and make a name for himself. So he ran the Ramsey prison camp a little differently. Normally, a warden is part social worker, part CEO, but

but Don made a name for himself as a great CEO and not so much a social worker. He wasn't there to reform anyone. He was there to make money. At this point, convict leasing was still illegal. So Don needed to figure out some other ways to make his camp more profitable. His big claim to fame in the warden game was the revolutionary idea of cutting costs in prisons by totally eliminating the needs for prison guards.

Sounds pretty progressive until you hear how he did it. Don didn't just get rid of the guards. He armed some of the inmates to keep watch over the other inmates. He dressed prisoners in a button-up shirt and jeans with a baseball cap, handed them a gun, and told them to make sure none of the other prisoners got out of line. And it turns out Don was a big fan of rebranding because he renamed these prison-turned-guards trustees.

But this wasn't a new idea. You see, plantation owners used tactics like this way back when. And Don was just following in the footsteps of Samuel L. even if he didn't know it. Don saved the prison mad cash by eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses just by getting rid of all those salaries. Suddenly, his prison was turning a serious profit. All around the country, governments wanted in on the cost-cutting measures Don was bringing to the table.

Don's reputation for using convict labor to maintain order made its way to the Arkansas governor who asked Don to run his state's entire prison system. Jeez Louise. So what does, of course, okay, look, of course, Don takes the position. It's a major upgrade for him. He's all stoked.

And what does he do when he gets to Arkansas? I want to call it Arkansas every time. Anyways, he gets there and he follows the playbook he wrote in Texas. Phase out prison guards, replace them with trustees, and boom, you're going to cut costs.

And as you can expect, when you start cutting costs and start cutting corners, things most likely start going wrong. So newspapers, they would start reporting a lot of different stories of inmate abuse that was happening at Don's prison, his prisons in Arkansas. But the worst stories were about something called the One Day Wonder Program. Has nothing to do with bread.

where young first-time offenders could be sentenced to prison for a day to learn what life would be like if they didn't straighten out. And it's probably no surprise that many of these young men were black, like a 17-year-old by the name of Willie Stewart. In 1971, Willie was convicted of burglary after stealing a candy bar. A candy bar. Just a candy bar.

And he was put into this one day wonder program. During one day in prison, Willie was ordered to pick cotton, forced to do 31 minutes of pushups, punched repeatedly in the face, chased by a car, had his head dunked underwater over and over. And he was even shot at by guards over a candy bar. After all of this, Willie, who let me remind you was only 17, he had a heart attack and died immediately.

All because of a candy bar. Jeez Louise. This wasn't an isolated incident either. At least 150 boys went through the same torture Willie endured. And this was inflicted upon people who were only in the prison for a day. Imagine what it was like for the actual inmates. I mean, life inside the Arkansas prison system was just awful.

One inmate said he was stripped naked and left in a completely dark windowless room for 28 days because he refused to work in the field. They blasted the air conditioning and wouldn't give him a blanket. And on top of that, they only fed him bread and little meat bars called grue. The man lost 30 pounds in 28 days. Other inmates reported only getting bread and syrup for breakfast before being forced to pick cotton all day.

And if they didn't pick enough, they weren't even given dinner or clean clothes. Instead, they were forced to stand against a wall day in and day out. And every time the media reached out to Don about inmate abuse, he said he never heard any complaints. Whether that's true or not, we don't know because zero records were kept at any of Don's prisons. Why would he keep records of his abuse?

And the state of Arkansas was just taking Don's word for it because he was making them so much money. So you're probably wondering how much money were they making? Well, in his first year in Arkansas, Don's operation brought in almost $1.7 million in revenue. That's about $11 million in today's dollars in one year.

In fact, Don turned a profit the entire time he was in Arkansas. This is probably why any complaints they received got brushed directly under the rug. Much like Samuel L. James, Don Hudo was untouchable. So the parallels between Samuel James and Don Hudo's careers are kind of obvious. Both of them got their starts in traditional prisons before cutting costs to make a profit.

Both of them dabbled in leasing convicts in their own ways. If Don Hudo's story ended here, the similarities might just be a weird coincidence. But the similarities don't end there. Because Don's career was heading where Samuel L's started a century before, private prisons. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking.

Yep, while you're listening to me talk, you're probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. But if you're not in some kind of moving vehicle, there's something else you could be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance. It's easy and you can save money by doing it from your phone. Drivers who save by switching to Progressive save nearly $750 on average. And auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts.

discounts for having multiple vehicles on your policy, being a homeowner, and more. So just like your favorite podcast, Progressive will be with you 24, 7, 365 days a year so you're protected no matter what. Multitask right now. Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customer survey who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables? The things you know make you feel better even when it's impossible to make time for them.

Like that workout you try to squeeze in between kids' activities, work, and everything else you have going on, and before you know it, it gets pushed to tomorrow. Sound familiar? But it's the moments when you feel like you have no time for yourself when those non-negotiables are more important than ever. Those are the things that keep you strong, healthy, motivated, and prepared to take on everything life demands of you. So why not make therapy one of them?

BetterHelp Online Therapy makes it easy to get started with affordable phone, video, or live chat sessions you can do from anywhere, and the option to message your therapist between sessions if anything comes up. Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash darkhistory today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash darkhistory.

The 1970s were a period of cultural transition for the United States. And then right in the middle of it all, Nixon announced drugs are public enemy number one. Maybe you remember we talked about that.

In another episode? Okay, great. So prisons started filling up even more because of drug arrests. And this meant, again, huge costs for both the state and federal governments. Now, politicians hate dealing with packed prisons because it usually means taxes have to be raised. So the government had a huge problem on its hands. So now I'm going to introduce you to two new people. One of them is named Thomas Beasley. And there's a doctor, Mr. Dr. Krantz.

His first name was legally Doctor. That was his first name. His name was Doctor. He wasn't a doctor. His name was legally Doctor. That's actually smart. Because then everyone would have to call you Doctor.

Okay, I see that move. Tom had recently been the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. So he had like a bunch of political connections. And Doctor was in real estate. So he was rich and knew how to get tons of land. Tom and Doc were at a party, smoozing and boozing, when another dude at the party approached them and put a bug in their ear. He's like, hey, let me tell you something. Opening a private prison would be, you know, a heck of a venture for a young man.

to solve the prison problem and, I don't know, make a lot of money at the same time. So Tom and Doc are like, oh my God, wow, that sounds like a great idea. The only problem? They didn't know squaddly shit about prisons.

But they did know of a guy who knew tons about profiting from prisons. That's right, they were thinking of this man, Don Hudo. You remember him because we talked about him two minutes ago. Thank you. So they knew him. I mean, small world, right? Yeah. Well, Don loved the idea of teaming up with Tom and Doc. He was a prison expert and he knew how to cut lots of corners to save lots of cash for the states he worked for. So why not take a cut for himself? Well,

Well, in 1983, Tom, Doc and Don created the Corrections Corporation of America, also known as CCA. And in doing so, they would create the private prison system as we know it today. The idea behind CCA was to go big, okay? Privatization was an easy sell in the United States because the free market was considered to be more efficient than big government.

So for CCA, making private prisons in the United States was like selling cars or real estate or maybe even selling hamburgers. Now, the idea here is like, hey, we don't have to own just one prison. They could be a whole large corporation that owned and managed many prisons and anybody could hire them to build a prison-like facility. But Don had been in the prison game for two decades now and he knew that privatizing prisons wasn't enough to maintain profits.

So he wanted to add one more special ingredient, immigration. President Ronald Reagan had recently announced a new detention policy meant to deter undocumented people from migrating. Now he used news reports about unrest among Cuban and Haitian immigrants to characterize them as, quote, hardened criminals, end quote.

And this became an excuse for weaponizing the southern border. If that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, you're right because it doesn't, but it somehow worked. And aided by the war on drugs and the U.S. border with Mexico becoming a battleground, Don Hudo and his merry band of chuckle fucks were ready to take prisoners and just make it rain.

So almost immediately after forming, Tom, Doc, and Don, they got $500,000 from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and also the Immigration and Neutralization Service, which today it's known as ICE. They got this money to run a facility in Texas.

But there was a catch. They had only 90 days to complete their new private prison. So they convinced the owner of a motel in Houston to lease his property to them. Then they surrounded the motel with a 12-foot barbed wire fence and called it a day. They're like, that works. Great. This motel prison was so sloppily put together and rushed that Don himself was photographing and fingerprinting inmates as they showed up. So why am I telling you about this weird-ass motel?

because this was the very first privately owned immigration center, a true expansion of the private prison nightmare. The federal government didn't even care that the prison was just a motel. Like, they're...

Yeah, they sure did not. On the first day alone, almost 100 detainees were booked and the government was like impressed by this. So now Tom, Doc and Don have everyone's attention. CCA starts getting investments from all different directions and people want them to build prison after prison after prison. But let's pause for an ad break.

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So the same year CCA opens its first center, Don is chosen as the president of the American Correctional Association. The American Correctional Association accredits prisons and other forms of correctional facilities. And if a prison isn't accredited, it can't operate. Point blank period. Making Don the president of the American Correctional Association is a gross conflict of interest. It's like a teacher telling you to grade your own work. You're going to give yourself an F?

No, you'd be dumb. Why would you do that? You don't want to sabotage your own success. Anyway, CCA continued to evolve over the years and at its peak would operate 22 federal facilities with over 25,000 prisoners. Every single facility was run as inexpensively as possible. The exact same way Don had always run his facilities. And every time somebody would bring up all the bad shit happening under their watch,

CCA would immediately pivot to escape accountability. This was big money and there wasn't a chance in hell CCA was gonna give it up.

So when one bad practice ended, I mean, another one would pop up in its place. Like there was something called the Voluntary Work Program, exclamation point. The Voluntary Work Program was big in CCA's immigrant detention centers. Detainees performed a wide variety of jobs from washing dishes to cutting hair to playing receptionist for the private facility manager. I mean, they were paid poorly in these jobs, but there's a huge problem here.

In another cost-cutting method, prisoners had to purchase everyday necessities like soap and toilet paper. Yeah, they weren't given these. Nope. And the voluntary work program was their only way to make money to buy these necessities. So can we even call it a voluntary project if it's the only way they can get what they need? Nope.

No, I don't think they, I don't think we can. One detainee would later recall working 18-hour days in a hot kitchen with no air conditioning in the middle of summer. After his shift, he tried buying more than one roll of toilet paper from the CCA store and was told to, quote, use his fingers, end quote.

But by forcing detainees to work in this program, CCA has made it unnecessary to hire more employees in these facilities. Lower cost equal more profits. So in the 90s, private prisons started to get more attention, attention they didn't really want. Prison reform organizations like the Sentencing Project had been exposing the awful conditions in private prisons for years, and their efforts really started to have an impact.

I mean, people saw the connection between private prisons and slavery, and now they couldn't ignore it. So private prisons started to be a harder sell. Then in, oh, remember when 9-11 happened? Yeah. Okay, so 9-11 happened. And locking up immigrants became much easier to do.

Dr. Krantz, who's not a doctor, even founded the Homeland Security Corporation with his son that same year while still being a part of CCA. Don and his chuckle buddies almost seamlessly shifted gears in order to keep their private prison corporation in business. So as state and federal governments dumped more and more cash into CCA, they would come up with even more ways to cut corners and save money.

CCA decreased inmates' medical care. If the food went bad, it was still served. Someone called out sick? I mean, they would just be short-staffed. And a new cost-saving maneuver was technology-based surveillance, which meant just putting up more cameras and decreasing the number of guards. Makes sense. They also reduced the training time of guards because training programs cost money. How much money do these people need?

And then bonuses started getting offered to department heads, not for their good performance, but for cutting costs. What could possibly go wrong?

Well in 2010, an inmate in CCA's Idaho facility filed a lawsuit saying the prison was so violent and understaffed that it was a gladiator school. That's what he called it. The lawsuit even referred to the guards as window dressing. CCA denied this at first, but in 2013, a full report came out in the Associated Press alleging that CCA was lying about their staff records but

by falsifying shift logs to conceal that the prison was understaffed. CCA admitted the report was true and lost their contract with the state of Idaho.

I'm sure they didn't really care. Soon, reports started popping up about other CCA facilities that were experiencing the same level of violence, leading to international news reports of neglect throughout their facilities. And you would think, with all this outrage and upset, that these places would be shut down. And we could say, oh, wow, look at that. That was shitty. But now we're better.

But of course not. Nothing changed for the CCA. I mean, at first. Wealthy, powerful corporations are hard to take down if you haven't learned. And the records at private prisons aren't subject to any kind of public access laws like the Freedom of Information Act,

because they're private. Bitch loopholes. CCA in particular fought really hard over the years to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as public prisons. So it would take an insider to blow this wide open.

As you saw with the sentencing project, activists and organizations had been trying to break the private prison system down for decades. But when a journalist named Shane Bauer enters the scene in 2014, things really start to go mainstream. Shane was well known for reporting on life in prisons across the planet.

And Shane had heard some whispers about what CCA was doing and was willing to do whatever it took to figure out the truth behind what happens at these private prisons. Someone had to do it.

Shane would go undercover at one of CCA's private prisons down in Louisiana. Yeah, we're back full circle, huh? Within two weeks of filling out a job application online, Shane got an interview. Now, he used his real name and personal information and even let them like know he was a reporter who wrote about prisons for a living. So he wasn't like lying. So he was like,

So CCA had access to a lot of red flags, but none of the interviewers paid any attention to the details of his resume. They didn't even ask about the time he was arrested for shoplifting when he was 19. So right off the bat, Shane noticed something shady. Then in November of 2014, Shane got hired as a guard at a place called Wynn Correctional, which was a private prison that was owned by CCA and

and Shane learned the CCA way his very first day. What a rhyme. Every morning at 6:00 AM, Shane would show up for the morning meeting with all the staff on duty. Some days there were as few as 24 guards for 1500 inmates, which is much lower than the number of guards that CCA is contractually required to have.

The first thing Shane noticed at one of these meetings was that the staff at Wynn Correctional was willing to do whatever it took to get inmates in line. One of his lead officers told Shane that if he ever wanted to hit an inmate, he should call for backup and tell the inmates to knock it off. But only if there was a camera. Now, if there wasn't a camera, he was told to knock the fuck out of the inmate. And that's a quote.

The way they were supposed to deal with inmates was so aggressive that being exposed to tear gas was part of Shane's training as a guard. While Shane worked at Wynn, he said the guards used tear gas and similar chemical agents three times as often as other prisons in the world.

The assistant warden told him, quote, I believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid. And if these inmates want to act stupid, then we're going to give them some pain to increase their intelligence level. He also found out that the health care provided for prisoners was pretty much non-existent.

Shane met a prisoner who had lost his finger and legs after months of untreated infections. The prisoner would ask for any kind of medical care and made multiple requests to see a doctor, but towards the end, his foot was completely black with infection.

But every time he asked for help, the staff responded by accusing him of faking his pain and they would give him, I don't know, a couple of aspirins. But the worst thing Shane noticed had to do with the guards being replaced by cameras in important areas. Because there weren't like that many guards around to prevent the inmates from being violent towards one another, Shane saw multiple stabbings, sometimes right in front of him. And legally, if a camera was watching, there was nothing he could do about it.

In training, if Shane ever saw two inmates stabbing each other, he was told, quote, it's not worth it. We don't make enough money to put ourselves in that situation. If these fools want to cut each other up, happy cutting, end quote. Shane quit his job at the prison after six months. And then in 2016, he wrote an expose on Wynn Correctional that caught the attention of the international press.

Shane concluded that the entire argument behind private prisons was a bad one. When he got hired, he was given a report by his CCA managers that said private prisons could save states as much as 59% over public prisons without sacrificing quality, which sounds great, right? Well, CCA funded this report themselves. So a more independent study estimates that private prisons cost 15% less than public ones.

Another said public prisons were 14% cheaper. So what the hell is the truth? I don't know. After reviewing these numbers, researchers say that the savings of private prisons appear minimal. So, I mean, what happened after the CCA report came out? Are we surprised? No. Sad? I don't know. CCA didn't face any legal ramifications. Oy.

But coincidentally, a few months after Shane's article was published, CCA changed their name to Core Civic. So if you try to Google something like Core Civic Controversy, their name wouldn't pop up. CCA's would.

You know what I'm saying? That's so lame. Okay, so where do things stand with private prisons today? Since 2009, prison populations in general have been falling. And this isn't good news for private prison companies. Coincidentally, CoreCivic started heavily lobbying Congress that same year. Between 2009 and 2020, they spent almost $14 million on lobbying efforts.

Now, call me crazy, but if you have to spend that much money convincing someone that what you do is good, then maybe, I don't know, I don't know, maybe it isn't. Still, Cora Civic's revenue in 2020 was $1.9 billion.

Imagine where we would be if all that money went to actually rehabilitating people instead of locking them up. Now, one of President Biden's first executive orders said federal prisons can no longer be privately run, which sounds great, right? Like, great, we don't need these things. But

But private prison owners weren't going to let this run them out of business. Okay? No, they need their billions. Instead, they're expanding even more into immigrant detention centers and electronic monitoring.

Over 136,000 immigrants are now being watched under ICE's Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which is a record high. And wouldn't you know, that program was developed by a subsidiary of the world's largest private prison company. So even though Biden said no more, they found a way to reinvent themselves and keep the money coming in.

A billionaire loves a rebrand. Prisons and private prisons in particular are a result of deep-seated racism and freaking greed in our nasty ass country. The only reason prisons exist is because of the criminalization of being black. And with every reinvention of the private prisons, they are just tweaking from that original format, slavery. And private prisons make so much money today and have so much influence in Washington, D.C., but why?

There's evidence they don't even work. It's just another example of money over everything. And it's exhausting and we're tired of it. And we fucking hate it. One good thing, I guess, is that Don Hudo died in October of this year, 2020. I'm sorry, last year, 2021.

Bye. Federal prisons are not profitable enterprises in and of themselves, despite the many industries connected to the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement. By putting people in cages and putting a monetary value on that, companies like CoreCivic are keeping slavery alive and well even today. Anyways, thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. I'm so sorry to be such a Debbie Downer.

But hey, that's... that's why it's called Dark History. Yeah, it's the truth. Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions and get to the like the whole story and the history of where things come from, why it is the way it is.

But I'd love to hear your guys' reactions to today's story. So make sure to use the hashtag dark history over on social media so I can see what you're saying. Also, join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs. And also catch my murder mystery makeup which drops on Monday. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. You make good choices and I'll be talking to you next week. Bye. Bye.

Dark History is an Audioboom original. This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Junya McNeely from 3Arts, Ed Simpson, and Claire Turner from Wheelhouse DNA. Produced by Lexi Kiven and Leah Sutherland. Research provided by Ramona Kivett and Jed Bookout.

writers Jed Bookout, Michael Oberst, Joey Scavuzzo, and Kim Yageed. A special thank you to our subject matter consultant, Brett Burkhart and Tryon Woods. And I'm your host, Bailey Sarian.

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