The Background
Citizens Financial Group, Inc. is a retail and commercial banking company headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2022, the company operated more than 1,100 branches across 14 U.S. states and generated $8 billion in revenue. Citizens Financial Group subsidiary Citizens Bank is one of several major financiers of the private prison and immigrant detention industries. Citizens has provided revolving lines of credit, term loans, and bond underwriting services to CoreCivic. In 2019, several major financiers of the private prison industry announced they would terminate their financing relationships to these companies; however, Citizens Bank never made a public announcement that it would divest from private prisons and continues to function as a major financing arm of the industry. [source: American Friends Service Committee]
The bank's known past involvement includes: CoreCivic issued $250 million of bonds in October 2017, with a maturity date of 2027. As part of a syndicate of banks, Citizens Bank subsidiary Citizens Capital Markets, Inc. underwrote an undisclosed proportion of these bonds.
In 2022, CoreCivic signed a credit agreement to replace a 2018 $1 billion credit facility. Citizens Bank was part of the 2018 agreement, having provided a $96 million revolving line of credit and a $24 million term loan. Unlike in previous years, public disclosures regarding the 2022 agreement only named the administrative agent, Alter Domus. While other lenders are also involved, they were not named. Therefore, Citizens Bank's current involvement in CoreCivic's credit facility is unclear.
In March 2024, Citizens JMP Securities, LLC, owned by Citizens Financial Group, became the lead underwriter of the $450 million of bonds issued by Core Civic, with maturity dates of 2029.
The People
The leadership team of Citizens should hear your concerns about the private prison industry. Write directly to these members of the C-Suite, and let them know that you condemn the role they play in financing and supporting an industry that exploits some of the most vulnerable members of our society for profit.
The Action: Letter Writing
Cut and paste and use this as a template to write a hand-typed letter or email. Or write your own letter and send it off to the C-suite of Citzens. Let them know that Citizens should STOP funding and enabling the private prison industry to thrive in the United States.
Mail letters: Citizens Financial Group, Inc. One Citizens Plaza, Providence, RI 02903
Dear __________________________,
I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of the United States, who has recently learned that Citizens Financial Group is a major financier of the private prison industry. Being a lender to the two largest private prison companies in the United States makes Citizens complicit in the illegal and immoral actions of ICE under the Trump Administration.
ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are operating outside the bounds of the law by arresting people without warrants, failing to grant due process to all persons in the United States, and shipping people who have never gone before a judge to indeterminant confinement. They rely on our massive private prison infrastructure, largely composed of CoreCivic and GEO Group, to carry out an aggressive and cruel immigration policy that destabilizes our communities and hurts innocent children and families that are ensnared in its grasp.
The private prison industry creates perverse incentives by coupling profit with the incarceration of human beings. This coupling of profit with incarceration has created a society with one of the highest rates of per capita incarceration in the world; the United States is behind only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan in the number of people it holds behind bars (https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants/).
Citizens has a choice as to whether it will continue to support an industry that profits from mass incarceration and deportation. Citizens has a choice in whether it will continue to fund the separation of families and the decimation of our communities. I urge Citizens to honor its stated commitment to strengthening communities by immediately ceasing its financing support of the private prison industry. I urge Citizens to make a public commitment to defunding this industry, sending a message to other lenders that profiting from human incarceration is unethical. Invest in education and healthcare to lift up humanity, not private prisons and a deportation-machinery that only seeks to control, police, sanction, and surveil human beings.
Sincerely,
[Name]
Additional points of contact (media relations) for email:
The Action: boycott
