Financial Infrastructure
In March and April of 2024, Citizens Bank and its affiliate Citizens JMP Securities, along with several other banks, inked agreements to facilitate hundreds of millions of dollars of credit to CoreCivic and The GEO Group, the country's largest operators of private prisons and ICE detention facilities. Other banks listed as underwriters included First Horizon (FHN Financial Securities Corp.), Texas Capital Bank (TCBI Securities, Inc.), and Wedbush Securities, Inc. First Horizon has remained a major lender to CoreCivic, underwriting $75 million of a half-billion-dollar loan the company took out in 2024. Texas Capital provided $25 million in financing to Core Civic last year. And Wedbush Securities underwrote a $25 million loan to CoreCivic.
Each of these banks and wealth management corporations are making a choice to fund the private prison industry in the USA, an industry that generates profit from the incarceration of human beings. Running prisons for profit creates a perverse incentive to increase the number of people under detention and confinement; this leads to a focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, often leading to worse outcomes for families and communities that must suffer the loss of their members.
Join us in a letter writing campaign to make clear to these banks the immorality of financing the private prison industry that is a main pillar of ICE. We believe in money for jobs and education, NOT for mass deportation!
Feel free to cut and paste and use this as a template to write a hand-typed letter or email:
Dear __________________________,
I am writing to you as a concerned citizen of the United States, who has recently learned that your bank is a major financier of the private prison industry. Being a lender to one of the largest private prison companies in the United States makes your organization 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.
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/).
[Name of lender] has a choice as to whether it will continue to support an industry that profits from mass incarceration and deportation. [Name of lender] has a choice in whether it will continue to fund the separation of families and the decimation of our communities. Please make the right choice to stop funding the private prison industry. Invest in humanity!
Sincerely,
[Name]