@trabex
It sounds like you're asking me for details about something I have only surface information about.
Let's start with the "easy" part of your comment, morality.
What's the quote about nobody thinks they're evil? In searching the web, I found a few variations, but not the exact one I wanted. Andrew McCarthy's is pretty close ("Nobody thinks they're evil or bad, they think that they're doing the right thing.")
I have enough trouble discerning the morality and motivations of neurotypical people who seem to have context-based fluctuations largely centered around "what they can get away with". If I tried to figure out the motivations of people working in an industry that I find deplorable, I worry I might drown.
Now to the more difficult part, because it's less subjective.
When I do a websearch for "private prison companies", I get:
- an article from Muckrock dated 2015 for top three corporations in the industry, two of them are the ones I mentioned above.
- a document from Prison Legal News dated 2017 for a partial listing of privatized correctional services companies. The two top names under Facility Operations are "GEO Group" and "CoreCivic", which are the two I highlighted above. Also, several of the other names on the list are denoted on the list of being subsidiaries of those two companies.
- an article from sentencingproject.org dated from 2024, which specifically highlights four companies, two of which are the ones I listed above.
- a direct link to the CoreCivic wikipedia page.
- a second article from sentencingproject.org dated from 2018 that describes CXW and GEO as the two largest private prison corps, "collectively manage over half of the private prison contracts in the [US]".
Furthermore, I have seen stock investment advice for Trump's second term that specifically mentions prison stocks of GEO, CXW, and AXON (hey, there's a third one!).
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Edited for a typo in the second mention of "sentencingrpoject.org"