Skip to content

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2020

Do private prisons rely on federal contracts for half of their revenue?

Seth Smalley, Gigafact
yes

CoreCivic Inc. and GEO Group Inc., two of the largest private prison operators in America, rely on payments from federal correctional and detention authorities for about half of their revenue, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2019, 51% of CoreCivic's revenue came from federal sources. In the same year, U.S. government customers accounted for 69% of GEO Group's consolidated revenue.

The companies' customers include federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as state and local governments. In 2018, according to Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group, the federal government spent $2.32 billion with the ten largest prison operators, more than double what they received in 2013.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.