Claude made this and it feels important to share. Maybe we should be fighting against slavery... because the 13th never abolished it.

HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT
CoreCivic, Inc.
Formerly Corrections Corporation of America
Assessment Period: 2014–2025 | Published: February 2026
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CoreCivic, Inc. — formerly the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) — is the second-largest private prison operator in the United States and the nation's largest owner of for-profit correctional and immigration detention facilities. As of 2024, the Brentwood, Tennessee-based company reported revenues of $2 billion and a net income of $68.9 million. It operates approximately 70 facilities holding tens of thousands of incarcerated people under contracts with federal agencies including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), as well as numerous state and county governments.

This report documents a sustained and systemic record of human rights violations at CoreCivic-operated facilities. The findings draw on federal government investigations, civil litigation, congressional reports, academic research, journalistic investigations, and testimony from formerly detained individuals. The violations documented here span forced labor, medical neglect, physical and sexual abuse, inhumane conditions of confinement, excessive use of solitary confinement, and the suppression of legal rights and access to counsel.

Critically, the legal permissibility of certain practices in the United States — including prison labor programs that pay as little as $1 per day — does not render those practices consistent with internationally recognized human rights standards. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly exempts incarcerated persons from the prohibition on slavery and involuntary servitude, creating a legal carve-out that private prison corporations have exploited for profit. That exploitation constitutes a human rights violation regardless of its domestic legality.

I. FORCED LABOR AND PRISON SLAVERY
The most systematically documented human rights violation at CoreCivic facilities concerns the exploitation of incarcerated and detained people as a source of near-free labor. Under what CoreCivic terms its "Voluntary Work Program" (VWP), detained immigrants and incarcerated individuals perform essential facility operations — cooking, cleaning, laundry, maintenance — for compensation as low as $1 per day. In some documented cases, workers received no compensation at all.
The Legal Framework and Its Human Rights Failure
The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." This clause — commonly referred to as the "slavery exception" — has been interpreted to permit compelled labor by convicted prisoners. Private prison corporations, including CoreCivic, have expanded this exception to include civil detainees, including immigrants who have never been charged with or convicted of any crime.

The domestic legality of these arrangements does not resolve the human rights question. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 4), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 8), and the ILO Forced Labour Convention each prohibit forced or compulsory labor without exception for incarcerated populations. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery has specifically identified prison labor programs in the United States as warranting serious scrutiny under international human rights law.
Documented Cases and Litigation
Multiple federal lawsuits have alleged that CoreCivic's Voluntary Work Program constitutes forced labor in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). Court filings describe a consistent pattern: detained immigrants who refused to participate in the work program were threatened with placement in solitary confinement, denial of basic necessities including hygiene items and adequate food, and other forms of punishment.

▪ Barrientos v. CoreCivic (settled November 2023): Plaintiffs detained at CoreCivic's Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia alleged they were forced to work for as little as $1 per day under threat of solitary confinement. The settlement required CoreCivic to formally notify all detained workers of their right to refuse labor — an implicit acknowledgment that the program had not previously operated on a voluntary basis. The settlement was reached with representation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Project South, and Perkins Coie LLP.

▪ Ndambi v. CoreCivic: A related case alleging forced labor conditions at CoreCivic immigration detention facilities, dismissed in 2021.

▪ Ninth Circuit Certification (ongoing as of 2024): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the certification of three classes of plaintiffs suing CoreCivic under the TVPA. The court found that plaintiffs had adequately alleged they suffered under a "classwide policy of forced labor." These plaintiffs were civil detainees — individuals who had never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime.

CoreCivic, meanwhile, collected per-diem payments from the federal government for each detained individual — payments intended to cover the full cost of their care — while simultaneously using their near-unpaid labor to operate the facilities. Critics, including legal scholars and labor rights advocates, have described this arrangement as a double extraction: the government pays CoreCivic to hold people, and CoreCivic then profits further by having those same people perform the labor necessary to run the facility.

II. MEDICAL NEGLECT AND PREVENTABLE DEATHS
A consistent finding across federal investigations, congressional oversight reports, and civil litigation is that CoreCivic provides constitutionally and legally inadequate medical care to the people in its custody. This neglect has resulted in preventable injuries and deaths.
Congressional and Federal Investigations
A 2020 congressional investigation found that CoreCivic's systemic failures in medical care contributed to the deaths of at least two immigrants detained at its facilities in 2017 and 2018. The investigation documented negligence and the absence of basic clinical protocols at multiple sites. A subsequent report by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General faulted CoreCivic's Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico for unsanitary living conditions and poor medical staffing.

In August 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a federal civil rights investigation into CoreCivic's management of the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee, a facility the state had fined CoreCivic more than $29.5 million for inadequate staffing between 2022 and 2024. The investigation centered on documented reports of murders, sexual abuse, and dangerous conditions attributable to chronic understaffing, with a guard turnover rate of 188% recorded in 2023 alone.

At the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico — where approximately 20% of those detained are held on behalf of ICE — at least 15 detainees have died prematurely since 2018. In 2025, the FBI launched an investigation into guards at this facility for drug smuggling, adding corruption to the facility's existing record of neglect.
Early Documented Failures
Federal oversight of CoreCivic's medical care failures dates back at least two decades. Following a detainee death at the company's immigration jail in Eloy, Arizona in 2006, government investigators concluded that the medical care provided meant that "detainee welfare is in jeopardy." A subsequent death at the same facility prompted additional inquiry and what the New York Times described as "another scathing report." These findings were not anomalies; they reflect a persistent institutional failure to prioritize the physical wellbeing of detained individuals.

III. PHYSICAL AND SEXUAL ABUSE
Numerous CoreCivic facilities have been the site of documented physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by facility staff, and in some cases facilitated by dangerous conditions of understaffing and inadequate supervision.

At the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, three women filed complaints through official channels alleging sexual assault by a facility nurse. Documents obtained by advocates confirmed that CoreCivic, as the facility operator, received these complaints. Investigative reporting and litigation records at Stewart document a facility culture in which staff misconduct was inadequately investigated and in which detainees who reported abuse faced retaliation, including transfer to harsher facilities or acceleration of deportation proceedings.

An undercover investigation published by Mother Jones in 2016, in which journalist Shane Bauer spent four months working as a CoreCivic guard at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, documented routine use of excessive force, guards who encouraged violence between incarcerated people, inadequate medical response to injuries, and a culture of staff impunity. The investigation received significant national attention and contributed to the Obama administration's 2016 announcement of its intention to phase out federal contracts with private prison operators — a policy subsequently reversed by the Trump administration.

At the Oklahoma private prison where CoreCivic operated, at least 18 people were stabbed — three fatally — in a single year, with emergency records documenting conditions of extraordinary violence that critics attributed to chronic understaffing and poor oversight. The parents of three incarcerated individuals who died within four months of each other in 2021 filed lawsuits alleging that CoreCivic repeatedly placed profits over safety and failed to discipline or remove dangerous staff.

IV. SOLITARY CONFINEMENT AS TORTURE
CoreCivic facilities have employed solitary confinement extensively, both as a punishment and as a management tool for overcrowded, understaffed facilities. The practice — placing an individual in isolated confinement, typically for 22 to 24 hours per day — has been characterized by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture as a form of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment when used for more than 15 consecutive days, beyond which some of the psychological damage can become irreversible.

A February 2024 report by researchers at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Peeler Immigration Lab found that ICE had overseen approximately 14,000 solitary confinement placements in the preceding five years, lasting an average of 27 days per placement — nearly twice the threshold identified by the Special Rapporteur as a tipping point for irreversible psychological harm. This data encompasses placements at CoreCivic-operated ICE facilities.

Solitary confinement has also been documented as a coercive mechanism within CoreCivic's forced labor program: detainees who refused to work, who filed complaints, or who organized to protest conditions were placed in solitary confinement as punishment. This use of isolation not only constitutes a human rights violation in its own right but compounds the coercive character of the labor practices documented in Section I.

V. IMMIGRATION DETENTION AND FAMILY SEPARATION
CoreCivic operated the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas — ICE's largest immigration jail — from 2014 to 2024, holding up to 2,400 people at full capacity. The facility was designated for mothers and their children until 2021, when ICE began using it to jail adults.

CoreCivic initially denied any involvement in the family separation policy that the Trump administration implemented beginning in 2018, in which children were systematically removed from their parents at the border as a deterrent to asylum seekers. In 2020, CoreCivic filed a defamation lawsuit seeking to suppress reporting on its role in the policy. The lawsuit was dismissed; the court found that CoreCivic "did, in fact, operate detention facilities for parents separated from their children."

A lawsuit filed in connection with conditions at CoreCivic's California City Immigration Processing Center — a facility that reopened without proper permits following a period of closure — describes conditions that include egregious medical neglect, three attempted suicides, a lack of access to legal counsel, pest infestations, and food deemed inedible. This filing is one of approximately 100 lawsuits filed against CoreCivic in 2025 alone, alleging a wide range of human rights abuses across multiple facilities.

VI. POLITICAL CAPTURE AND THE PROFIT MOTIVE
The human rights violations documented in this report do not occur in a vacuum. They are structurally enabled by a business model that creates direct financial incentives to maximize detention populations, minimize operational costs (including staffing and medical care), and maintain political access to the government officials who award contracts.

CoreCivic's revenues are directly tied to the number of people it detains. The company receives a per-diem payment for each incarcerated or detained individual, creating an incentive to maximize occupancy and to lobby for policies that expand detention. Between 2004 and 2014, the average daily detention population and the share of detention held by private contractors grew in near-perfect correlation, a period during which CoreCivic and GEO Group together spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying for stricter immigration enforcement.

The company's political donations have followed administrations likely to expand its business. CoreCivic donated $250,000 to Donald Trump's 2016 inaugural committee and $500,000 to the Trump-Vance 2024 inaugural committee — the larger donation made one month before the incoming administration reversed President Biden's executive order banning Department of Justice contracts with private prisons. CoreCivic's stock rose approximately 75% in the days following the November 2024 election. The company subsequently met daily with Trump administration officials and, as of early 2025, was positioned to receive an estimated $300 million in new ICE contracts under plans to incarcerate up to 100,000 immigrant detainees.

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