UNDERSTAFFING • COMMUNITY HARM
The True Cost of the 'Good Jobs'
Private Prison Companies Promise
CoreCivic and GEO Group promise economic lifelines to struggling towns: hundreds of good jobs and millions in local revenue.
Former employees tell a different story.
A Preventable Tragedy
The following is an excerpt from "Why a Prison Town That Voted for Trump Is Fighting an Immigration Detention Facility" by Cary Aspinwall for The Marshall Project.
"[Former Leavenworth inmate Tina] Shonk-Little expressed sympathy for the corrections officers who worked there. “God bless the corrections officers who did what they could with what they had,” she said.
Toward the back of the room sat Bill Rogers, a brick wall of a man who spends nearly two hours a day in the gym. He was one of those guards. A few minutes after her speech, Rogers stood suddenly, looking like a frog was lodged in his throat, as his eyes welled with tears.
​
He spoke directly to Shonk-Little: “What courage… to come here. And everything you said was right. It was true. I remember. And as a former officer, I apologize. That's all I can say.”
​
She responded: “I'm sorry you were treated the way you were treated also.”
​
At a coffee shop the next morning, Rogers explained he was a high school dropout and heavy equipment operator who thought $20 an hour, plus benefits, working for CoreCivic sounded like a good gig.
“I just needed a job,” he recalled. He started working as a correctional officer in 2016 and initially loved it.
“I bet you 85% of those inmates I met? I would have hung out with them on the street. They were just decent people who made a mistake. I really believe that,” he said.
Not long after Rogers started, the voluntary overtime shifts became mandatory. A 2017 audit by the Department of Justice found that understaffing was hurting safety and security at the facility. In recent court filings, lawyers for Leavenworth accused CoreCivic of gross mismanagement of the previous facility, resulting in “Rampant abuse, violence and violations of the constitutional rights of its detainees and staff.”
They referenced one incident in November 2018, when CoreCivic didn’t report the death of an inmate to city police for six days.
It’s that death that haunts Rogers’ dreams. Dillon Reed was only 29 when he ended up at the Leavenworth facility on a drug charge, but Rogers remembered he was a funny, sweet kid who reminded him of his adult son.
“He made me laugh,” Rogers said.
Reed had an addiction, and alcohol and drugs were rampant inside the prison, Rogers said. On Thanksgiving Day in 2018, Reed was found dead in his cell. Rogers was working in a different section of the facility, but he was called to remove Reed’s body from his cell. An autopsy later showed that Reed likely died of sudden cardiac death, with a mixture of alcohol and drugs in his system.
Rogers still can’t talk about it without getting choked up. Calling an ambulance quickly could have saved Reed, he said.
“When that door came open? I didn’t see an inmate. I saw a young man…and I saw my son,” he said. “I don’t care that he was an inmate…he was a human soul. He shouldn’t have died. We had a job to do, and it didn’t happen that day.”
​
Damning Patterns
Like medical neglect, understaffing is not an isolated problem for CoreCivic. It is, by all appearances, a routine business practice for the company.
In 2017, a federal jury found that CoreCivic had understaffed an Idaho prison and was “deliberately indifferent to the serious risk posed by the company’s longstanding practice of understaffing.”
In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog agency, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), found during an unannounced inspection that CoreCivic's Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico was staffed at just 54%, leaving posts unmanned and detained people with no way to contact an employee in an emergency. In an unprecedented move, the OIG recommended that all immigrants detained in the facility be immediately relocated elsewhere.
From 2022 to 2024, CoreCivic had to pay the Tennessee Department of Corrections more than $29.5 million in damages for failing to meet contractual requirements, mainly for understaffing four facilities.
Further, CoreCivic has engaged in efforts to conceal understaffing and overcrowding, including by falsifying staffing records and even by removing beds prior to inspections to hide the company's practice of 'triple-bunking', adding a third bed to cells meant to hold two people.
Responding to questions about its relationships with CoreCivic and GEO Group, Citizens Bank has said, "We don't comment on specific clients" beyond saying that “we do business with organizations that conduct business in a lawful manner, and if we determine that not to be the case, we are prepared to exit those relationships.”
Former CoreCivic employee Bill Rogers became an outspoken opponent of reopening the company's facility in Leavenworth, Kansas.
WHY CITIZENS BANK
Citizens Bank is a key financial partner to ICE's top detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic. In the past year alone, Citizens has acted as administrative agent on agreements that have helped increase GEO's credit line by over $200 million.
In 2019, eight major U.S. banks pledged to cut ties with CoreCivic and GEO Group. Citizens chose to stay the course.
While the for-profit prison companies Citizens is backing hurt our neighbors, the bank continues to tout its commitment to fostering strong communities.
Join us to tell them it's time that they live up to that commitment.
WHAT ABOUT THE MONEY?
When GEO Group and CoreCivic want to open new facilities, they often tout the jobs and revenues their facilities will bring to struggling communities — many of which have poverty rates far exceeding two times higher than the national average, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Their economic argument for hosting private detention facilities deserves scrutiny. Research by sociologist Gregory Hooks found that prison construction actually impedes economic growth in rural counties, particularly those where educational attainment is lower, and that maintaining these facilities diverts resources away from community services. Local officials in communities that host CoreCivic and GEO Group facilities have echoed those findings.
In 2017, when GEO Group proposed a new facility in Conroe, Texas — a city that already hosted two GEO facilities — then-Mayor Toby Powell was skeptical of the company's promises. “The majority are $20,000-a-year jobs, which are right at the poverty line, if not below,” he told the Texas Observer. “By the time you think about the burden upon your infrastructure with the low-paying jobs, it's pretty well gonna wash out.”
The limited economic benefits the companies do provide are precarious. When facilities close, communities may find themselves in an even worse position: saddled with debt from municipal bonds issued to help finance private prison projects and unable to pay.
“I say that this is just something you don't want to build your future upon. Something that changes every four years,” a Folkston, Georgia resident told NPR as GEO Group was preparing to open an ICE detention facility in her town. “GEO's gaining way more out of this than we are.”
More of our neighbors' stories
“It’s just one of the worst feelings. Here I am on deployment, on active duty, and they are abusing my mom.”
Reyna's son returned from his deployment to learn of her abuse by a GEO Group employee. GEO monitors more than 180,000 people in their communities, with few guardrails against abuse.
“I want to get out and eat pizza and bananas. I really want to go to school. I miss my friends from school.”
Thousands of children have been put in ICE detention since 2025. Five have been held for more than nine months at a CoreCivic facility in Texas, where they describe medical neglect, inedible food, and trauma.
