The practice has been compared to slave labor and has brought a pile of lawsuits to the doorsteps of the country’s two biggest private prison companies, CoreCivic and Geo Group, which in 2017 had a combined $4bn in revenue. In April, a class-action lawsuit was filed against CoreCivic for using “forced labor” at a facility in Georgia. In September 2017, Washington state filed suit against Geo Group for paying detainees $1 a day. Pablo Paez, a Geo Group spokesman, also said in a statement that the company complied with national, government-established standards for voluntary work. The founding director of Northwestern University’s Deportation Research Clinic, Jacqueline Stevens, prompted the 2014 Colorado lawsuit through her research of private prisons’ voluntary work schemes.

Source: The Guardian November 25, 2018 11:00 UTC