Make Private Prisons Great Again?

In late August of this past year, private prison corporations like Nashville-based CoreCivic — the for-profit prison giant formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America — were reeling.

An explosive investigation by Mother Jones a month earlier had laid bare the often unsavory inner workings of a CCA prison in Louisiana. The Department of Justice had announced that it would be phasing out its use of private prisons, which housed about 30,000 federal inmates or 15 percent of the federal prison population, and the two dominant players in the for-profit prison game, CCA and GEO Group, saw their stocks take a beating. Within 45 minutes of the news, CCA's stock had dropped more than 39 percent while GEO Group stocks were down more than 35 percent. Both stocks would come back some but never fully recover. Soon after that, CCA would announce layoffs at their Nashville headquarters. 

Then on Nov. 8, Donald Trump stunned the nation by winning the presidential election, and that event has acted as a defibrillator for the flagging industry criminal justice activists have been fighting for years. Hillary Clinton had called for the end of private prisons altogether, but Trump's campaign rhetoric about law and order and harsh immigration enforcement must have been music to private prison executives' ears. Now the opening and closing bell of the New York Stock Exchange is a sweet sound to their investors. 

Here are pictures of CCA and GEO Group stock prices since Aug. 1, 2016, as charted by the NYSE. See if you can spot the election:

The past six months have been slightly less volatile for GEO Group, but their post election rebound is just as notable. 

CoreCivic (CCA) runs eight state or local facilities in Tennessee and GEO Group has a connection to the state as well — Derrick Schofield stepped down from his post as commissioner of the state Department of Correction last year to take an executive job with the company.