Private prisons: Wrong at any price

By Fatima Iqbal, CFP® In late February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed a Department of Justice (DOJ) plan to phase out the use of for-profit prisons. This boosted the stock prices of the two publicly traded for-profit prison companies in the U.S., Geo Group and CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America), which had already seen their share prices soar since the November election of Donald Trump. Last August, we explained why Azzad chooses not to invest in the companies that operate those private prisons, a policy that we maintain today. At the time, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates cited research showing that private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs,” and “they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.” What we did not know then is that private prisons may be complicit in an even bigger problem: modern-day slavery. Recently, a federal judge ruled to allow tens of thousands of current and former detainees at an immigration detention facility run by Geo Group to join a class-action lawsuit alleging that they were forced to work for $1 a day or for