The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

And someone else wins, too: Wall Street. Some of the biggest investors in private prison companies are, you guessed it, the too-big-to-fail banks. Wells Fargo, for instance, has nearly $100 million invested in the GEO Group, plus about $6 million in CCA. Bank of America, General Electric, Fidelity, and Vanguard are all major investors in at least one of the three big prison companies. And why not? Like too-big-to-fail banking itself, private prisons are an industry that depends not on the unpredictable economy but upon political connections. It’s the perfect kind of business in the oligarchical capitalism age, with guaranteed profits to provide a low-cost public insurance against the vagaries of the market. Stock analysts, naturally, are not blind to the brilliance of the business formula.