On May 16, just four days after demon­stra­tions against the pri­vate prison indus­try in cities across the coun­try – part of the Nation­al Prison Indus­try Divest­ment Cam­paign – Per­sh­ing Square Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment, a New York-based hedge fund, sold its remain­ing shares of Cor­rec­tions Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca (CCA) stock. After sell­ing 3.4 mil­lion shares ear­li­er in the year, the fund unloaded anoth­er 4.4 mil­lion. Alto­geth­er, the shares were worth near­ly $200 million.

Per­sh­ing didn’t say it was react­ing to the new cam­paign, but Enlace, an umbrel­la group of 21 work­er cen­ters, unions and com­mu­ni­ty groups in the Unit­ed States and Mex­i­co that is lead­ing the divest­ment cam­paign, took cred­it in a state­ment lat­er that month.

On May 12, the first day of the cam­paign, Enlace and oth­er groups orga­nized protests in New York City, Los Ange­les, Tuc­son, Nashville and Mia­mi to pres­sure Wells Far­go, Gen­er­al Elec­tric, Fideli­ty, Welling­ton Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny and oth­er firms to divest from pri­vate prison cor­po­ra­tions includ­ing CCA, GEO Group (GEO) and Man­age­ment and Train­ing Cor­po­ra­tion (MTC).

CCA, the pri­vate prison industry’s largest com­pa­ny, which has con­tracts with Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment (ICE) and the U.S. Mar­shal Ser­vice, is also the nation’s largest detain­er of undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. Since the com­pa­ny began to receive ICE con­tracts in 2000, immi­grant rights groups have been tar­get­ing CCA for pris­on­er abuse, poor work­ing con­di­tions for guards and the company’s con­nec­tions to anti-immi­grant leg­is­la­tion. Now Enlace is try­ing to force reform by tar­get­ing firms that finan­cial­ly sup­port CCA’s entire industry.

Chuck Foy, the for­mer exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Ari­zona Cor­rec­tion­al Peace Offi­cers Asso­ci­a­tion, a union for prison guards, told Prescott, Ariz.’s The Dai­ly Couri­er in 2009 that CCA facil­i­ties pro­vide wages at $10 to $12 per hour – almost 50 per­cent below the wages at state-run pris­ons. Foy also said CCA pris­ons hire few­er cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers and pro­vide, on aver­age, 240 hours few­er of train­ing to their personnel.

A 2005 law­suit brought by the watch­dog group Michi­gan Pro­tec­tion and Advo­ca­cy Ser­vice against GEO, the nation’s sec­ond-largest pri­vate prison com­pa­ny, claimed there was only one social work­er for 483 inmates at the GEO-run Michi­gan Youth Cor­rec­tion­al Facil­i­ty in Bald­win, Mich. The facil­i­ty report­ed 61 sui­cide attempts in a six-month peri­od that year, com­pared to 18 the pre­vi­ous year.

As of Decem­ber 31, 2010, Wells Far­go had $88.7 mil­lion invest­ed in GEO and $5.9 mil­lion in CCA. ​“When we spoke to Wells Far­go, they denied hav­ing any hold­ings with CCA and GEO group. Even though the infor­ma­tion is pub­lic, they still denied it,” said Peter Cer­vantes-Gautschi, direc­tor of Enlace. While the bank may not admit its con­nec­tions to the pri­vate prison indus­try – at least to activists – its invest­ments are sound.

Detain­ment is a lucra­tive trade. Pris­ons can earn $90-$200 per inmate per night, which trans­lates into near­ly $5 bil­lion in rev­enues each year. The indus­try has lob­bied dili­gent­ly to secure prof­its, sup­port­ing and even writ­ing laws to increase prison sen­tences and pop­u­la­tions, espe­cial­ly among undoc­u­ment­ed immi­grants. Between 2003 and 2010, pri­vate prison com­pa­nies spent more than $20 mil­lion lob­by­ing leg­is­la­tors and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty. Addi­tion­al­ly, GEO has giv­en $790,000 to lob­by­ing firms High­Ground and Podes­ta Group, while CCA has giv­en $680,000 to the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. lob­by­ing firm Akin Gump.

Ari­zona state sen­a­tor Rus­sell Pearce, the pur­port­ed writer of SB1070, Arizona’s anti-immi­grant law passed in 2010, met with CCA rep­re­sen­ta­tives at an Amer­i­can Leg­isla­tive Exchange Coun­cil (ALEC) con­fer­ence in Decem­ber 2009, where togeth­er they report­ed­ly draft­ed the leg­is­la­tion. When Pearce intro­duced the bill in Jan­u­ary 2010, 36 sen­a­tors signed on as co-spon­sors. Over the next six months, 30 of them received dona­tions from CCA, GEO or MTC.

“Crim­i­nal jus­tice law is sup­posed to pro­tect cit­i­zens, not pur­pose­ly put them away for finan­cial gain,” Cer­vantes-Gautschi said.

Since SB1070 was signed into law in April 2010, five oth­er states – Utah, Indi­ana, Geor­gia, Alaba­ma and South Car­oli­na – have passed sim­i­lar or near-iden­ti­cal leg­is­la­tion. On May 13, Geor­gia gov­er­nor Nathan Deal, who has received thou­sands of dol­lars worth of cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions from CCA, signed his state’s ver­sion of the bill, HB87, into law.

As anti-immi­grant laws gain sup­port across the coun­try, sol­i­dar­i­ty groups are redou­bling their efforts against the cor­po­ra­tions that stand to ben­e­fit. On July 1, when HB87 took effect, the prison divest­ment cam­paign held its sec­ond, larg­er round of demon­stra­tions out­side of Wells Far­go offices in 14 cities across the coun­try, demand­ing that the bank and all oth­er share­hold­ers of pri­vate pris­ons dump their invest­ments. Activists in Den­ver con­vinced the Wells Far­go region­al vice pres­i­dent to agree to meet with them in August. A dif­fer­ent vice pres­i­dent rescind­ed an ear­li­er agree­ment in San Fran­cis­co, how­ev­er, say­ing that while the Wells Far­go mutu­al fund invests in pris­ons, the bank does not.