Corrections Corporation of America

Corrections Corporation of America was founded in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 28, 1983, by Thomas W. Beasley, Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto. Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party; Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville; Hutto was the president-elect of the American Correctional Association. A founding member of its board of directors was Maurice Sigler, the former chairman of the United States Board of Parole. The initial investment came from Jack C. Massey, co-founder of the Hospital Corporation of America. An early investor prior to the IPO was Vanderbilt University Law School, where Beasley had completed his Juris Doctor degree. Additionally, the Tennessee Valley Authority was another early financial backer.According to a 2013 CCA video, Hutto and Beasley were the chief founders. Hutto had years of experience in corrections and was president-elect of the American Correctional Association. The two men met with representatives of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Immigration and Naturalization Service , which operated under U.S. Department of Justice from 1933 to 2003, to discuss a potential joint venture for a facility to detain undocumented immigrants in Texas.CCA was awarded a contract in late 1983 by the U.S. Department of Justice for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement . This was the "first contract ever to design, build, finance and operate a secure correctional facility." This is considered to have marked the beginning of the private prison industry. CCA had to have the facilities ready by early January 1984, ninety days from the signing of the contract. Hutto and Beasley flew to Houston and after several days, negotiated a deal with the owner of Olympic Motel—a "pair of nondescript two-story buildings" on "I-45 North between Tidwell and Parker"—to hire their family and friends to staff the re-purposed motel for four months as a detention facility. On Super Bowl Sunday at the end of January, Hutto personally processed the first 87 undocumented immigrants at this facility, and CCA received its first payment.The company opened its first facility, the Houston Processing Center, in 1984. The Houston Detention Center was built to house individuals awaiting a decision on immigration cases or repatriation.In 1984, CCA also took over the operations of the Tall Trees non-secure juvenile facility, for the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County. Two years later, CCA built the 200-bed Shelby Training Center in Memphis to house juvenile male offenders.

In 1989, it opened the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants, New Mexico; it had constructed this facility of 204 beds.In the 1980s, CCA officials met with representatives of the Mitterrand administration in France. They did not win any contracts there for CCA prisons.In 1990, CCA opened the first medium-security privately operated prison, the state-owned Winn Correctional Center, in Winn Parish, Louisiana.It opened the Leavenworth Detention Center, operated for the U.S. Marshals Service, in 1992. This 256-bed facility was the first maximum-security private prison under direct contract to a federal agency.CCA entered the United Kingdom in 1992, when it entered a partnership with Mowlem and Sir Robert McAlpine to form UK Detention Services. It opened the 650-bed Blackenhurst prison in Worcestershire, England.The stockholders are mostly corporate entities and it is classified as a real estate investment trust, or REIT. Research published in Social Justice by scholars at Rutgers University showed that in 2007, the company had "114 institutional stockholders that together amount to 28,736,071 shares of stock." The scholars added, "The largest number of shares of CCA stock is held by RS Investments , WesleyCapital MGMT and Capital Research and MGMT ."In 2010, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center, claiming that understaffing contributed to the high levels of violence there. In 2014, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began an investigation into CCA management of the ICC to ascertain whether any Federal statutes were violated because of the understaffing of the facility and what was found to be falsification of staffing records.In 2016, the Obama administration provided the CCA a $1 billion no-bid contract to detain asylum seekers from Central America.CCA was renamed CoreCivic in October 2016.