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JPMorgan stopped bankrolling private prisons. Individual investors should, too.

JPMorgan stopped bankrolling private prisons. Individual investors should, too.

On March 8, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced that the firm will no longer finance private, for-profit prison operators, including those who run detention facilities along the border between the United States and Mexico. Although this is welcome news, the move could be simply symbolic if banks and other groups do not continue to call for divestment. And it’s not just financiers and big investors who have a responsibility to act. Everyday Americans should do their part, too. About 70 percent of immigrant detainees are held in facilities owned by for-profit companies, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center. These corporations face allegations that they force detained immigrants to perform unpaid labor inside their facilities, a kind of modern slavery. GEO Group, of the two publicly traded companies affected by the JPMorgan decision, has been accused by human rights monitors of neglect and abuse at their facilities. The Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, with its history of death and complaints of assault and medical neglect, has drawn comparisons to a modern-day concentration camp. An ongoing lawsuit asserts that detainees were subjected to practices that violate federal anti-slavery laws, including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. And although private prison revenues

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Investors really should care about immigration. Do you?

Why for-profit immigration detention facilities need to be excluded from socially responsible portfolios If you’re anything like me, you’ve watched with heartbreak the countless images flooding the news these days of asylum seekers in cages and children separated from their parents. You may have also wondered what you can do, short of heading to the border to volunteer for a legal aid organization. If you have money invested in the stock market — perhaps in a retirement account — one thing you can do is make sure your dollars aren’t supporting the for-profit prisons that hold detained immigrants. About 70 percent of immigrant detainees are held in facilities owned by for-profit companies, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center. The two largest for-profit prison contractors in the United States are GEO Group and CoreCivic. They’re also the only ones that are publicly traded companies. Together, they imprison thousands of immigrant detainees across the country. According to Bloomberg, GEO Group is the larger of the two, running 11 immigrant processing centers around the country and one family residential center under a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). CoreCivic runs eight, including a facility for families in Dilley, Texas. In June,

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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

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Why Azzad didn’t invest in private prisons

When the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it would stop contracting with for-profit prison operators, Azzad’s investment team remembered why we chose not to invest in private prisons. At Azzad, we follow internationally accepted criteria for Islamic investing: avoiding interest, leverage, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and pork products. We also implement selected additional social justice screens that we believe are in line with the universal faith imperative to protect people and the environment. For example, we don’t invest in weapons producers or companies practicing the devastating drilling practice known as fracking. Sometimes we hear from clients about these additional screens. “The traditional screens are already strict,” they tell us. “Why do you add more?” The answer is two-fold: because we believe it’s the right thing to do and we believe doing the right thing pays off in the long run. Yesterday we saw a great example of this when the DOJ made its announcement, dealing a major blow to the for-profit prison industry. Here’s the background. In May 2015, a REIT (real estate investment trust) company called Corrections Corporation of America (NYSE: CXW) passed Azzad’s financial ratio screens. CCA is one of the biggest players in the private prison

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