An Original Dataset. To construct my dataset, I relied on the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s 10-K reports, annual reports publicly-traded companies are required to file with the SEC. These reports contain information on the location of companies’ privately oper- ated facilities and, for the most part, data on customers, design capacity, and contract length. My sample includes the facilities operated by four companies: CoreCivic, the GEO Group, Correctional Services Corporation (CSC), and Cornell Companies6. The entire sample encompasses private prisons from 1986 to present, but the coverage dif- fers across different firms. CoreCivic is included in the data from 1986 to present, GEO Group from 1989 to present, CSC from 1997 to 2004, and Cornell from 1996 to 2009. The GEO Group acquired both CSC and Cornell Companies in 2005 and 2010, respectively, and both companies have acquired smaller, non-traded private prison companies over the last three decades. In fact, the industry has become smaller over 6There were a few name changes for these companies over the last few decades: CoreCivic is for- xxxxx the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group is formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, and Correctional Services Corporation was formerly Esmor Correctional Corporation. time: in 1999, there were 12 private prison firms and by 2016, eight of the original twelve were absorbed by other companies and only two new firms opened (Mumford, Xxxxxxxxxxxx and Xxxx 2016). Though the reports are fairly consistent over time, I filled in any missing data that occurred using past reports and other sources as a guide7. Additionally, this data encompasses only correctional facilities, like prisons and jails, and not community corrections facilities8. I chose to restrict the sample to only prison and jail facilities to measure the practice of private corrections, not private community corrections, which is a commonplace practice across all states. The result is a dataset of private jail or prison facilities, at either the local, state, or federal level, operated by publicly- traded private prison companies in each state-year from 1986 to present. This comprehensive dataset improves on the existing data in several ways. First, this dataset provides information on capacity, customer, and contract length for pri- vate prisons for the last three decades. No other dataset contains consistent data on these facilities for that long of a time span. Second, not only does this data con...
