Slavery by Another Invoice

From the convict leases of the Reconstruction South to Delaney Hall's $1-a-day labor, America has never fully broken with the idea that detention should pay for itself

In 1904, a Black man named Green Cottenham was arrested in Shelby County, Alabama, on a charge of vagrancy — which is to say, he was arrested for being unemployed, in a county where the definition of unemployment was applied almost exclusively to Black men. He was convicted within minutes, fined, and when he could not pay, was leased to a subsidiary of U.S. Steel to work in a coal mine. He died there within the year. His precise cause of death was never recorded. The mine operator paid the county a fee for his labor. The county kept the books. Nobody went to prison for what happened to Green Cottenham. Nobody was supposed to.

More than a century later, a detained migrant at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey — held in a facility operated by GEO Group under a $1 billion federal contract, awaiting immigration proceedings for which he has not been charged with a crime — cooks meals, cleans corridors, and repairs infrastructure for as little as $1 a day. He has not been convicted of anything. The legal architecture that makes his labor extractable is the same clause of the 13th Amendment that governed Green Cottenham: the exception that permits involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. The fact that neither man was convicted of a serious crime, or in the migrant's case any crime at all, has historically proven to be a detail the system absorbs without difficulty.

The through-line between these two moments is not metaphorical. It is institutional — a continuous American history of finding legal forms for the same incentive structure: that detained human beings represent an economic resource, and that the people profiting from their detention will reliably expand the population of the detained when the financial and political conditions allow it.

The conditions, at this particular moment, allow it considerably.

The convict leasing system that consumed Green Cottenham operated with a clarity that its modern successors have learned to obscure. After the Civil War, Southern states rewrote their criminal codes to criminalize the ordinary conditions of Black life — vagrancy, loitering, changing employers without permission, failing to carry proof of work. The resulting convictions were leased to private operators: coal mines, turpentine camps, railroad construction crews, plantation owners who had lost their enslaved workforce and found in the criminal justice system a mechanism to recover it. Douglas Blackmon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Slavery by Another Name documented the system exhaustively, described it as slavery by a different administrative procedure. The state collected fees. The companies collected labor. The individuals collected death, in numbers that were never fully counted because no one with power had any interest in counting them.

What made the system self-sustaining was its financial logic. The more aggressively local sheriffs and judges criminalized Black life, the more revenue flowed to state coffers and the more profit flowed to the companies leasing the labor. The incentive to expand the detained population was structural, not incidental. It didn't require anyone to be consciously malevolent. It required only that the people making detention decisions have a financial relationship with the people profiting from detention — and that the people being detained have no meaningful political recourse.

That combination has proven remarkably durable.

In 2003, Judge Mark Ciavarella of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, began sentencing juvenile defendants to a private detention facility called PA Child Care at a rate that struck observers as unusual. What wasn't known at the time was that Ciavarella and his colleague Judge Michael Conahan had accepted $2.6 million from the facility's builder in exchange for filling its beds. The scheme, which came to be known as Kids for Cash, processed thousands of children through Ciavarella's courtroom at a pace that made due process functionally impossible. Many appeared without counsel. Most were disposed of in minutes.

The offenses that sent children to detention included creating a MySpace page that mocked a school administrator, shoplifting a jar of nutmeg, and being present in a building where a fight occurred. The sentences ranged from weeks to months. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court eventually vacated approximately 4,000 juvenile convictions. Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison.

What Kids for Cash demonstrated, with a directness that was almost pedagogical, was the endpoint of a simple incentive: if the profit from detaining a human being flows to the person making the detention decision, the population of the detained will expand to fill the available capacity and beyond. Ciavarella's arrangement was merely unusually transparent about a logic that is present, in more laundered form, in every private detention contract ever written.

The laundering, in the modern version, happens earlier in the process. The payments are made before the detention decisions rather than in exchange for specific ones. That is what makes them legal.

GEO Group, the private prison company that operates Delaney Hall, contributed nearly $2 million to Donald Trump's campaign, inaugural committee, and associated entities across the 2024 election cycle. Its PAC was the first corporate PAC to max out donations to Trump's presidential campaign. It donated $500,000 to the 2025 inaugural committee — double what it gave in 2017. In return, or at minimum in close temporal proximity, it received a $1 billion, fifteen-year contract to operate Delaney Hall, the largest immigration detention center on the East Coast, along with expanded contracts at facilities across the country that are expected to generate over $2 billion in annual revenue.

The revolving door between GEO Group and the administration that writes its contracts runs in both directions with unusual efficiency. Tom Homan, the White House Border Czar, formerly worked as a paid GEO Group consultant. He recruited David Venturella — who had spent twelve years at GEO Group and was paid over $6 million by the company — back into government as a senior DHS advisor in February 2025, and personally granted him an ethics waiver exempting him from the standard one-year prohibition on working with his former employer. Venturella was subsequently appointed acting director of ICE itself — the agency that writes GEO Group's contracts. Since his return, GEO Group has reported a 700 percent increase in profits, reaching $254 million in 2025, and its largest single year of new business in company history — $520 million in new or expanded contracts. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, was paid $390,000 to lobby for GEO Group before taking office.

When Democratic lawmakers wrote to Homan raising conflict of interest concerns — noting that he was participating in decisions affecting hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with his former client — no members of the congressional majority signed the letter. It received no formal response.

The financial results have been unambiguous. GEO Group's stock rose 73 percent after the 2024 election. The company has told its shareholders it is "built for this unique moment." That moment, to be precise, is one in which the people setting detention policy are former employees and paid advocates of the company that profits from detention, and the detained population is expanding at a rate that the company's executives describe to investors with the language of opportunity.

Inside Delaney Hall, the opportunity looks different. Roughly 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike last Friday, describing conditions they likened to physical and mental torture. They are demanding a meeting with the governor of New Jersey. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the strike a political stunt and said reports of it were false.

The labor strike is itself a significant act. Delaney Hall runs on detainee labor — cooking, cleaning, maintenance — performed for as little as $1 a day under the federal government's Voluntary Work Program. The legal foundation for that program is the same 13th Amendment exception that governed convict leasing: involuntary servitude is permitted as punishment for crime. The detainees at Delaney Hall are civil immigration detainees. The vast majority have no criminal record. They are not being punished for a crime because they have not been convicted of one.

In December 2025, a detainee named Jean Wilson Brutus died less than 24 hours after arriving at Delaney Hall. In June 2025, four detainees escaped by breaking through an aluminum wall after an uprising over food and water shortages. Federal agents responded with riot gear and tear gas. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside the facility during a protest in May 2025 — charges later dropped — after the city had already sued GEO Group for opening the facility without a valid certificate of occupancy.

None of this has interrupted the contract.

There is a film most Americans have seen that prepared them, without their knowing it, to understand exactly what is happening at Delaney Hall. In The Shawshank Redemption, the warden runs a side business built entirely on prison labor — inmates contracted out to private interests at rates that make the warden wealthy and the contractors grateful. He calls it rehabilitation. The inmates call it what it is. The warden's corruption is presented as personal, the product of one man's greed operating inside a system that would otherwise function honorably. That framing is the film's one significant concession to comfort.

The reality at Delaney Hall is more disquieting precisely because it requires no corrupt individual at its center. The warden's equivalent — the executive who profits from captive labor, the official who writes the contracts, the politician who receives the donations — is not breaking the system. He is operating it as designed. The Shawshank warden needed to be personally venal to make the arrangement work. The GEO Group arrangement works without anyone in particular being venal at all. It works because the incentive structure makes it work, because the financial relationships make it work, because the legal architecture of the 13th Amendment makes it work, and because the people who could interrupt it have chosen, in their various ways and for their various reasons of self-interest, not to. Fiction required a corrupt man. The present requires only a system that has never been corrected.

Green Cottenham died in a coal mine in Alabama in 1908 because the incentive structure of his society treated his body as a resource and his freedom as a cost to be eliminated. The people who built that system did not think of themselves as architects of atrocity. They thought of themselves as administrators of a labor market, managers of a public safety problem, stewards of a fiscal arrangement that kept county governments solvent.

The archive does not care what they thought of themselves.

At Delaney Hall today, men and women who have not been convicted of any crime cook the food, clean the floors, and fix the walls of a facility whose operator contributed $2 million to the political campaign of the president who authorized their detention, whose executives now run the agency that holds them, and whose shareholders were told, correctly, that this moment was one the company was built for.

The forms have changed considerably since 1908. The incentive structure has not moved at all.

Sources: American Prospect on Delaney Hall labor strike, May 28, 2026; OpenSecrets on GEO Group political contributions, April 2025; HuffPost on Venturella ICE appointment and GEO Group ties, May 2026; Washington Post on Venturella ethics waiver and GEO Group contracts, August 2025; KQED on Venturella acting ICE director and conflict of interest, May 2026; Raw Story on Venturella ethics waiver and GEO Group profits, May 2026; Raskin, Jayapal and Crockett letter to Tom Homan, August 25, 2025; Durbin letter demanding Bondi recusal, May 2025; NPR on Kids for Cash civil damages, August 2022; Mississippi Today on Christopher Epps sentencing, May 2017; Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, Doubleday, 2008.