One of the World’s Largest Private Prison Corporations Lied About Separating Families and Tried to Silence Us with a Lawsuit. They Failed.
By: Jasmine Rashid
Tags: Financial Activism, Private Prisons, Impact Investing, Family Separation, Criminal Justice

Why They Sued Us

We get that it’s unusual for an investment firm to be deeply embedded in activism, let alone be sued for it. At our core, however, we’re activists who happen to use money as our tool for social change objectives. We direct about $40M in capital a year, and have supported investments in over 90 companies and funds, varying from Navajo Power, producing solar for the Navajo Nation, to MACRO, a multicultural media producer. We actively work to increase equity and inclusion both in investing and in society, and over 50% of our investees are women and people of color (compared to less than 10% for traditional venture capital).

As proud as we are of the capital we direct as Registered Investment Advisors, we also know that it’s just a fraction of the trillions of dollars in capital circulating the globe every year. We choose to think big and be vocal advocates for the thoughtful use of money in society above and beyond our own investing, encouraging investors (of any size) to put their money where their values are. This is why we have historically partnered with social movements — to amplify the opportunity for all of us to make conscious decisions about where we put our money, and to stay informed and accountable to what’s being called for by experts on the ground.

Through Morgan’s Senior Contributorship to Forbes.com we wrote extensively about the Families Belong Together movement, in addition to other news items at the intersection of money and justice. Forbes contributors are not staff journalists, they are experts in their fields encouraged to share what they are seeing. And what we were seeing — and writing about — was a successful movement of over 10 million people leveraging financial activism. This writing spread widely, with advocates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren sharing pieces, adding to the pressure on banks to show their customers that they didn’t want to land on the wrong side of history.

As hundreds of thousands of people were reading our articles and learning more about the connections between their bank accounts, private prisons and family separation, what CoreCivic saw, in our opinion, was the writing on the wall for their industry. Around the same time as the lawsuit filing, their credit rating was downgraded by Fitch from Average to Negative, they lost $1B in market cap during COVID, and their stock price fell substantially alongside GEO Group’s. They have stated that this led them to much more expensive credit sources, given that mainstream banks have made a strong statement that they do not want to be associated with an industry that makes money by locking people up. We believe this continues to be bad news for the private prison industry overall, and for shareholders concerned with retaining value.

We can imagine why CoreCivic was frustrated by our collective success raising awareness about these issues, and the fact that major banks chose to cut ties. Lashing out and filing a lawsuit against us, they claimed that we lied by saying that private prisons separated families and lobbied for harsher policies. They claimed that these lies are what caused the banks to pull out.

Yikes. Let’s break their strategy down.

First, it’s worth stating that fundamental to democracy is the right to have divergent opinions. Our opinion, apparently shared by hundreds of thousands of people, is that private prisons straight up shouldn’t exist, and that our current criminal and immigration “justice” systems are embedded with profit incentives that don’t deserve our dollars. The fact that our message and activism was effective doesn’t make it defamatory, or otherwise lawsuit-worthy.

Second, what the lawsuit said to us is that CoreCivic clearly doesn’t understand social movements. Our work built on thousands of grassroots activists over literal decades before us, and was conducted shoulder to shoulder with thousands more over the past few years. It’s simply impossible to claim one person or organization was responsible for the mass movement of money out of the industry. And even if that was the case — speaking the truth, whether us or anyone else, is by no means illegal. We believe the only party responsible for the market outcomes of its morally reprehensible actions is: CoreCivic.

Third, in their lawsuit, CoreCivic had to show we had a motive to defame them, and claimed that we did this activism work in order to lure clients in and make more money. We found this especially laughable. We’re proud of the $125M+ that we’ve advised for social justice. Keep in mind though, it’s not our money, it’s the money of the investors who engage us. Candide Group is a small business doing big things: we received minimal financial support for this work, and certainly didn’t make any profit. The vast majority of our time working on this campaign was essentially an “unfunded mandate” of Candide Group and our sister initiative, Real Money Moves. The contested statements about CoreCivic were written on Forbes.com, which pays roughly $50 an article to its contributors — meaning we see it as a critical platform to share ideas, not to make money. The annual budget for Real Money Moves in 2019 was less than $25,000. We did not receive a single client as a result of this campaign, and have historically only accepted clients by invitation because we only partner with investors who have a deep commitment to social justice. If this work was financially motivated, then — if anything, you should sue us for being terrible fundraisers and salespeople.

The bottom line is that we are incredibly proud of how much we were able to accomplish, with minimal financial resources. Both Morgan and I have each worked on private prison and immigrant detention issues since our respective college years. Pollyanna as this may sound, we do this work, because it’s our responsibility to our own values and communities. We are a mission-driven company first and foremost, and thus when we see an opportunity to support social movements, we jump on it; whether by supporting investments in innovative projects, or working to address the behavior of companies who haven’t found ways to make money without causing harm.