Corrections Corporation of America Founded in Nashville, Launching Modern Private Prison Industry

Thomas W. Beasley (chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party), Robert Crants, and T. Don Hutto found Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in Nashville, Tennessee, creating the first modern for-profit prison company. After a 15-minute presentation on Valentine’s Day 1983, Massey Burch Investment Group—the venture capital firm that backed Hospital Corporation of America and Kentucky Fried Chicken—invests $500,000 in the concept of privatized incarceration.

CCA’s founding marks the beginning of the prison-industrial complex, applying a corporate profit model to human incarceration during the Reagan era. The founders’ political connections and business backgrounds in healthcare demonstrate the intentional commodification of imprisonment as a revenue stream. The company immediately pursues contracts with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to house detained immigrants, establishing the immigration detention business model that would generate billions in revenue.

CCA’s formation represents a fundamental shift in American criminal justice: incarceration transformed from a public function into a profit center where companies have financial incentives to increase imprisonment rates and oppose criminal justice reform. This alignment of corporate profit with mass incarceration creates perverse incentives that drive policy for decades.