Citizens Financial Group Must Stop Financing the Private Prison Industry

Bruce Van Saun, CEO of Citizens Financial

Citizens Financial Group is a major financier of the private prison industry.* Being a lender to the two largest private prison companies in the United States makes Citizens complicit in the illegal and immoral actions of ICE under the Trump Administration.  

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are operating outside the bounds of both law and morality by arresting people without warrants, failing to grant due process to all persons in the United States, and shipping people who have never gone before a judge to indeterminant confinement in lands they've never known.  They rely on a massive private prison infrastructure, largely composed of CoreCivic and GEO Group, to carry out an aggressive and cruel immigration policy that destabilizes our communities and hurts innocent children and families that are ensnared in its grasp.  

The private prison industry creates perverse incentives by coupling profit with the incarceration of human beings.  This coupling of profit with incarceration has created a society with one of the highest rates of per capita incarceration in the world; the United States is behind only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan in the number of people it holds behind bars.**

Citizens has a choice as to whether it will continue to support an industry that profits from mass incarceration and deportation.  Citizens has a choice in whether it will continue to fund the separation of families and the decimation of our communities.  

  • We urge Citizens to honor its stated commitment to strengthening communities by immediately ceasing its financing support of the private for-profit prison industry.  
  • We urge Citizens to cut all ties to Core Civic and GEO Group
  • We urge Citizens to make a public commitment to defunding this industry, sending a message to other lenders that profiting from human incarceration is unethical.  

Invest in education and healthcare to lift up humanity, not private prisons and a deportation-machinery that only seeks to control, police, sanction, and surveil human beings.

*https://www.boycottcitizens.org/take-action

**https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants/

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To: Bruce Van Saun, CEO of Citizens Financial
From: [Your Name]

We are writing to you as concerned members of our society who have recently learned that your bank, Citizens Financial Group, is a major financier of the private prison industry.* Being a lender to one of the largest private prison companies in the United States makes Citizens Financial Group complicit in the illegal and immoral actions of ICE under the Trump Administration. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are operating outside the bounds of the law and morality by arresting people without warrants, failing to grant due process to all persons in the United States, and shipping people who have never gone before a judge to indeterminant confinement in lands they've never known.

The private prison industry creates perverse incentives by coupling profit with the incarceration of human beings. This coupling of profit with incarceration has created a society with one of the highest rates of per capita incarceration in the world; the United States is behind only El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan in the number of people it incarcerates behind bars.**

Citizens Financial Group has a choice as to whether it will continue to support an industry that profits from mass incarceration and deportation. Citizens Financial Group has a choice in whether it will continue to fund the separation of families and the decimation of our communities. We call on you to do the following:

We urge Citizens to honor its stated commitment to strengthening communities by immediately ceasing its financial support of the private for-profit prison industry.

We urge Citizens to cut all ties to Core Civic and GEO Group

We urge Citizens to make a public commitment to defunding this industry, sending a message to other lenders that profiting from human incarceration is unethical and immoral.

Please make the right choice to stop funding the private prison industry. Please invest in humanity!

​Sincerely,

Community Members Against For-Profit Prisons

*https://www.boycottcitizens.org/take-action
**https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-the-most-prisoners-per-100-000-inhabitants/