"With a little sweat equity and American entrepreneurship"

April 16, 2022 3:40 AM

"Private prisons are the single greatest real estate investment vehicle around... To increase my cash flow I spent a significant amount of money on lobbying efforts to win a judge who was hard on crime. This paid off by the end of year two. To pay me back the judge sent most young men (higher margin than older men) to my facility. Cash flow went up 3x. By year four cash flows were $15 million at 95% occupancy. To maximize my investment I started to market the facility to outside investors. Halfway through year four we sold the facility to private equity for 10x cash flow or $150 million. In four years I turned $7.5 million into a clean $150 million." (SLThreadReader)

Private prisons are one of the most overlooked and undervalued real estate vehicles out there. With a little sweat equity and American entrepreneurship you can become extremely wealthy through this passive investment. Shoot me a follow if you want to learn more about investing.

The greatest thing about this business is that I have never paid taxes on any of my millions because of the unique U.S. tax law of depreciation on real estate and 1031 gains. Did I mention that I received $35 million in PPP loans that were forgiven? Greatest business ever.

posted by clawsoon (32 comments total)

Can't tell if Satan or if Mocking Satan's system......
posted by lalochezia at 3:49 AM on April 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

It occurs to me that one measure of a society is how easy it is to accumulate wealth and power doing shitty things.

(Though I'm a bit skeptical this is written by who they say they are? Doesn't seem like it would be too hard to figure out who this "investor" is, if they're not fudging their members too much.)
posted by ropeladder at 4:09 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Looks like it may have been previously posted and deleted (by who?), about a year ago, by the same Twitter account.
posted by clawsoon at 4:17 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reads like, "You know what's profitable? Participating in modern day slavery!"

Disgusting.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:33 AM on April 16, 2022 [6 favorites]

This reads like, "You know what's profitable? Participating in modern day slavery!"

I read this just yesterday, from an upstanding Massachusetts Puritan writing to his nephew in the mid-1600s:

"I doe not see," he wrote, "how wee can thrive untill wee gett into a stock of slaves suffitient to doe all out busines." For indentured servants, he explained, will "desire freedome to plant for them selves, and not stay but for verie great wages." It is cheaper to maintain twenty "Moores," he concluded, than one English servant.

posted by clawsoon at 4:38 AM on April 16, 2022 [18 favorites]

For those of you with mutual funds / 401k’s etc:

“We have the power to cut financial ties to the prison industrial complex”
- https://prisonfreefunds.org/ (Search engine to check funds you are invested in)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:40 AM on April 16, 2022 [16 favorites]

I don't think the article is real. (Though the problem is real.)

"Eagles Nest Facility" would seem to be a New Mexico state prison. The photo in the post is of a prison in Karnes County, Texas that is run by GEO Group, one of the big private prison corporations.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:57 AM on April 16, 2022 [11 favorites]

Guys like this are the reason people made GIFs of the David Mitchell "Are we the baddies?" SS officer skit.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:02 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am 90% sure that this guy is not real, for the reasons snuffleupagus writes above, as well as the fact that actual evil villains don't actually recount their evil schemes in detail like they do in the movies. Not saying this isn't an interesting or real story he tells but it's either someone else's story or it's fiction designed to show how the for-profit industry system works and to (apparently, effectively) whip up awareness and anger against it. Don't get me wrong, the story is completely believable, I just don't think these types of people are explaining themselves in detail on Twitter.

It would be good if we could somehow be 100% sure about the fact vs. fiction question here so we don't spend a lot of embarrassing time railing against an imaginary person. Any links or information in that direction greatly appreciated.
posted by cilantro at 5:28 AM on April 16, 2022 [15 favorites]

(also the guy's pfp is almost certainly an ai-generated fake, you can see it in the weirdness around the left side of his glasses)
posted by cilantro at 5:38 AM on April 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

Uh, guys? His Twitter handle is @prisoninvestor1, the account is two months old, and he tweets out things like "So you wanna be a prison investor huh? Do you have the balls to lobby judges and defund schools so crime continues to be a good business model? Only a select few are built like me. Suburban housewives love my service." I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that this is not meant to be taken completely seriously.

Though I do admit there's a small chance he's earnestly cosplaying Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies.
posted by Mayor West at 5:40 AM on April 16, 2022 [20 favorites]

With a little sweat equity and American entrepreneurship you can become extremely wealthy through this passive investment.

Passive sweat. It's an entrepreneurship thing.
posted by flabdablet at 5:42 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that this is not meant to be taken completely seriously.

Right. You don't put easily googleable names and images of a facility that hasn't changed hands since '96 in a post like that if the fakery isn't meant to be obvious. But, it's still a good piece.
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:43 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Poe’s Law remains undefeated.
posted by Etrigan at 5:44 AM on April 16, 2022 [9 favorites]

This is America
Don't catch you slippin' now
Don't catch you slippin' now
Look what I'm whippin' now
posted by snwod at 6:14 AM on April 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are people who will do this though, for whatever evil thing, because they want you to know how clever they are.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:19 AM on April 16, 2022

It was super obvious to me from the first two sentences that he's riffing on entrepreneur bro #hustle investment advice posts on social media (ie "Hi, here's how I created income streams and you can too step 1 etc") that litter pretty much every platform. But perhaps that's a testament to how online I am.
posted by windbox at 6:39 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Not to derail but what happened to all the truth vetting initiatives over the last few years? We seem to be needing it more and more on all sides. Shouldn't there at least be a trusted AI that does not judge but adds say a "skepticism bar" to an article that on a light glance seems legit?
posted by sammyo at 6:54 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the "I bought a prison, you can, too" line sounded fishy to me. Prison companies are traded on the stock market, however, and they did well when Trump was elected.

They have fallen significantly since their Trump-era highs.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:11 AM on April 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

Postulate: this is satire designed to get people talking about (and more aware of) the financial incentives that have contributed to the growth of the US prison industry (especially the for-profit sector of that industry). Folks remember satire, right?

And even if it isn’t satire, the topic is a giant problem at the intersection of the history of institutional racism in US carceral systems, capitalism and the increasing levels of inequality in the US economy, corruption, and declining health of democratic institutions in the US, which is something we should most definitely be talking about. There’s that thing where people get much more upset and invested when there is a singular bad guy to get angry about? Let’s notice that that’s what’s going on here, but not get distracted from the really bad systemic issue.
posted by eviemath at 7:13 AM on April 16, 2022 [18 favorites]

There’s that thing where people get much more upset and invested when there is a singular bad guy

oh lol, imagine the international unprecedented grrrar if Musk made a tweet about space prisons ;-)
posted by sammyo at 7:27 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

Not to derail but what happened to all the truth vetting initiatives over the last few years?

Integrity and accountability are fundamentally incompatible with the business model.
posted by mhoye at 7:29 AM on April 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

If it's satire and he's coming from a place of feigned expertise, we should still assume that his claims are researched and well substantiated?
posted by Selena777 at 8:03 AM on April 16, 2022

I work in the financial services side of commercial real estate, and while this account is (probably) satire, it’s exposing actual truths. A lot of the incentives and carve outs that make this such an “amazing investment” are real. That’s why it’s horrifying. This specific guy probably didn’t make a “clean $150M” by profiting on modern day slavery, but it is certainly possible to do it and to do it very similarly to how he recounts. More people than you’d expect probably already have.
posted by rue72 at 8:11 AM on April 16, 2022 [5 favorites]

Of course it’s satire. Is it well-researched? No idea. The question it raises (note: not “begs”—you people are why we can’t have nice things) is whether prisons should ever be privately owned. I say “no,” if we can’t pay for them, we shouldn’t have them; the corrupting incentives are too dangerous. Unfortunately, we as a society have chosen the “yes” route.

Thinking about privately-funded highways and prisons I sometimes wonder how large a step it will be to go to an entirely private justice system: private police, judges and legislators. After all, we have the second two already on an unofficial basis (well, a semi-official one for legislators).
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 8:13 AM on April 16, 2022 [7 favorites]

if Musk made a tweet about space prisons

It would 100% be called the Phantom Zone and actually be a shipping container with a flat grey paint job
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:14 AM on April 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

I sometimes wonder how large a step it will be to go to an entirely private justice system: private police, judges and legislators.

Yes, I totally agree — this Twitter thread raises the privatization question very adroitly. And privatization is something I worry about especially with police, because well justified fear and hatred toward police is making people I know in real life much more amenable to private security forces right now… and I personally think that private security forces like that are likely to have the exact same problems and pull from the exact same populations as police forces do, but the public would have even less opportunity for oversight. And I find that scary. Our justice system has A LOT of problems but privatization takes those problems and makes them even more unreachable by public oversight, and introduces an even greater profit motive. Not where I think we should go in terms of justice reform. But I’m against privatization of the justice system at every level.
posted by rue72 at 8:24 AM on April 16, 2022 [9 favorites]

I thought this was excellent and clearly pointed advocacy. If Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” were written in 2022 metafilter would be full of folks wringing their hands over it, huh?
posted by Emily's Fist at 11:35 AM on April 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Before you chide people for not exercising due skepticism, I remind you that Elon Musk is a real person. Matt Gaetz is a real person. Lauren Boebert is a real person. Tucker Carlson, Sarah Palin, Dan Crenshaw, George Zimmerman are all real. Dick Cheney shot someone in the face. Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. A whole army of tech bros insist that buying cryptocurrency or a token that says you own image of a stupid monkey will make you rich, all backed up by credulous Forbes, CNN, and NYT journalists who are too chicken or on the take to say the emperor is wearing no clothes.

Cops kill a black guy. So what? He was unarmed. So what? The chokehold was against procedure. So what? We got it on film. So. Fucking. What.

Kyle Rittenhouse is real. The next Kyle Rittenhouse will also be real.

In the Trump era, if you have power and privilege or serve those who do, you don't hide or apologize for your crimes. You go on national television and brag about them. Then deny them. Then accuse liberals of them. Simultaneously.

Even though (or if?) this particular account is a troll, what exactly about it is unrealistic?
posted by AlSweigart at 10:44 PM on April 16, 2022 [4 favorites]

Pretty sure there is no such thing as a “perpetual contract” in government contracting.
posted by haptic_avenger at 11:21 AM on April 17, 2022

There's a followup too on building ICE detention centers:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514598428080173064.html

He mentions two stocks to buy related to the removal of Article 42 and those two are indeed up.
posted by subdee at 7:43 AM on April 18, 2022

Also:

The best part about capital punishment is that it frees up bed occupancy so we can cycle in new and younger prisoners that are higher margin. Younger prisoners have higher margins as they require less medical expenses compare to older ones.

This account is so good...
posted by subdee at 7:50 AM on April 18, 2022