It’s not hard to figure out why this happens. Private companies win contracts to manage federal prisons by undercutting the Bureau of Prisons’ operational costs. Unlike the government, private prison companies must also take their profit margins out of their budgets. The only way to make that work is to massively drop labor costs, corresponding to a severe degradation of the quality of prison management.

The examples of this are legion. Wages for private prisons are over 20 percent lower than their public counterparts, and the penitentiaries are routinely short-staffed. Equipment requisitions are insufficient. Maintenance is routinely deferred. In one CCA prison in Idaho, corrections officers let the gangs help them run the facility.

That reflects the problem with privatization as a whole. Private companies must carry out a government function—be it water, parking meters, mass transit, or K-12 schools—at a lower cost than the government can provide it, while taking their profit off the top. Time and again, the results reveal that to be impossible, at least if you want to provide the same quality of service. Yet we keep privatizing. Whether it’s Republicans expanding Medicaid or cash-strapped cities handing over bus service to Uber and Lyft, eventually costs shift from taxpayers to the users of the services, oversight becomes impotent as officials grow reliant on outsourcing contracts, and attempts to maximize profits lead to service breakdowns.

When the Justice Department made its announcement, stock in CCA and Geo Group collapsed. But investors were probably too hasty in thinking that private prison companies base their business model solely on managing private prisons. It turns out that’s just a small part. Mindful of the negative publicity—and of growing bipartisan support for criminal justice reform—these companies have diversified, seeking profit from wherever an individual touches the justice system. They have robust business lines in parole services, halfway houses, and electronic monitoring. And their largest federal contracts come not from prison management, but running immigrant detention facilities.

In fact, while 12 percent of all federal prisoners sit in private prison facilities, at least 62 percent of immigrant detainees are housed in private jails. Nine of the ten largest facilities are private. These numbers have increased with the introduction of family detention centers for women and children seeking asylum. And the contract terms are outrageous; one billion-dollar contract recently unearthed for a 2,400-bed facility in Dilley, Texas, pays CCA whether the beds are filled or not.

These facilities are incompetently managed as well. As of May, CCA’s camp in Dilley had been cited for 12 different state regulatory violations. Former interned Japanese-Americans have said the Dilley camp mirrors their experiences. For more than a year now, women in another facility in Pennsylvania have held a hunger strike to protest conditions.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security, awards contracts for private immigrant detention facilities. And almost immediately after the Justice Department’s announcement, activists and public officials were demanding that ICE follow its lead and shut them down.

Immigrant rights group Presente wants ICE to “stop paying corporations to lock up immigrants.” The American Civil Liberties Union agrees, as does AFSCME union leader Lee Saunders, and the New York Times editorial board. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Raul Grijalva jointly penned a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson seeking an end to private detention centers. California Senate candidate Kamala Harris has a similar petition. Even Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has said, “we should end private detention centers.”

While ICE has not responded publicly to this drumbeat—in fact, they’re actively planning to open new private detention centers—this cannot help but have an impact, especially if Clinton wins the White House.

Unlike the DOJ’s closures, losing its detention-center contracts would represent an existential crisis for the industry. Federal contracts comprise between 42 and 44 percent of all CCA and Geo Group revenues. Both companies attributed their strong financial performances last quarter to an increase in immigrant-detention center contracts. Private prison companies benefit from a government mandate to maintain at least 34,000 immigrant detention beds at all times. If this government-fed forced profit withers, the private prison companies will too. And this lesson in the brutal logic of privatization could spark a mass reconsideration of outsourcing what we know of as government to a company trying to make a buck.