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Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transportedsometimes thousands of miles across the countryto large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast. ICE currently holds more than 48,000 detainees, though the agency only has funding to support housing for 41,500. Despite that overflow, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller now want ICE to ramp up arrests to 3,000 per dayand private prisons stand to benefit. Taxpayers are expected to shoulder the cost of this potential expansion, but the money won’t just go to the government: The majority of ICEs 113 detention facilities are not government-run. More than 90% of immigrants arrested by the agency are held in private detention centers, most of which are operated by just two companies: Geo Group and CoreCivic. Aerial view of the Geo Group-run Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington [Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images] Private prisons occupy a controversial place in the criminal justice system, said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at the Sentencing Project. Beyond general discomfort with the idea of profiting off of incarceration, reports have also questioned safety and security, citing higher incidences of assaults, theft, and contraband in private facilities than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons. Despite their controversial status, private prisons have long been a part of the immigration landscapeand their role is only expanding as the Trump administration makes sweeping changes to immigration policy and enforcemen The start of the Private Prison Industry The first modern private prison, Libal says, was CoreCivics Houston Processing Center, which opened in 1984 as a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and later ICE, detention center. Four years later, cofounder Thomas W. Beasley told Inc. that CoreCivicthen known as Corrections Corporation of Americacan sell prison contracts “like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers.” Houston Police arrive outside the Houston Processing Center during a protest on October 11, 2014. [Photo: Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images] Although federal contracts were a part of the private prison industry from the beginning, it was a 1996 law that cemented their place in the criminal justice system. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 required commissioners to consider buying or leasing existing facilities before building new federal detention centers. In the 30 years since this law passedand particularly since the post-9/11 formation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICEfederal contracts have become the industrys primary growth driver. Last year, federal contracts made up 52% of CoreCivics total revenue and 62% of Geo Groups, much more than the revenue received by state and international contracts. The federal government never built their own capacity, said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice and author of Inside Private Prisons. They relied on these companies to do that. A Growing Partisan Divide Federal reliance on private prisons grew substantially under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but there has been a sharper partisan divide in the industry in recent years. Presidents Obama and Biden each passed legislation to phase out private prisons during their terms. The Obama administration worked toward ending all private prison contracts except those undertaken by ICE, and the Biden administration vowed not to renew any private prison contract. These measures, later rescinded by the first and second Trump administrations, responded to safety and security concerns in private facilities, where differences in contracts and levels of oversight mean standards can vary not only by company, but by facility. A guard escorts an immigrant detainee from his segregation cell back into the general population at the Geo Group-run Adelanto Detention Facility in California in November 2013. [Photo: John Moore/Getty Images] It makes it very easy for there to be a pass the buck situation, said Jennifer Ibaez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, noting that government agencies awarding contracts may not have enough presence in private facilities to identify problems, let alone address them. Reports about ICE denying basic medical care to detainees have filled the news recently. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student detained in March, said her asthma attacks worsened after not receiving adequate medical care or opportunities to access fresh air while in detention. Similarly, Maria Isidro, a Florida resident detained during a routine check-in with immigration officials, has been shackled and denied medication for her diabetes in an ICE facility in Texas. We really dont have a full sense of the scope of it, except for on the occasions that people are released by ICE and can describe to their community or to the media, Whitlock said. Still, these concerns and the legislation by Democratic administrations did little to stymie the industrys growth. The Geo Group, for example, has had relatively steady growth in its U.S. secure services sector, a part of the business including ICE facilities. That sectors revenue increased from $600 million to $2.4 billion between 2004 and 2023. A new era of Unprecedented Growth After Trump spent the 2024 campaign promising to initiate immigration crackdown (a deciding factor for many voters in the 2024 election), private prisons expect their growth to reach new heights in his second term. Both Geo Group and CoreCivic have disproportionately supported Republican campaigns in most election cycles, but in the last election cycle, Geo Group was also the first company whose political action committee reached its contribution limit donating to the Trump campaign. CoreCivics Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego [Photo: Carlos Moreno/Anadolu/Getty Images] Their loyalty seems to have paid off, with Geo Groups stock price surging from $14.18 to $25.36 during the week of Trumps election last year, and CoreCivic seeing a similar rise, from $13.19 to $22.52. Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors on the companys first-quarter earnings call last month. Both CoreCivic and Geo Group also donated $500,000 to Trumps inauguration, which CoreCivic spokesperson Brian Todd told Fast Company was consistent with our past practice of civic participation, including contributions to inauguration activities for both Democrats and Republicans. The Geo Group-owned Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, California [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images] The Geo Group did not respond to a request for comment, but has expressed its willingness to support the new administrations goals and has stressed the significance of Trumps immigration policies for the company. Weve taken several important steps in anticipation of what we expect to be significant future growth opportunities and related operational activity during 2025, Geo Group CEO J. David Donahue said on the companys Q1 earnings call last month. Private detention’s expanding impact Already, ICE has awarded a 15-year, $1 billion contract to Geo Group for a 1,000-person detention center in Newark, New Jerseythe first of several idle private facilities that may be reopened to accommodate the influx of detainees under Trump officials. Within a week of the reopening, Newark Mayor and gubernatorial candidate Ras Baraka was arrested for trespassing during a weeklong protest at the facility. His office previously filed a lawsuit, alleging the facility had not obtained proper permits before reopening. Tom Homan, Trumps border czar and a former consultant for a division of the Geo Group, has said the administration plans to increase the number of immigrant detainees from 48,000 to 100,000. Another boon for the private prison industry, given the average cost of around $165 per detention bed. In this time of transition, Geo Groups and CoreCivics stocks remain well above their preelection price, and concern among researchers and activists continue to rise. Every detention bed is a person whose life and family and community are likely to be impacted, Libal says. Its another story of somebody whos dropping their kids off at school who was picked up by ICE and now is in a detention bed.
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E-Commerce
Dairy is having a moment. Influencers on social media are drinking raw milk, consumers are going back to cows milk, and Republicans are pushing for whole milks return to school cafeterias. But, while the plant-based milk world might appear in the rearview mirror, Oatly is leaning into coffee cultureand making some truly bizarre ads in the process. As part of a recent campaign called Blind Love, Oatly invited consumers to blind test whole milk and Oatly in coffee in a bizarre how-to video. In the accompanying ad, voiced by SNL alum Chris Parnell, the brand spoofed typical American pharmaceutical commercials, and presents a made up condition dubbed DOMP (Dormant Oatmilk Preference), to help viewers to diagnose themselves and discover their oat milk preference in coffee. Oatly knows what it is doing. Studies show that Gen-Z is more responsive to absurd tactics, and 72% of Gen Zers and millennials prefer humorous ads. It comes to no surprise then that oddball advertising is becoming increasingly common for Oatly (and other brands, too). Nutter Butter fills its TikTok with obscure brain rot content; Duolingos owl faked his own death; and Wendys irreverent comments have started a feud with Katy Perry. Yes, advertising is stranger than ever, but it’s effective. We always do it in a strange way, executive creative director at Oatly Michael Lee says. Late last year, the brand hired 31 professional Santas for a taste test switching milk and cookies with oat milk and croquembouche. Before that, another campaign featured “auditions” for an Oatly cooking show (spoiler: the casting tapes were the show). Oatly is very much in on the joke: on its website, the advertisement tab reads brainwashing. The ad campaigns track with Oatlys marketing evolution. While the Swedish brand was born in 1994 targeting those with dairy allergies, it wasnt until 2013 when they shifted strategies to appeal to wider audiences, including a major redesign. The brand originally boasted muted packaging, but opted for a more rebellious rebrand as it entered the American market. Now Oatlys carton, covered with playful typography and quotes like wow no cow, and its like milk but made for humans, is a staple in grocery store aisles and coffee shops. We had a very solid mission to convert dairy drinkers to plant based. But we were also human about it, and we had fun with it, Lee says. We did a lot of stuff that was very provocative that other brands wouldn’t have done, and so we had this kind of fearless, kind of punk quality. [Photo: Oatly] The plant-based revolution is declining Just a few years ago, almond and oat lattes dominated orders, and recently more niche plant-based alternatives like pistachio milk have peaked consumers interest, yet there is no denying alt-milk is taking a hit. From 2023 to 2024, whole milk saw a 1.6% increase in sales, while plant-based milks sales declined by 4.4%. For Oatly, its first quarter financial report revealed a 0.8% revenue decline compared to the same period the year prior, although it still expects to meet its first full year of profitable growth. While consumers with dietary restrictions will remain loyal to nondairy products, most of the time, picking between whole milk and alt-milk is a choice. The plant based group is really kind of a story of overlap, Darren Seifer, executive director and industry advisor for consumer goods and food service at Circana, says. 90% of [alt-milk users] are also using traditional dairy items. Like the perfect storm that allowed alt-milks to boom in the first place, a similar one is brewing elevating whole milk to cult status. Buzzwords like high protein, low-sugar, and gut healthy can be naturally occurring features in dairy, making it an attractive choice for users. We’ve seen so far in the last year in traditional dairy, there’s been a strong emphasis around health claims, Seifer says. Aligning with the health trends that we see popping up, that’s been helping to drive some of its growth. And again, because there is an overlap among those who use plant based it feels like it’s drawing them away from it. Additionally, financial factors like the higher price of alt-milk at a time of economic uncertainty might also be driving consumers away, Seifer explained, and cultural trends are also at play. We started to see people tell us that they’re trying to get away from artificiality again, Seifer says. From the rise of tradwives, Make America Healthy Again, and a disdain for oils, many consumers are now opting away from ultra-processed foods, artificial colors and sweeteners, and more. Define that as you wish, but that’s just the terminology that was thrown out there, he adds. And they might look at something like almond milk and say, well, that doesn’t occur naturally, so it’s processed. [Photo: Oatly] Brewing culture In the midst of shifting trends, Oatly is doubling down on humor and culture. Specifically, it’s tapping into coffee culture and baristas’ expertise, going where consumers might first meet their product: in a coffee shop. We want it to be easy for people to engage with us. So it has to be fun, it has to be cool. It has to be part of culture. So, coffee kind of plays that role for us, Lee says. Traveling from New York and Chicago, to London and Berlin, the over 60 baristas on staff spend time at coffee shops around the world, informing Oatly not only where culture is going, but how coffee fits into the mix. Every barista is not just a barista. They are tattoo artists. They’re in a band, they’re artists, they’re designers. And so that was a perfect way for us to follow coffee into culture, Lee added. Coffee culture is moving into fashion. It’s moving into nightlife. It’s moving into music. And since we have such a strong relationship with coffee, there’s kind of a license for our brand to do that. Leveraging the intersection of fashion and coffee, the brand recently released a global lookbook, presenting various summer recipes like an Ube matcha latte and a cherry bakewell dirty soda recipe, both featuring colorful editorial visuals. The company has been around for 30 years, and from our perspective, trends come and go, Lee added. We’re staying the course.
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E-Commerce
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Theres a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many namesembodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadershipbut the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldnt prefer a leader whos self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideologyone that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectivenesswho believe that if they feel right, they must be right. Its not just anti-rational; its anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the “15 Commitments”a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But its not the principles that are the problem, its their embodiment conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the whole-body yes. It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it’s an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesnt feel rightin your gutits probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldnt do it. Or worse, you shouldnt have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say no. Every debate becomes an attack on your authentic self. In other words: if you dont want to do something, your subconscious probably knows its ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. Its confusing righteousness with rightness, and its a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulatingretroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. Thats the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circlesthose stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They dont carry payroll. They dont answer to shareholders. They dont navigate hostile markets. Theyre not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesnt evolve leadershipit regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal knowing. In ancient traditionsfrom Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicismtrue wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of whats most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your truth, and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone: The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movements epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled Conscious Leadership Isnt for Everyone. I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piecefinally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, theyll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: Maybe Conscious Leadership doesnt apply so well in a military context, where you cant pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier. Or: Maybe your whole-body yes should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence. But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to do the work. Hres the tone: If you dont resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, its not because the framework might be flawed. Its because you arent ready. You havent evolved enough. Youre still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. Its a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. The Real Danger: Corporate Adoption Without Accountability Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn’t its spread in coaching circlesbut its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. Its structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of staying above the line. Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already made it. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model ambition, competency-building, and hard-work that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously led are happy to pay lip-service to their leaders fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnectbetween leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of businesssimply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesnt require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming run. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expressionbut as responsibility. Leadership isnt about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. Its about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Heres another unsexy fact of life and businessthe best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family membersand that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. Thats why Maslows Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called conscious leaders dont realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they havent reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They dont want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. Theyd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, youre in a crappy business situation. This isnt a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isnt wrong. Its just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need themthe type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitmentsindividual responsibility, curiosity, integrityought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy havent been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatorynot because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesnt need to be declaredits lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with in the spirit of conscious leadership, then I suggest you turn tail and run.
Category:
E-Commerce
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