At the beginning of the decade, the private prison industry was in a tailspin. After several profitable years in the 1990s, companies contracting prison beds to public corrections agencies were losing revenue at an alarming rate. Capital earned during the 1990s had been poured into a speculative prison-building boom that backfired. State corrections agencies, a mainstay of what was then a relatively new industry, had begun pulling inmates out. There were too many prison beds and too few prisoners.