Alabama just won’t give up on selling bonds to finance prison projects.
In April, Barclays Plc backed out as lead underwriter of a large municipal-bond deal for two Alabama prisons owned by CoreCivic Inc., a giant in the private-prison industry. It really had no excuse for the drama: The bank had previously pledged to no longer provide new financing to such companies and seemed to try to use the state’s role as a workaround. Soon afterward, Stifel Financial Corp. said it was no longer involved. By September, the state’s corrections department terminated its 30-year lease with CoreCivic, and lawmakers advanced a plan to use federal aid to build the new facilities.
