By Damon Hininger, President and Chief Executive Officer, CoreCivic:

At CoreCivic, we do our best to do right by each other, our government partners, the people entrusted to our care, and our communities. We work hard to maintain our corporate and personal values, and we perform consistently to high standards of excellence. Even through the difficulties of the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve maintained our strength as a company and upheld the professionalism that has been our hallmark.

One of my responsibilities, as your CEO, is to make sure our shareholders continue to have confidence in our mission. Optimizing our ability to use our financial assets to their best purpose helps further our mission. When borrowing funds, making sure we can get the most competitive interest rates is also important to our success. Part of our culture is knowing where we can improve, owning it, and stepping up and getting better.

Today we’ve announced that our company is evaluating our current corporate structure and the ways we choose to use the money our business generates. You can find a news release for investors that we distributed today here.

I compare this process to an engineer studying a car – both its exterior and the interrelated components under the hood – for ways to improve fuel efficiency. In our case, we’re looking at our corporate structure for ways to improve the efficiency of our financial assets. Right now, our current corporate structure as a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) limits how we can use those financial assets. We’re required to use our strong cash flow to fund dividend distributions to investors that are equal to at least 90 percent of our net earnings. With increased flexibility to invest our capital where, when and as needed, we believe we can be in an even stronger position to do right by our investors, serve our partner needs, and Better the Public Good. 

For CoreCivic professionals, our service to government partners will remain seamless -- whether that’s today, in the weeks ahead as we evaluate our options, or following our decision.  The people entrusted to our care and the communities where we work so hard to be good corporate citizens can expect our continued commitment to excellence.

Our goal for the process we announced today is a corporate structure that better aligns our investment performance with the solid underlying fundamentals of our business. Our commitment to our strategy and purpose will stay as strong as ever and as strong as you rightly expect as part of our team.

Many thanks for the outstanding work that you do each day, every day.  I continue to be grateful and deeply appreciative.