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Short answer: Yes

Long Answer: Good lord. Yes, it would be something a bad person would do.

In effect, any gains you make will be blood money. Have fun with that on your conscience.

There are other investments that are less… morally questionable…

Like, even investing in real estate is still less morally wrong than literal prison labor.

Yes

Yes

“I’m not a Nazi”

Said the Nazi, investing in the German military. I’m a friend to the Jews! But I might as we’ll profit off of their incarceration and death, I mean, it’s happening anyway. It’s not like I could instead of thinking only for myself in this time possibly use some of this extra capital I happen to have available to invest and actually do some good with it, but nah.

Yes. Doing so makes you a hypocrite. Don’t worry through, there’s no shortage of hypocrisy in America. It’s practically a requirement to be at least unwittingly hypocritical. Just by drinking Coke or tipping a waiter you’re contributing to a broken system designed to exploit people for maximum profit.

But here’s the rub. You can’t, in any practical sense, escape that crap, however, you can choose to not deliberately contribute to stuff outside your immediate wheelhouse. It’s one thing to buy a chocolate bar out of a vending machine, but investing in Nestle? That’s a choice, and one you could have easily skipped. You could skip the candy too, but it’s very, very hard (and impractical) to refuse every corporate product ever. Everything, from the materials in your electronics to your mortgage company, to most food from lettuce to frozen chicken, exploits people. But you don’t have to voluntarily make the problem worse.

And on the sliding scale of morality, investing in slavery - in this case the prison industrial complex is just greed and indifference to the cost in human suffering. Seriously research it, slavery in all but name has been part of the plan since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. We never had a justice system; we have a punishment system that hungers for the labor of the downtrodden, especially of minorities.

So if you want to at least try and be a better person, and investing is something you want to do, look into the companies you’re investing in. See what their executives are paid compared to their workers here and abroad. There are companies that you can ethically justify investing in - small companies, co-ops, credit unions, pro-union companies, companies actually trying to solve problems or make the world better, like solar manufacturing, etc.

If you want to invest in human suffering, then you’re going to have to make peace with being a bad person and being judged for it. I’d advise at least trying not to. It’s a hopeless battle, but fighting honorably is its own justification.

Fuck it, imma say it. Some questions are hella stupid

Of course.

Nope. Name a company or even an investment that isn’t evil. Would you want to invest in it? If you tried to avoid all of them it would be a very difficult life.

So first, you need to know that the definition of “genocide” is larger than you probably think.

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The acts in question include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.

Emphasis mine.

Second, hastily-built private prisons constructed for the purpose of keeping a group that has committed no crime in one place long enough to “dispose of” them? They also have a technical term: a concentration camp. If they’re also performing work, they’re a labor camp.

So what Trump wants to do with Latiné folks is a form of genocide.

Third, there are multiple levels of supporting a genocide, from being a member of the society that created the out-group, all the way up through pulling people from that out-group from their homes. Somewhere in the middle of that list is “voluntarily providing aid to those committing the genocide.”

Fourth, each level of support bears a different culpability, and each individual within the levels bears a different culpability based on their knowledge and understanding of what’s happening, their intentional decision to participate or not, and the amount of protest they raise at the treatment of the out-group.

So, knowing all of this, where would you put such a decision?

I would also ask yourself if this is beneficial at all.

Look at their historical prices. Investors have already bought into this.

If you think you see an opportunity go ahead and invest and don’t feel ashamed. Many of the Hispanic immigrant communities that will adversely be affected by mass deportation had high levels of Trump support.

I say fuck it and make a buck. May those who voted for Trump get exactly what they voted for.

“I’m just trying to monetize human suffering. Am i a bad person?”

Actually no, you’re not “bad.” You’ve gone so far past bad that bad is just a dot on the horizon in your rearview mirror.

Anyone voluntarily participating in the US for-profit prison system is, almost assuredly, a problematic person with questionable morals.

It’s literally making money off of slavery. If you would not be proud to call yourself a slave-owner, I’d hope you would also not be proud to invest in slavery.

Royal “you,” by the way. Not OP, specifically.