This alien life: Privatized prisons for immigrants

The small town of Florence, Arizona, sits at an epicenter of a new boom in private prisons for immigrants. Florence hosts Arizona's state prison, two privately run prison complexes and one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) immigration jail. Florence "has a prison economy and a prison consciousness," says Victoria López, an attorney who runs the town's only pro bono legal center that helps immigrant detainees fight their cases. "Florence is another world. Here most locals are people whose families have for generations worked in the prison system. Life revolves around the prisons." As the government invokes national security to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants, the private-prison industry is booming. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, immigrants have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the US today. In fiscal year 2005, more than 350,000 immigrants went through the courts. "A growing share of them committed no crimes while in the United States–53 percent this year, up from 37 percent in 2001–even though Bush administration officials repeatedly have said their priority is deporting criminals," the Denver Post reported. Corrections Corporation of America Contracts for new jails flowed to the private prison industry despite the previous history of mismanagement and scandal. Yet the problems have not been solved–today detainee advocates still decry the treatment of immigrant inmates. They accuse prison companies of cutting corners in training guards and in providing basic services. The government has done little to regulate prison administration, but has sanctioned exploitive labor practices and rip-off telephone costs for inmates. A 2003 report by the DHS Inspector General forcefully condemned the treatment of immigrants inside various jails in its report, "The September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of the September 11 Attacks." Infractions included routine abuse of basic prisoner rights, mental and physical abuse, denial of health care and medical treatment, prison overcrowding, and a lack of working showers, and toilets. Despite a long record of problems, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) continues to promote privatization and win contracts. "The private prison industry, to increase the demand for its services, exerts whatever pressure it can to encourage state legislators to privatize state prisons," wrote Sharon Dolovich in the Duke University Law Journal. "[T]he industry is adept at lobbying legislators and targeting campaign contributions to promote its privatization agenda." Indeed, some critics charge that the company's success is related to its deep rooted ties to elected officials. In addition to CCA's record of campaign contributions to the Republican Party since 1997, there are significant connections between executives and government officials. J. Michael Quinlan, former head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, has been an executive at CCA for the past decade. CCA's chief lobbyist in the state of Tennessee is married to the speaker of the house. And CCA is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that writes and pushes bills on policy such as sentencing guidelines. For the second quarter of 2005, CCA announced that its revenue had increased three percent over last year, for a total of almost $300 million. CCA calculates that its expenditure of $28.89 per inmate, per day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate. Meanwhile, on July 1, 2005, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded CCA contracts to continue running the 300-bed Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey and the 1,216-bed San Diego Correctional Facility. Both of these contracts are for three years with five three-year renewal options. In 2005 CCA also secured new prison contracts with the Kentucky Department of Corrections, the state of Kansas and the Florida Department of Management Services. Business is good for CCA, and the more people it stuffs into its prisons, the better it becomes. "As you know, the first 100 inmates into a facility, we lose money, and the last 100 inmates into a facility we make a lot of money," CCA Chief Financial Officer Irving Lingo said on a 2006 company conference call. Wackenhut Florida-based Wackenhut, a major private security company, has also received a great boost in the years since the Sept. 11 attacks. Its poor record has not undermined its ability to reap lucrative government contracts. Before 2001, Wackenhut, like CCA, had been at the center of all manner of inmate-abuse scandals: Guards were caught having sex with underage inmates, there were routine reports of extreme mistreatment of inmates, and there was even a disproportionately high level of deaths in their facilities. Wackenhut CEO George Zoley has been flippant about the cases of abuse. After a CBS Television report exposed the repeated rape of a 14-year-old girl at a Wackenhut juvenile jail and two guards were found guilty, Zoley said, "It's a tough business. The people in prison are not Sunday-school children." Still more worrying was Wackenhut's record with inmate-on-inmate killings, which, contrary to public perception, are not very common in US prisons. In 1998"99 alone, Wackenhut's New Mexico facilities had a death rate of one murder for every 400 prisoners. For the same period in all US prisons, the rate was about one in 22,000. Wackenhut's most visible response was to change its name. Now as the GEO Group, it is still headed by George Zoley, and it continues to run the Wackenhut facilities and get new contracts. In 2005 the State of California Department of Corrections gave GEO the contract for the housing of minimum security adult male inmates at the 224-bed McFarland Community Correctional Facility estimated to generate $4.1 million in annual revenues. On Aug. 8, 2002, ICE awarded GEO a contract for the company's Broward Transitional Center in Miami. The contract has been extended through September 2008. Under a 2005 ICE contract GEO also manages the Queens Private Correctional Facility, where it expects to reap $10.5 million in annual revenues. The Mississippi Department of Corrections also renewed GEO's contract for the continued management and operation of the 1,000-bed Marshall County Correctional Facility. Meanwhile, also in 2005, GEO announced a merger with Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) that will add approximately $100 million in revenue to GEO's coffers. GEO is especially excited about the earning potential from CSC's 1,000-bed expansion of its State Prison in Florence, Arizona. GEO executives are overjoyed about the boom in business. In 1999, the feds farmed out less than three percent of beds; but seven years later, the number had reached almost one in five. "That's a remarkable turnaround," Zoley told his fellow executives. "And it's continuing to lead in that direction, that for minimum-security beds by the BOP (Bureau of Prisons) to house criminal aliens and illegal aliens by either the US Marshal Service or the BOP or immigration service, they are turning to private companies." "I think we're in a new era that I could never have predicted, really, this scale of acceptance by the federal government. We talked about it for many, many years, but we're finally on the verge of it," added Zoley. Cost savings The corrections industry has routinely argued that privatizing prisons dramatically lowers costs. A 1996 US General Accounting Office report concluded, however, that there was no clear evidence supporting this contention. Prison companies do have clear advantages over other corporations: They are able to save large amounts of money on labor practices that would be illegal under any other circumstances. Inmate jobs in all prisons pay a pittance, but immigrant prisons are even worse. Because DHS guidelines mandate that non-citizen prisoners cannot earn more than $1 per day, the company gets janitors, maintenance workers, cleaners, launderers, kitchen staff, sewers and grounds keepers at almost no cost. With the increase in prison beds for immigrants comes the pressure to fill them–a scenario that has immigrant advocates extremely worried. Isabel García, attorney and human rights activist in Tucson, sees the drive to jail immigrants as fueling the same prison-industrial complex that first flourished with the war on drugs. "The war on drugs has conveniently become a war on immigrants," says García, "and there is a lot of money to be made in detaining immigrants." The growing industry of incarcerating immigrants is facilitated by the tight connections between the private prison industry and the federal government and the extent of the industry's powerful and well-funded lobby. García worries that the profit motive behind detaining immigrants will promote the criminalization of immigrants. In the name of national security, the Department of Homeland Security has let industry lead the way in implementing systems and procedures that purport to protect the US from future terrorist attacks. However, in most cases it is immigrants and non-citizens with no connections to terrorism who get tangled in the net.