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Private Prisons, Public Cash

 

It’s fait accompli that conservatives and neoliberals will want to solve America’s alleged immigration problems by building walls and prisons. As frustrating as their proposed “solutions” are, they shouldn’t come as entirely shocking. They have at their core the same punitive catchall approach that they take to everything else, including the economy. We shouldn’t expect anything new. But an important distinction deserves to be made here between the populist vitriol and the entities that benefit financially from it. Behind every rowdy reactionary mob there’s a good business opportunity.

A recent American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report, titled Warehoused and Forgotten: Immigrants Trapped in Our Shadow Private Prison Industry, goes a long way toward illustrating the horror of the profit-from-misery industry. The report resulted from an extensive four-year investigation into the conditions of prisons known as “Criminal Alien Requirement” (CAR) prisons in Texas and elsewhere. CAR prisons are private establishments, operating outside of the purview of the Bureau of Prisons, that were built specifically to house non-citizens.

This study consists of thousands of anonymous interviews with prisoners and finds allegations of overcrowding, abuse, and lack of proper health care. Reform, of course, sounds appealing. A little bit more oversight certainly couldn’t hurt. But the deeper problem is that the very business model of private prisons incentivizes these abuses: more prisoners with minimal care equal greater profits.

Among critics of the American criminal justice system, it’s usually taken for granted that private prisons are insidious. But these statistics should be staggering to anyone: there has been a 1,600 percent growth in the number of privately operated prisons between 1990 and 2010, the industry produces $3 billion in annual revenue (half of which comes from the detention of immigrants), and 10 percent of all prisoners in the United States are housed in private facilities. The United States may make up only 5 percent of the world’s population, but we account for nearly a quarter of all its prisoners.

This is also a relatively recent development. As the ACLU study points out, “the U.S. prison population grew by 700 percent between 1970 and 2009—far outpacing both population growth and crime rates.” The study explains that a lot of that growth is due to the failed “War on Drugs,” but more recently, crackdowns on illegal immigrants have added to those numbers. Illegal border crossing were once dealt with as a civil matter. Now, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection account for more federal prosecution cases being brought forward than the FBI.

What’s ironic about this emphasis on law enforcement is that, according to the ACLU report, the inside of most CAR prisons sound like lawless hellscapes. Inmates reported healthcare being arbitrarily withheld and often not even available. In at least one instance described in the report, there wasn’t anyone on site qualified to handle an inmate’s asthma attack. Guards regularly used slurs like “Mexican n****r” and “wetback” and singled out gay inmates for ridicule. Perhaps most disturbing are the high rates of solitary incarceration. As Carl Takei, staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, described in the report,

Ten percent of the bed space in CAR prisons is contractually reserved for extreme isolation—nearly double the rate of isolation in normal federal prisons. I spoke to prisoners who spent weeks in isolation cells after being sent there upon intake—simply arriving at prison was the reason why they were locked in a cell and fed through a slot for 23 hours a day.

The living conditions described by inmates in the report sound absolutely squalid—tent cities overrun with insects and foul with backed-up plumbing. The report describes families being torn apart by distance—there are thirteen CAR facilities, but most are located in southern states—and by lack of communication, as the phone rate for calls out are so much higher than in public prisons.

The report also details the lack of any kind of rehab or training programs that are so fundamental to maintaining the lie that American prisons are centers for change rather than warehouses of the impoverished. The reasoning behind this absence, according to Chris Burke, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, is that the immigrants being detained in these places aren’t going to be reintegrated into American society. So why bother investing in them at all, right?

The thing is, we do invest in them. CAR prisons are a multibillion-dollar industry, financed by taxpayers. There’s taxpayer funding, but no taxpayer oversight. As the ACLU report states:

These private prisons operate in the shadows, effectively free from public scrutiny. By statute, most of their records are exempt from the open records laws that apply to other federal prisons. Meanwhile, as detailed in this report, BOP [Bureau of Prisons] fails to subject its private prisons contractors to adequate oversight and accountability, and it fights to avoid public disclosure of basic information about these prisons.

The privatization of prisons in America, and the construction of CAR prisons specifically, follows a logic that can often be used for understanding politically reactionary money-making schemes: manufacture a threat, claim that the government has already failed in addressing the threat, create an industry to profit off of “solutions” to the threat, and then move oceans of public funds into the hands of private corporations.

You can see this dynamic play out in the school reform movement. It was also in operation during the Blackwater/KBR/Triple Canopy mercenary bonanza of the war in Iraq. And it’s definitely obvious when it comes to CAR private prisons.

Despite the fact that the number of illegal border crossings has been dropping for years, and despite the fact that more money is spent on enforcing immigration laws than on the FBI, DEA, and ATF combined, Americans are still convinced that the immigration problem is growing. In fact, America’s biggest problem when it comes to immigration is the heartless, heavy-handed way in which we deal with some of the most vulnerable people in our society. The CAR prison system that profits from the misery of immigrants is a sick moral violation; facing the complex dangers of a border-crossing in order to build a better life for yourself and your family is simply brave.