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eaglesnick · 1 year ago

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Private Sector Good, Public Sector Bad? (2)

This is the second part of a look at former public services and utilities in Britain that have been privatised in the name of neoliberal economics and the mistaken belief that private enterprise is ALWAYS more efficient than publicly run bodies.

Prisons

The first privately run prison in the UK was opened in 1992 under a Conservative government and private sector involvement in Britain’s penal system has grown steadily ever since. The UK is now second only to the USA in the number of privately run prisons.

Premier Custodial Group was formed in 1992 and in 2005 was the largest private company running UK prisons. It was a joint venture between the American private prison operator Wackenhut Corrections Corporation and the British firm Serco PLC. From a turnover of £7.52 million in 1994 it had increased its revenues to £127.4m, with pre-tax profits of nearly £10m, paying out a £2m dividend to shareholders. In 2002 Wackenhut was taken over by Group 4 Falck.

In 2003 Serco gained control of Premier, estimating that Premier's

“income over the life of its existing contracts for five prisons, one secure training centre, two immigration facilities and court escort custody and electronic monitoring services was £2bn” (Cited in Prison Reform Trust: Private Punishment :Who Profits; January 2005)

Group 4 Securicor (G4S) was a company created in 2004 when Group 4 acquired Securicor. Since these takeovers these companies have gone from strength to strength, with Serco, G4S, and GEO Group branching into immigration and other services.

In 2018, the Guardian reported that the Home Office paid these companies:

“hundreds of millions of pounds to run the UK’s immigration removal centres, but no one knows for certain just how profitable the industry is…Commercial confidentiality agreements mean the Home Office and outsourcing companies are not obliged to publish detailed financial information about immigration detention centres in the UK.” (Guardian: 10/10/22)

In 2022, one of these companies, Sodexo was awarded a £264 million UK prison contract over a ten year period. On receiving the contract, Paul Anstey, CEO, Government, Sodexo UK & Ireland stated:

“Our vision is to provide a secure and safe environment which reduces re-offending through education, builds new skills and offers respect, equality and inclusion.” (Facilities Management Magazine: 16/08/22)

If only that were true! As long ago as 2013 Sodexo Justice Services was facing charges of prisoner torture and degradation.

'Cruel, inhumane and degrading': Female prisoner kept segregated in 'squalid' cell for five years.” (Independent: 21/08/2013)

In 2016 a video of naked Prisoners pretending to be dogs led to an investigation into violence and humiliation of prisoners by Sodexo. In September 2017, a female prisoner died under Sodexo care. An inquest into her death concluded:

“serious failures at Sodexo run HMP Peterborough contributed to death of Annabella Landsberg” (Inquest: 04/04/2019)

Another prison run by Sodexo was accused of residing over a “spice” epidemic, which led to the death of a male prisoner. (Manchester Evening News) In 2018 Sodexo was again accused of neglect and systematic failures resulting in the death of yet another inmate. In 2019, a different prison run by Sodexo was accused of “systemic breaches of inmate human rights”.

In February of this year 20 prison staff resigned from the Sodexo run HMP Lowdham Grange, which was deemed so unsafe the government was forced to take it over.

The appalling levels of service cited above are not restricted to Sodexo alone. In her book “Profiting from their misery: Britain’s private prisons”, Hatty Nestor reveals that:

“outsourcing companies like G4S encourage prisoners to work 40-hour weeks, all they are paid (is) as little as £2 an hour. Such practices amount to slave labour. Companies are profiting from prison labour, paying fewer well-trained, low staff wages. In private prisons, staff are paid 23% less than public prisons, and they also outsource security, healthcare and cheap food. Private prisons aim for a profit margin of 8-10%, which is met by cutting costs and the increased exploitation of staff and inmates.”

Given that privately run prisons pay their staff less, are more overcrowded, and employ fewer prison officers you would think they would at least be more cost effective yet this isn’t the case. The governments own figures for 2022/23 reveal that it cost £32,762 per prisoner, per year in publicly run prisons, while the cost for privately run prisons was £33,628 per prisoner. (Ministry of Justice: “Costs per place and cost per prisoner by individual prison.", 21/0324)

What is more, the government gives 23% of its allocated budget to private companies despite the fact their prisons only house 15% of the total prison population. It seems that whichever way you measure private prison success (apart form profits for its shareholders) private prisons do far worse than those still in the public sector.

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michaelraqimmira · 5 days ago

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The Abyss

I didn’t know who Iris Chang was until the month she died.

November 2004. I was seventeen, a high school senior in the Philippines. I used to visit a bookstore that sold TIME Magazine’s Asia edition. That’s where I read about Iris. She had just taken her own life. She’d been working on a book about the Bataan Death March.

It wasn’t a long article; just a short write-up. I remember the photo more than the words: her piercing eyes and voluminous hair. At that age, I thought history was a closed subject, a fixed thing. Names, dates, treaties. But history is just our collective memory and we all know how unreliable memory could be.

I didn’t read The Rape of Nanking until years later. I could see why it was both a bestseller and a highly-debated piece of work. The testimonies, the photos, the passion in her prose. It’s not a book you finish and put back on the shelf. It stays in your bloodstream. You start to wonder how she made it through writing it, and then you remember that she didn’t.

I thought about her recently since the novel I’m writing has a character that’s partially based on Iris. The character is also somewhat based on Gary Webb and Danny Casolaro, two other journalists who died under circumstances that are still talked about on the internet to this day.

Gary Webb wrote Dark Alliance, a series that uncovered connections between CIA-backed Contras and cocaine trafficking from South America to American cities. His reporting was sharp, specific, maddening in its implications. The backlash from major media was swift and punishing. It didn’t matter that later reporting confirmed some of what he found. His reputation was already dismantled. He died on December 10, 2004, in Carmichael, California. Approximately one month after Iris Chang’s death. Official cause: suicide. Two shots to the head.

Besides the death dates, the same area of California, and mentions of the CIA (you’ll see this come up in Iris Chang’s suicide note later on), they were both very controversial and started dialogues around the world. They were also bloodhounds when it came to investigations and work ethic. They were also flawed writers because they wrote a lot of truth, but also had shoddy facts (or lack thereof) in their respective publications. They were also battling depression or another form of mental illness during their last days. Both Webb and Chang’s family say they believe that their loved ones committed suicide. In both deaths, thousands of people still believe they were killed by the powers that be despite the insistence of the two writers’ families—the people who knew them best; not strangers speculating from a distance—saying otherwise.

What do I believe? Who gives a fuck what I believe.

Okay, I’ll tell you anyways because I’m opinionated: I 99% believe both deaths were suicide and 1% believe they were assassinations, only because government agencies are not above those types of activities.

Danny Casolaro, on the other hand, was working on a story he called “The Octopus”: something called the PROMIS software, arms deals, Iran-Contra, the DoJ, Reagan, Daddy Bush, intelligence spook networks with tentacles everywhere. It’s a whole fruit salad. Danny’s notes were disorganized, sometimes speculative, but there was something in there, something that made him feel watched. Honestly, I didn’t care too much about the whole software/spying thing but more so on Wackenhut and what they were doing in the indigenous reservations in California.

I think that’s where Danny was supposed to go to next for his investigation, or to meet some mysterious source (I forgot the details), before he died In 1991. He was found in a bathtub in a motel in West Virginia with his wrists slit. He’d told his family that if he died, it wouldn’t be an accident. He was known to be squeamish about blood, according to family members.

In one of three suicide notes, Iris wrote:

“I cannot shake the belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or another organization, I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will not stop hounding me. Days before I left for Louisville, I had a deep foreboding about my safety. I suddenly sensed threats to my life: an eerie feeling that I was being followed in the streets, a white van parked outside my house, and damaged mail arriving at my P.O. Box. I believe my detention at Norton Hospital was an attempt by the government to discredit me. I had considered running away, but I will never be able to escape from myself and my thoughts. I am doing this because I am too weak to withstand the years of pain and agony ahead.”

It’s hard to parse how much of that was real and how much was the result of mental illness. After all, that type of paranoia is well-documented among patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Unfortunately, when I was a private investigator, I would get clients asking me to check for wiretaps, hidden cameras, and tracking devices because they believed the CIA or the Illuminati were after them. It was sad to see and, of course, I had to kindly refuse their business.

On the other hand, as a private investigator, I did (legally, with permission from the car owner, who was my client) install tracking devices on the vehicles my subject was driving. I did conduct surveillance in unmarked vans and did undercover operations, as well as rummage through a subject’s trash bin at 3 AM to find evidence. Again, this is all legal. Anything on the public street is public property and is not subject to privacy rights. They are also considered “abandoned property” once in the trash out on the curb.

So, as you can see, the paranoia can be warranted. The threat of surveillance is real. So, it’s really up in the air whether Iris was experiencing reality or delusions brought on by mental illness.

Her family insisted the medical treatment did more harm than the research, but there’s no clean separation. The two feed each other. History opens the door; chemistry walks you through it.

A few years ago, I took a contract job at a law firm. It was supposed to be short. Just four weeks. I was assigned to a review project involving hundreds of testimonies about sexual abuse, almost all the victims were young boys. The descriptions and testimonies were deeply explicit. Graphic. Painful. I’d read file after file. It made me sick, physically.

That kind of research stays in your nervous system. It doesn’t metabolize the way a news article does. It lives in you like mold. That job gave me the smallest glimpse into what writers like Iris must have gone through when immersed in years of atrocity research. Not metaphorical horror, but a granular, documented hell.

The files I read during that sexual abuse research project didn’t offer any kind of wisdom on how to combat pedophilia in the same way that The Rape of Nanking hasn’t moved the Japanese government to ever officially apologize or compensate the survivors of that horrible period in history.

They don’t give us catharsis. However, what they do is give the victims a voice; a way to be remembered; to provide a record, a testimony, of what happened to them so that they won’t get buried under the sands of the hourglass.

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Original post: https://michaelrmira.wordpress.com/2025/06/03/the-abyss/

#Books #Essay #History #Literature #Michael Raqim Mira #nonfiction #nonfiction books #Research #Writing

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darkmaga-returns · 6 months ago

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Church League of America developed a surveillance network, in collaboration with FBI offshoot Wackenhut, of American leftists during the Cold War.

With Dylan’s self-professed quasi-anarchistic philosophy, he may not be a member of any organized radical left movement. However, as history has proven, the credulous dupe has performed much more services to the collective cause than ten active members of the Communist Party. Herein lies the danger.

By “we” I am referring to Steven Fischler—co-principal at Pacific Street Films — and me; for more than 50 years we have been personally engaged with all things surveillance-related, in part, due to our production of an iconic 1972 documentary film known as Red Squad.

That 1972 documentary was a product of our own experiences at NYU Film School—under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese—who supported our efforts to film and identify cops who flirted around the edges of peaceful anti-war demonstrations. They were NYPD’s own paparazzi, getting up close and personal, grabbing pictures of all who participated. That film—and our involvement—was the reason we became named plaintiffs in a 1971 class-action lawsuit, Handschu v Special Services Division, which led to restricting the activities of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. Its impact can still be felt today.

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deblala · 11 months ago

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Wackenhut - Inside The Shadow CIA

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_wackenhut06.htm

View On WordPress

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unwilting · 1 year ago

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Private prisons house 17% of people in ICE custody. The Correctional Corporation of America, a private prison management company who controls half of the detention facilities run by private companies, spent $3 million lobbying politicians in 2004. They want stricter immigration laws so they can have access to more prisoners, which will bring them more money. In turn, ICE is able to pay 26% less per day to house prisoners in a private versus state-run facility.(4) This is possible because of the lack of public as well as governmental oversight at private facilities, where they reduce costs by getting rid of everything that would help prisoners, including necessary-to-life medical care. One reason state governments shied away from private prisons for their own citizens was the scandals that they quickly became associated with. In the year 1998-99, Wackenhut’s private prisons in New Mexico had a death rate 55 times that of the national average for prisons.(5) The migrant population’s lack of voice allows these corporations to get away with their cost-cutting abusive conditions when contracted by ICE. This is another good example of how capitalism values profit over humyn life.

#filed under: settler colonialism #immigrants #immigration

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partisan-by-default · 7 months ago

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On the earnings calls, two of the largest players in the private prison industry ― GEO Group and Core Civic ― demonstrated broad agreement on the implications of a second Trump term, saying it was likely to increase government funding of private contracts for immigration detention, electronic tracking devices, and the transport of detainees within the United States and to other countries.

“The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s– country’s history, and the opportunity that it will bring,” George Zoley, GEO Group’s founder andexecutive chairman of the company’s board of directors, said on the call. (The company used to be called Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.)

Elsewhere in the call, he referred to a potential “sea change” in interior and border enforcement ― an “unprecedented opportunity” to assist with what he described as the “much more aggressive” policy framework from the incoming Trump administration. Speaking generally, he said, “We’re looking at a theoretical potential doubling of all of our services.”

“It feels like with this election this year, we’re heading into an era that we really haven’t seen, maybe only once or twice in the company’s history, where the value proposition of the private sector for both our state partners and our federal partners are going to be not only strong today, but even stronger as we go in the next couple of years,” Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, said on that company’s own earnings call. Hininger noted he’d been with the company over 32 years. “We do think that there’s going to be increased need for detention capacity,” he added later.

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ausetkmt · 2 years ago

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The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor | The Nation

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Years after ALEC’s Truth In Sentencing bills became the law of the land, its Prison Industries Act has quietly expanded prison labor across the country.

August 1, 2011

This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.

This Prison Industries Act as printed in ALEC’s 1995 state legislation sourcebook, “provides for the employment of inmate labor in state correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain products under specific conditions.” These conditions, defined by the PIE program, are supposed to include requirements that “inmates must be paid at the prevailing wage rate” and that the “any room and board deductions…are reasonable and are used to defray the costs of inmate incarceration.” (Some states charge prisoners for room and board, ostensibly to offset the cost of prisons for taxpayers. In Florida, for example, prisoners are paid minimum wage for PIE-certified labor, but 40 percent is taken out of their accounts for this purpose.)

The Prison Industries Act sought to change this, inventing the “private sector prison industry expansion account,” to absorb such deductions, and stipulating that the money should be used to, among other things: “construct work facilities, recruit corporations to participate as private sector industries programs, and pay costs of the authority and department in implementing [these programs].” Thus, money that was taken from inmate wages to offset the costs of incarceration would increasingly go to expanding prison industries. In 2000, Florida passed a law that mirrored the Prison Industries Act and created the Prison Industries Trust Fund, its own version of the private sector prison industry expansion account, deliberately designed to help expand prison labor for private industries.

The Prison Industries Act was also written to exploit a critical PIE loophole that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders. It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), a private trade organization that happened to be represented by Allen’s lobbying firm, Service House, Inc. In 2003, Allen became the Texas House Chairman of the Corrections Committee and began peddling the Prison Industries Act and other legislation beneficial to CCA and Geo Group, like the Private Correctional Facilities Act. Soon thereafter he became Chairman of ALEC’s Criminal Justice (now Public Safety and Elections) Task Force. He resigned from the state legislature in 2006 while under investigation for his unethical lobbying practices. He was hired soon after as a lobbyist for Geo Group.

Today’s chair of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task force is state Representative Jerry Madden of Texas, where the Prison Industries Act originated eighteen years ago. According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were “thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations.” These included such states as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well; Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification. Today these state’s legislation are based upon an updated version of the Prison Industries Act, which ALEC amended in 2004.

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida’s forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states. What’s more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work. According to the Capitol Times, “inmates are not paid for their work, but receive time off their sentences.” The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much of ALEC’s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

“It’s bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China,” says Scott Paul Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of business and unions. “They shouldn’t have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral.”

Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, says prison labor is part of a “confluence of similar interests” among politicians and corporations, long referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” As decades of model legislation reveals, ALEC has been at the center of this confluence. “This has been ongoing for decades, with prison privatization contributing to the escalation of incarceration rates in the US,” Friedmann says. Just as mass incarceration has burdened American taxpayers in major prison states, so is the use of inmate labor contributing to lost jobs, unemployment and decreased wages among workers—while corporate profits soar.

#Prison #Prison for Profit #The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor | The Nation #ALEC #private prisons #prison industrial complex

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frenchrivieraguide · 5 years ago

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Ramatuelle, Var. By J Wackenhut / iStockphoto (at Ramatuelle) https://www.instagram.com/p/B6NGx3BKJ9Z/?igshid=1noodf2khp7xs

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youthincare · 7 years ago

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“In the early 1980s, the Corrections Corporation of America pioneered the idea of running prisons for a profit.

“You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers,” one of its founders told Inc. magazine.

Today, corporate-run prisons hold eight percent of America’s inmates. Here’s how the private prison industry took off:

1983

More: Who owns the Corrections Corporation of America?

Thomas Beasley, Doctor R. Crants, and T. Don Hutto start Corrections Corporation of America, the world’s first private prison company.

1984

CCA begins operating a county jail and a juvenile detention center in Tennessee. It also opens its first privately owned facility in Houston, a motel hastily remodeled to hold immigration detainees.

1985

A federal judge orders Tennessee to stop admitting inmates to its overcrowded prisons. CCA offers, unsuccessfully, to pay $250 million for a 99-year lease on the state’s entire prison system.

1986

CCA goes public, saying its facility design and use of electronic surveillance mean it can operate larger prisons “with less staff than the public sector would have needed.”

A guard dog at Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana 1987

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, later known as the GEO Group, gets its first contract to run a federal immigration detention center.

1990s

Among the “model” bills ?to emerge from the American Legislative Exchange Council‘s criminal justice task force, which CCA later co-chairs, are truth-in-sentencing and three-strikes legislation that help fuel the ’90s prison boom. (CCA says it did not vote on or comment on any proposed ALEC legislation.)*

1997

Arguing that it’s in the property business, CCA becomes a real estate investment trust for tax purposes. A new affiliate, Prison Realty Trust, raises $447 million for a prison-buying spree.

Private And Public Prison Populations 1990-2014

1998

The Justice Department investigates a CCA prison in Youngstown, Ohio, following a spate of escapes, stabbings, and killings. In addition to finding inexperienced and poorly trained guards, the probe reveals that CCA took on maximum-security inmates at a facility designed for a medium-security population.

2000

As prison occupancy rates drop, Prison Realty Trust nearly goes bankrupt. CCA stock, once nearly $150 a share, falls to 19 cents. The company drops the trust and restructures.

CCA Stock Price, 1997-2016

2004

A Justice Department report finds a “disturbing degree” of physical abuse by staff and underreporting of violence among inmates at a Baltimore juvenile facility run by the private prison operator Correctional Services Corporation. CSC is later acquired by GEO.

2005

Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) introduces the Private Prison Information Act, which would require private prisons holding federal inmates to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests. It died, as have at least seven similar bills opposed by CCA and GEO.

2007

A drawing by an immigrant child held at CCA’s T. Don Hutto Center.

ACLU

CCA’s and GEO’s stock prices jump as both companies jockey to run the federal government’s expanding immigration detention centers. Meanwhile, the ACLU settles a case against Immigration and Customs Enforcement for conditions in the CCA-managed T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas, where about half the detainees are kids. Under the agreement, children no longer wear prison uniforms and may move more freely.

2008

The New York Times investigates the deaths of immigration detainees, such as a Guinean man at a CCA-run facility who fractured his skull and was placed in solitary confinement before being taken to a hospital. He died after four months in a coma.

2009

A CCA representative attends a meeting where ALEC members draft the legislation that will eventually become Arizona’s notorious anti-immigration law. CCA denies having a hand in writing the bill. It cuts ties with ALEC the following year.

2010

An ACLU suit alleges rampant violence at a CCA-run Idaho prison known as “gladiator school.” The lawsuit claims the prison is understaffed and fosters an environment that “relies on the degradation, humiliation, and subjugation of prisoners.” The FBI investigates but doesn’t pursue charges. In Kentucky, the governor orders all female inmates removed from a CCA prison after more than a dozen cases of alleged sexual abuse by guards.

2011

Inmates at Winn Correctional Center

CCA becomes the first private prison company to purchase a state facility, buying Ohio’s Lake Erie Correctional Institution as part of a privatization planproposed by Gov. John Kasich and supported by his corrections chief, former CCA Director Gary Mohr.

2012

CCA offers to buy prisons in 48 states in exchange for 20-year management contracts. The same year, a GEO-operated youth facility in Mississippi where staff sexually abused minors is described by a judge as a “cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions.” At another Mississippi facility, a 24-year-old CCA employee is killed during a riot over prisoners’ complaints about poor food, inadequate medical care, and disrespectful guards.

2013

CCA converts back to a real estate investment trust, as does GEO. Mother Jones reports that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has invested $2.2 million in GEO.

2014

As it did during at least the previous five years, CCA’s annual report flags criminal justice reform—including drug decriminalization and the reduction of mandatory minimum sentences—as a “risk factor” for its business.* Chris Epps, Mississippi’s prison commissioner and the president of the American Correctional Association, is charged with taking kickbacks from a private prison contractor.

2015

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) co-sponsors the Justice is Not for Sale Act, which would ban all government contracts with private prison companies. After Hillary Clinton is criticized for using campaign bundlers who’d worked as lobbyists for CCA and GEO, she promises to no longer take their money and says, “We should end private prisons and private detention centers.”

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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While incarcerated at the Stewart Detention Center, Wilhen Barrientos—an immigrant from Guatemala—was forced to labor for CoreCivic, the infamous for-profit prison company. During his incarceration, he worked in the facility’s kitchen, making between $1 and $4 per day as part of the ironically named “Voluntary Work Program.” Barrientos explained that in prison, he faced an “impossible choice”: he could either work for pennies, or attempt to live without necessities such as soap and toilet paper, which were not provided to detainees and had to be purchased. (Once, when Barrientos requested more toilet paper, a CoreCivic guard denied his request and told Barrientos to “use his fingers” instead.) And when Barrientos refused to work double shifts, or tried to organize his coworkers, guards would threaten him with solitary confinement. In 2017, CoreCivic punished Barrientos by placing him in medical segregation for two months, using the excuse of a non-existent chicken pox infection as justification for their retaliation.

Barrientos is not alone. On any given day, there are about 50,000 immigrants being held in detention, most of them in private prisons. Just to be clear, these immigrants are not incarcerated as punishment for a crime; rather, they are being held in what’s called “civil” detention until their deportation cases can be heard by an immigration judge or an appeals court. Under the law, “civil” detention is supposedly non-punitive; it’s simply an administrative measure to ensure that people don’t flee and disappear before their cases are decided. But for those on the inside, immigration detention is functionally indistinguishable from being in any other prison. Approximately half of those 50,000 detainees work in the “Voluntary Work Program,” earning a pittance for their labor, and many more are forced to do entirely uncompensated janitorial work. All across the country, detained immigrants are forced to labor to increase the profits of the corporations which keep them incarcerated.

The public debate over the use of for-profit prisons has largely focused on the privatization of prisons that incarcerate people convicted of crimes. Although most people—libertarians excepted—agree that profiting from incarceration is morally abhorrent, some critics have pointed out that private prisons are not major drivers of mass incarceration. Historian David Stein has accurately described them as “a camera, not an engine” of mass incarceration. In 2017, about 8 percent of state and federal inmates (121,420 people) were housed in private prisons. In the federal system, for-profit prisons play a somewhat bigger role: about 27,500 people, or 15 percent of federal inmates, were held in private facilities. The state with the highest proportion of prisoners in for-profit facilities is New Mexico, which holds about 42 percent of its incarcerated population in private prisons.

121,420 people is a huge number, but it’s a relatively insignificant percentage of the huge numbers of people currently imprisoned as a result of the world historical crime that is American mass incarceration. Thus, while ending the use of private prisons in the criminal punishment system is still a worthy goal, it’s not one that will likely lead to systemic change. On the other hand, private prisons are absolutely central to the “civil” system of immigration detention. The vast majority of detained immigrants—more than 70 percent—are held in for-profit facilities. The radical expansion of immigration detention over the last thirty years would not have been possible without the for-profit incarceration industry.

The story of the companies that have made this lucrative imprisonment of immigrants possible began in the 1980s. Privatized, profitable punishment had a long history in the United States prior to that point, but after the horrific abuses of convict leasing led to its abolition in the first decades of the twentieth century, profitable prisoner exploitation enterprises like chain gangs and prison farms were managed directly by state authorities, not by private individuals and companies. This began to change in 1983, when two entrepreneurs named Robert Crants and Thomas Beasley saw a business opportunity at the intersection of the rapid growth of incarceration and the Reagan Administration’s push for privatization. They decided to start a private prison company called the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Neither Crants nor Beasley had any experience with managing prisons, so they reached out to T. Don Hutto, a warden with a long track record of running public prisons at a profit in Texas and Arkansas. It so happens that people incarcerated at these public prisons had previously sued Hutto because of conditions that were described by the district court as being “a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world;” conditions which included prisoners being whipped with a five-foot long leather strap, receiving electrical shocks to their genitals with the “Tucker Telephone,” and being fed a starvation diet while held in punitive isolation. Hutto’s sinister track record, however, did not stop Crants and Beasley from partnering with him; they believed Hutto could help them turn a profit. CCA received its first contract to run an Immigration and Naturalization Service detention facility in 1984 and went public in 1986. (Today, CoreCivic manages an immigration detention center named for T. Don Hutto near Austin, Texas!)

The founding of CCA marked the beginning of a new era of American incarceration. Just one year later, in 1984, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was formed. Both companies have since changed their names, as public awareness of private prison companies (and negative publicity around them) has increased. CCA rebranded itself under the blandly inscrutable name “CoreCivic” after journalist Shane Bauer went undercover as a guard at a CCA prison in Louisiana and released a blockbuster investigation highlighting the abuses there. Wackenhut, meanwhile, is now known as GEO Group. (GEO is not an acronym for anything, it’s just meant to obscure what their actual business is.) Through acquisitions, these two corporations have become by far the largest private prison corporations. GEO Group manages 124 detention facilities of various types in the United States while CoreCivic manages 108. Business is very good: in 2019, GEO Group had $2.48 billion in revenue, while CoreCivic had $1.98 billion. (Two other companies—LaSalle Corrections and the creepily-titled Management and Training Corporation—also incarcerate a significant number of people.)

Both CoreCivic and GEO Group have long had ties to Republican politicians. Thomas Beasley was once the head of the Tennessee Republican Party, and most of CCA’s initial investors—which included then-Governor Lamar Alexander’s wife, Honey—came from his party connections. GEO Group has been particularly active in courting Republican politicians, both nationally and in its home state of Florida. For example, before his election to the Senate, Rick Scott headlined a fundraiser held at the home of GEO Group’s CEO. In addition, GEO recently hired the outgoing president of the Florida Senate as head counsel and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as a lobbyist.

Both GEO Group and CoreCivic donated heavily to pro-Trump political action committees. GEO Group also donated $50,000 to the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, which has strong connections to the Trump White House. In 2017, GEO Group relocated its annual conference from its own headquarters to the Trump National Doral Miami golf resort. In addition, both companies, whose stocks soared immediately after President Trump’s election, donated $250,000 apiece to Trump’s notably corrupt inauguration festivities.

It is no surprise that both corporations would enthusiastically support the Trump administration: immigration detention is central to their business model (and to Trump’s as well). In 2019, almost 30 percent of GEO Group and CoreCivic’s revenue came from detaining immigrants, and ICE contracts are both companies’ single largest revenue source. What’s more, much of these profits are essentially guaranteed by government policy. In 2010, Congress passed a law requiring ICE to maintain at least 33,400 detention “beds”: what this means, essentially, is that ICE is heavily incentivized to keep at least 33,400 human beings imprisoned at all times in order to continue justifying their receipt of this funding. (This provision has come to be known as “the bed quota” because ICE leadership has, in practice, interpreted it as a legal directive that they must keep the pre-funded beds continuously filled.) The majority of those “beds” are managed by GEO Group and CoreCivic. In the government shutdown and border wall fight of early 2019, Democrats beat back the Trump Administration’s attempt to require ICE to maintain 52,000 beds, but the average daily population of detained immigrants nevertheless remained above 50,000 for fiscal year 2019. In its 2019 budget, the Trump Administration asked for an even bigger 54,000-bed requirement.

It’s worth noting that the abuses of immigration detention pre-date the Trump administration. Conditions during the Trump administration have been awful of course: besides the COVID outbreaks and the forced hysterectomies, a USA Today investigation in 2019 found more than four hundred allegations of sexual assault or abuse, as well as numerous instances of inadequate medical care, frequent use of solitary confinement, and more than eight hundred instances of physical force against detainees. These abuses led detained immigrants to file nearly 20,000 grievances between 2017 and 2019. During the Obama administration, hundreds of detained immigrants reported being sexually abused by guards. Despite the administration’s promises, the mass detention of immigrants continued until the end of Obama’s presidency, and detainees were never provided with protection from abuse. The abuse of detained immigrants is caused by the fact of their detention, no matter who is President.

Private prisons, like all privatized services, make money by cutting costs. But once prisons are constructed, the two largest costs are labor and medical care, which are impossible to cut without making conditions worse inside the prisons. For example, labor and benefits costs make up 59 percent of CoreCivic’s operating expenses (even though its non-unionized correctional officers are paid as little as nine dollars per hour, much less than most unionized state prisoner guards). In addition to underpaying their own guards, a key way that CoreCivic and GEO Group further reduce labor costs is by forcing detainees to work for very little or no pay.

There are two main forms of coerced labor in immigration detention centers. First is the so-called “Voluntary Work Program” that Barrientos worked in. The program rests on a thin legal basis, and the going rate—$1 per day—was set in 1979 and then never renewed by Congress, leading some courts to determine that state minimum wage laws might apply to labor in detention centers. Although the application of state minimum wage laws to detained workers is complex, it is clear that absolutely nothing forbids GEO Group or CoreCivic from voluntarily paying the state or federal minimum wage—or more—for detainees’ labor.

Today, all detained immigrants are eligible to work in the Program. They perform a wide variety of jobs, from washing dishes to cutting hair to performing clerical work for the private facility manager. Any job performed by a prisoner for an extremely sub-minimum wage makes it unnecessary to hire an employee to perform the same task, thereby boosting the profits of the for-profit prison corporations. ICE regulations require detained immigrants to “maintain their immediate living areas in a neat and orderly manner,” and GEO Group and CoreCivic have frequently stretched this provision to force detainees to clean the bathrooms, hallways, and common areas of their prisons without any compensation.

ICE’s own guidelines for the Voluntary Work Program make it appear that the program is truly voluntary—so far as any incarcerated labor is voluntary. Officially, detainees cannot be required to work, and cannot be punished for quitting their jobs or refusing to work. These regulations, however, do not reflect the reality of labor in detention. An American Civil Liberties Union report found, “[e]ven though the program is supposed to be voluntary, detainees’ experiences are illustrative of its coercive nature.” The Justice Department has acknowledged that it is possible for facility operators to “illegally” force detained immigrants to work (although they maintain that the program, if run “correctly,” would be voluntary).

Detained immigrants have alleged that the program is coercive for two main reasons. First, participating in the program is the only way to buy necessities such as toothpaste, soap, and feminine hygiene products, which are not otherwise provided to detained immigrants and are sold at highly inflated prices. Second, GEO Group and CoreCivic retaliate against detainees by putting them in solitary confinement or changing their housing assignment if they refuse to work double shifts, refuse to work while sick, or protest unsafe conditions. In at least one GEO Group prison, the official policy was to place detained immigrants in solitary confinement if they refused to perform uncompensated janitorial work or encouraged others to do so. During the pandemic, protests against unsafe working conditions have understandably risen significantly, while at the same time facility managers have retaliated against protestors and placed immigrants who tested positive for COVID-19 in solitary confinement.

Current and formerly-detained immigrants have filed several lawsuits over the last six years, arguing that the work policies in GEO Group and CoreCivic detention centers violate the forced labor provision of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The TVPA, first passed in 2000, is best known as an anti-sex trafficking law, but it also contains the most important federal prohibition of forced labor. If a person or company obtains labor through threats of or actual force, “serious harm,” or abuse of legal process, they can be charged or sued under the law. The TVPA is most commonly used to protect immigrant workers, but it applies to everyone in the United States. For example, if you threaten to pull a gun on the guests at a party and force them to clean your apartment, you have violated the TVPA (and several other laws. Please don’t do that).

The forced labor statute of the TVPA was passed in response to a 1988 Supreme Court decision ruling that a farm owner named Ike Kozminski had not committed the distinct crime of “involuntary servitude” when he coerced two mentally disabled men into working on his farm. The Court, always happy to disadvantage workers, held that “involuntary servitude” required physical or legal coercion, not psychological coercion, regardless of how vulnerable or powerless the coerced person might be. The TVPA was explicitly intended to circumvent the Supreme Court’s decision in Kozminski and protect workers from all forms of coerced labor.

So far, the immigrants and their attorneys have won a string of victories. Courts across the country have rejected GEO Group and CoreCivic’s arguments that the TVPA does not apply to for-profit detention centers and that they should therefore be allowed to force detainees to labor. In addition, three courts have certified classes of thousands of immigrants who were allegedly forced to labor while detained. As the lawsuits wend their way through the court system, it appears more and more likely that the plaintiffs could win a judgment which forces the corporations to pay massive damages and stop their illegal practices. The private prison corporations have already begged ICE to pay their legal bills, and one scholar has estimated that paying minimum wage for work in detention centers could reduce their profits by as much as 25 percent.

Other recent activist challenges have further threatened GEO Group and CoreCivic’s profits, compounding the importance of these forced labor lawsuits. Both companies’ stock prices cratered when it appeared the Obama administration would phase out federal contracts with private prisons, but rebounded after Trump was elected. In the last few years, however, activists have successfully forced institutions such as universities to divest their holdings, and, most importantly, forced major banks to stop lending to GEO Group and CoreCivic. Both corporations have acknowledged in SEC filings that “[i]ncreasing activist resistance” poses a significant threat to their profits. Consequently, their stock prices have fallen by more than two-thirds since peaking in mid-2017. Forcing private prison companies to pay up for stolen labor, while simultaneously choking off their access to investors, is a two-pronged strategy that has the potential to cripple their operations.

So what will happen to immigration detention if these lawsuits succeed, or if Joe Biden decides to reinstate the late Obama-era plan to phase out private prisons? Although we should never underestimate the ability of the carceral state to adjust to keep people locked up, without private prison facilities it would be extremely difficult to detain immigrants at the same volume. The roughly 30 percent of detained immigrants who are currently not held in private facilities are held in local jails. In theory, ICE could radically expand its use of jails to detain immigrants. But this may prove difficult: in addition to the logistical difficulties of shifting their detention practices, many localities have recently refused to allow ICE to detain immigrants in county jails. In the past, ICE has responded to these refusals by utilizing more space at private prisons: for example, in 2018 ICE moved detained immigrants to a nearby GEO Group facility when the city of Atlanta canceled its contract to lease jail space to ICE. Without private prison facilities as an option, ICE will have nowhere to put its intended prisoners if local jails decline to lease them space.

Obviously, the clearest moral, economic, and logistical solution to the problems faced by for-profit ICE detention centers is to stop detaining immigrants. The radical expansion of immigration detention is a recent phenomenon and could easily be reversed. But additionally, everyone should be able to agree that it is imperative to stop corporations from profiting from forced labor. The lawsuits against GEO Group and CoreCivic are being argued by dedicated advocates and organizations, but there are plenty of other ways to weaken immigration detention and the for-profit prisons that enable it.

For those who want to see an end to for-profit prisons, forced labor, and the mass jailing of immigrants generally, two useful sites for organizing are divestment campaigns and local elections. Although banks have distanced themselves from private prison corporations, institutional investors still own large chunks of them and can be pressured to sell them off. Vanguard, which likely manages your retirement fund if you’re lucky enough to have one, owns more than 15 percent of both CoreCivic and GEO Group’s stock. Vanguard also manages a number of unions’ pension funds, but so far has resisted divesting from its private prison holdings. Meanwhile, local elections for sheriffs and District Attorneys have a major impact on ICE’s ability to arrest and detain immigrants. ICE relies on the cooperation of local authorities to help arrest and detain immigrants, but local officials are free to withdraw that cooperation, as many have in recent years.

As dark as the last decade of deportation policy and mass incarceration has been, a world without immigrant prisons—and without for-profit prisons—may be much closer than it seems.

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