The Morning News The future of private prisons in America is frighteningly bright.
Credit: Matt B..

“We’re just bailing out the ship with a plastic bucket.”

If/when Trump follows through on his promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, they will be funneled through ICE's "removal" apparatus, the detention facilities for which are contracted out to private prison groups.

These facilities are already inhumane. They are also incredibly underprepared to adequately treat any mental health problems that any of these millions of people may have.

Dec 24, 2016

The private prison where a four-year-old riot prompted the DoJ to drop private prisons hasn't improved since then

Inside the deadly 2012 private prison riot in Natchez, Miss—scant medical supplies, rank food, and a nearly entirely English-speaking staff for a correspondingly Spanish-speaking population. The riot prompted the Department of Justice's initial report recommending the agency end its relationship with for-profit detention.

Related: A DoJ Inspector General report on the Natchez facility published this month found "deeply concern[ing]… significant deficiencies in correctional and health services and Spanish-speaking staffing" at the CoreCivic (until recently CCA) prison.

Dec 23, 2016

For children, it was too much like prison

A state judge in Texas ordered hundreds of women and children freed from a CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA)-run ICE "family detention" facility.

Dec 14, 2016

Advisory board rejects recommendation that immigration authorities should use private prisons

DHS's Advisory Board rejected a portion of an internal report that recommended maintaining and increasing ICE's reliance on private prisons—which sounds great in headlines, but their rejection is merely advisory, and Trump's DHS pick can just ignore whatever decision current DHS head Jeh Johnson makes anyway.

Dec 5, 2016

Trump will be a great friend of private prisons and their backers

The pro-privatization and anti-regulation Trump presidency will be good news for not only private prisons but also the major banks—including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase—that finance the industry and profit off its reliance on debt financing.

Nov 17, 2016

In other "dark money" news

The second-largest private prison company in America, GEO Group, made a potentially illegal $100,000 donation last week to a Super PAC supporting—shocker—Donald Trump.

Nov 4, 2016

A troubled private-prison firm rebrands itself

Corrections Corporation of America, the largest and worst private prison operator in the country, is rebranding to the "social studies textbook"-sounding CoreCivic as it expands into jail construction and maintenance.

Oct 31, 2016

How the largest US prison health care provider puts lives in danger

Even when prison systems outsource specific parts of their procedures to private companies, instead of whole facilities, it doesn't end well. Case in point: Corizon, the country's largest medical "health care" provider for jails and prisons, whose inadequate care has resulted in deaths and unnecessary complications from illnesses.

Oct 31, 2016

American immigration policies will prop up private prisons for the foreseeable future

Following the DOJ's decision to end use of private prisons, the privare prison industry is ramping up its lobbying. But it can take solace in the fact that current American immigration policies will prop up the industry for the forseeable future, regardless of any "pending review." As the CEO of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) said during an investor call in 2013, "ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has always said… there is always going to be strong demand regardless of what is being done at the national level as far as immigration reform."

For instance: In 2010, former KKK organizer Sen. Robert Byrd snuck an incendiary line into a larger national security bill that created an increasing detention bed quota for ICE to fulfill. Seeing how private prisons house some 62 percent of ICE's detainees—and charge the government per prisoner some $160/day—the industry direclty profits from the arbitrary quota.

Last week, DHS officials met to address record immigration detention and to scrounge up 5,000 new beds. ("They’re scraping the bottom looking for beds," an anonymous official told the Journal.) Then CCA stocks spiked after news broke that ICE had extended its contract to run the country's largest family detention center in the country. This was only weeks after ICE's advisory committee on family detention recommended that the agency end the practice entirely. Family detention centers have been referred to as "internment camps."

(Also: ICE is looking to reopen at least two DOJ private prisons that are being shut down, one of which was a subject of a lengthy exposé that found that it regularly functioned without any doctors on staff.)

Oct 26, 2016

The government has no reliable data on whether private prisons actually save taxpayers money—which is ostensibly the entire reason they exist. But if they do save money, it's because they conscript prisoners into effective slave labor.

It shouldn’t have taken the ACLU to make the government realize that holding innocent children in a converted medium-security adult prison is a bad idea.

Former ACLU attorney Vanita Gupta reflects on her fight to close America's first big experiment with private family detention.
↩︎ The New Yorker
Oct 26, 2016

How Homeland Security can wean itself off private prisons

With the Department of Homeland Security now in the position of being private prisons' last federal sugar daddy—CCA got a secret, no-bid $1 billion contract to build and run the country's largest family detention center from ICE earlier this year—what can it do to ratchet down its increasing reliance on the industry? Luckily the ACLU has a helpful white paper that lays out what steps it should take:

1. End family detention and detention of asylum seekers (reducing detention population by 11,000-15,000 people)
2. End prolonged detention without bond hearings (reduction of 4,500+ people)
3. Interpret the mandatory custody statute to permit a range of custodial options, and apply it only to immigrants recently convicted of serious crimes who do not have meritorious immigration cases (reduction of 5,000-10,000 people)
4. Stop imposing exorbitant, unaffordable bonds (reduction of 1,300+ people)

There are obstacles, though: an anonymous ICE official told the Journal last month that ending ICE's use of private prisons would require an 800 percent expansion of the agency's capacity.

Oct 26, 2016

Prior to the DOJ's recent decision to end the use of private prisons, bureaucrats created a lucrative new classification of prisons, specifically built for immigrants who have solely been charged with immigration-related offenses. "You build a prison, and then you've got to find someone to put in them,” Texas state Sen. John Whitmire told Fusion. “So they widen the net and find additional undocumented folks to fill them up."

More Headlines