Anywhere from 50 to 100 detainees at the sprawling Port Isabel Processing Center near Brownsville stopped eating last Wednesday in an effort to draw attention to extended detention that they say violates their right to due process.
One of the detainees on hunger strike - Rama Carty - spoke to the Observer by phone on Friday about how he has been detained by ICE for more than 13 months.
“It’s unconstitutional. It’s unjust,” Carty said. “We’re held well past any reasonable time under the law, or just any reasonable time, period.”
Carty fell under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008 after he served two years in prison for what he says is a wrongful drug conviction. He spent time in detention centers in Maine and New Hampshire before being sent to Texas in December. In March, he came across an article in USA Today about a new Amnesty International report on how thousands of immigrants are detained for months or years without any meaningful judicial review of whether they should be released.
“If immigration removal is not reasonably foreseeable at all, then detention, in essence, shouldn’t exist,” Carty said, citing a Supreme Court precedent for cases like his.
Carty turns 39 next week and has lived in the United States since he was a year old. His parents are Haitian, but he was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo while they were working there. Neither country will accept him, so he languishes in detention in the country he calls home.
“I am a U.S. citizen from a cultural standpoint,” Carty told the Observer.
He wants a chance to argue he is a citizen from a legal standpoint as well. He said ICE mishandled his mother’s application for naturalization, and he should be given an opportunity to be considered a citizen. But, like many in the 1,200-bed facility, he said he lacks access to legal assistance.
“We are told we have lawyers available thru pro-bono associations but that’s not the truth,” Carty said of the overwhelmed legal aid offices that mostly focus on political asylum cases. “The amount of effective assistance of counsel is grossly insufficient,” he said.
Carty says he thinks the hunger strike will continue to grow. The strikers’ demands include a meeting with Dora Schriro, the newly appointed special advisor on detention and removal for the Department of Homeland Security.
Despite the ACLU’s TYC lawsuit, many juvenile justice advocates assert that, while it’s slow-moving, there is progress at TYC — trickling down from the top.
When Richard Nedelkoff became TYC conservator and brought new leadership from outside the agency, reform proponents saw hope for change—hope that may have been dashed by the ACLU’s revelations of punitive practices and abuse.
But for those brave (or naive) enough to keep believing in the possibility of reform, the ACLU’s revelations don’t seem to fit the classic TYC pattern of abuses following the promise reform. State-appointed TYC watchdog and former ACLU directorWill Harrell says the suit does not accurately reflect the massive culture shift occurring at TYC. And, even most youth advocates say there’s evidence the agency is on the right path; it just needs legislative and fiscal support.
“Six months ago, I wouldn’t have believed the reforms taking place at TYC were possible,” says Harrell, “but this leadership has embraced all the principles we advocated for in the past.”
Harrell says most allegations mentioned in the ACLU suit are already being addressed. “I wish ACLU would have come to me before filing suit,” he says.
Litigation, says Harrell, is often an ineffective means to bring about change, especially when it involves filing suit against an underfunded agency, whose new leaders have demonstrated a willingness to openly discuss problems and issues with advocates.
And, indeed, advocacy organizations traditionally opposed to TYC say they have seen dramatic changes in the agency over the past six months. “TYC leadership is making encouraging cultural and structural changes,” says Deborah Fowler, legal director of Texas Appleseed, a non-profit that sued TYC last year over pepper spray policies. “The new leadership shares our reform vision,” she says.
So why did the ACLU hit TYC with such force just as the agency is trying to right itself?
Terri Burk, ACLU of Texas executive director, says the organization was representing clients with pressing needs, and the 2007 legislative reform was too slow in its progress. The best way to move the process along was to file suit, she believes.
“Culture shifts won’t happen overnight in an agency with deep-rooted issues to overcome,” responds Harrell.
Advocates on the ground seem to agree.
“TYC is a big ship to turn around. It takes longer than we sometimes would like, but it’s moving in the right direction,” says Rebecca Lightsey, Texas Appleseed executive director.
Ultimately, it seems the longevity and speed of reform efforts depend on those beyond TYC’s top management. “TYC finally has leadership that’s youth and family-focused,” says Jodie Smith, public policy director of Texans Care for Children. “The burden of change now falls to the legislature.”
“You get what you pay for,” says Harrell, who believes funding issues will ultimately determine the pace of change. “The real test of progress will be what reforms are put into place next legislative session.”
In fact, the agency’s bad rap sheet stretches back almost 30 years, to the Morales v. Turman federal lawsuit that aimed to reform the Texas juvenile justice system. Unfortunately, the suit was to be the first of many in an ongoing cycle of abuse, exposure and promised reform.
Perhaps the agency has been so hard to rehabilitate because its problems extend beyond a handful of troubled facilities or a flawed approach to juvenile justice. Mental health advocates blame public officials’ failure to recognize the importance of early intervention programs within the mental health system statewide as a key culprit.
“If we addressed these problems early on, with community and school-based programs, these kids wouldn’t end up at TYC,” says Jodie Smith, public policy director of Texans Care for Children.
But, in Texas, a state ranked 49th in the nation for mental health funding, kids in need often don’t get any psychiatric help until they are already deeply entrenched in the criminal justice system.
“Our aim is to rehabilitate these kids, but many of them have never been ‘habilitated’ in the first place,” said Jim Hurley, TYC spokesman. “They never received adequate education or care.”
TYC has undergone massive reforms in the past year, including instituting 300 hours of required training for each staff member and increasing agency transparency, says Hurley.
The fact remains, however, 38 percent of its youth have serious mental health problems, and another 72 percent come from “chronically chaotic households” (a condition often linked to later development of PTSD, depression and addiction)—shifting the culture and practices of the agency to meet such a large need takes money, resources and time.
For the ACLU, who recently filed another lawsuit against the agency, time was the problem. “We felt progress of reform was too slow, and that filing suit was the best way to meet our clients pressing needs,” said ACLU of Texas Executive Director Terri Burke.
There’s little doubt seclusion and restraint practices only exacerbate any mental problems adolescents may have. And, the ACLU accounts of the treatment of these juveniles, which (among many heart-wrenching scenes) cite instances of TYC officers making fun of suicidal young girls, are, without doubt, devastating.
Immediately after the suit was filed, TYC made changes to their guidelines for conducting strip searches, says Burke.
But these changes likely will not be enough.
Until there is a shift in thinking and dollars toward early intervention, not at TYC, but at the legislative and societal level, says Smith, these problems will continue.
Got pot? If so, take comfort that you’re one of an estimated 80 million Americans who’ve at least tried the supposedly dangerous Schedule 1 drug, But do you know where your drug money actually goes? Is it funding terrorists, as the post-9/11 advertising campaign would have you believe?
Well, no, according to American Drug War: The Last White Hope, a compellingly researched new documentary by Austin filmmaker Kevin Booth that does an admirable job of following the money.
In the case of the United States’ war on drugs, the modern incarnation of which was launched by Richard Nixon in 1971, Booth makes the case that the ostensible battle is more accurately an economic incentive program for the private prison industry, funded out of self-interest by the Partnership for a Drug Free America (essentially a front group for legal drug industries, i.e. pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and tobacco) and waged by a series of increasingly ineffective administration-appointed Drug Czars, including current title-holder John Walters. You’ve never heard of him, Booth argues, because the current drug economy is working the way it should: drugs are flowing, prisons are full, and Wall Street is happy.
In painting this ugly picture, Booth traces the connections between the Iran/Contra debacle, infamous Los Angeles street dealer Ricky Ross, controversial CIA-cocaine connection journalist Gary Webb, Oliver North, Panamanian henchman Manuel Noriega, Phoenix’s tough-love anti-drug sheriff Joe Arpaio, pro-pot comedian/martyr Tommy Chong, the PATRIOT ACT, and the equally inscrutable war of terror.
Along the way, Booth questions why Afghanistan’s heroin production actually increased after the American invasion, gives Clinton-era Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey enough on-camera rope to make him look like a self-satisfied and not entirely bright tool, recontextualizes Osama bin Laden as a drug kingpin propped up by prohibition, and makes a convincing case that the drug war is not so much winnable as fund-able. The Office of National Drug Control Policy is budgeted at $18.5 billion for 2008.
Meanwhile, the burgeoning private prison industry finds itself a beneficiary of the million-plus nonviolent drug offenders currently behind bars in the U.S.
Observer fans will be curious to see reference to staff reporter Forrest Wilder’s Daily Texan reporting on the for-profit prison industry, and yet another examination of the drug war gone awry in Tulia, told through interviews with lawyer Jeff Blackburn and recently deceased fall-guy Joe Moore.
Booth’s narrative is hardly subtle (though he does manage to make it personal by including the legal and illegal drug-related deaths of his brother and friend), and the slightly ham-handed approach (Booth would have you believe that the solution to all these problems is to be found in Amsterdam-style decriminalization of “organic” drugs like marijuana and mushrooms) does a good job of hammering home the essential point: America’s war on drugs is incredibly costly, appallingly ineffective, and irretrievably entrenched.
American Drug War is strong medicine, impeccably sourced, and the DVD — which recently took top honors in four consecutive film festivals —is due to hit stores May 27. If you already agree with its premise, you’ll find further ammunition for your next argument. And if the film’s hypothesis sounds to you like just another round of paranoid conspiracy-theorizing, you just might learn something from it.
The fastest-growing segment of the prison industry is for-profit detention centers housing immigrants. The Bush administration - with characteristic zeal - has given the job of holding this growing detention population — fed largely by the crackdown on illegal immigration — to prison peddlers who are dependent on taxpayer dollars. Texas has been ground zero for this growth industry.
“Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses… and we’ll lock ‘em up” seems to be the mantra of Corrections Corporation of America, Emerald, GEO Group, MTC, and other “corrections” companies. These outfits tend to operate with minimal oversight and little direction from government agencies. In truth, outside of a few attorneys, correctional officers, and the detainees themselves, few have first-hand knowledge of detention center operations.
However, documents recently obtained by the Observer paint a dismal picture of some Texas facilities. We wrote about the documents in a March issue of the magazine. Three of six Texas facilities inspected by the Office of Federal Detention Trustee flunked federal standards: the Brooks County Correctional Facility in Falfurrias, operated by LCS Corrections Services Inc. of Lafayette, Louisiana; the Willacy County Regional Detention Center in Raymondville, operated by Utah-based Management & Training Corp; and the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa, also operated by LCS.
The facilities had numerous security, sanitation, management, record-keeping, and health care problems. In the case of East Hidalgo, the Federal Detention Trustee deemed the detention center “at risk” and ordered immediate federal intervention.
From the March issue of the Observer:
At East Hidalgo, the inspectors found dozens of violations of federal standards. Medical, dental, and mental health care is virtually nonexistent. Initial medical screenings are performed by unqualified nurses and do not include a physical examination, or an appraisal for chemical dependency, mental retardation, and suicide risk, according to the report. Moreover, the jail has no dentist or mental health professional on-site.
A hallway is used as an examination room. Staff are not trained to deal with suicidal detainees despite eight suicide attempts in the year prior to the report.Security is poor. At the time of the inspection, visitors didn’t even pass through a metal detector when entering the building. The jail has no “specific instructions” on when firearms may be used; no procedures for maintaining weapons or for controlling keys, kitchen tools, and medical equipment; no effective plan for a mass evacuation; and no training program on the use of force.
Sanitation is lacking. Employees are not tested for blood-borne pathogens, increasing the risk of disease to both guards and inmates. Detainees are issued “sporks,” but the utensils are not sanitized, nor are barbering tools.Two juveniles were discovered by the inspectors at the adult-only detention center and immediately removed.In addition, the report reveals that 19 inmate-on-inmate assaults had occurred in the previous year.
After six inmates escaped in 2006, the state jail commission cited the facility for employing too few guards, for the third time.
Richard Harbison, vice president of LCS, told the Observer last month that the company had corrected the problems and expected to pass an upcoming inspection. (We’ll update once we find out if the inspection has occurred and how the facility did.)
Because it’s so rare to get a glimpse of how bad some of these private lockups can be, we’ve taken the time to scan most of the pages from the East Hidalgo inspection report.
In addition to the deficiencies of the prisons, the documents also inadvertently reveal the pettiness of the secretive Bush administration. Whole pages of the inspection reports were redacted… sort of. The feds need to invest in some better Sharpies. Much of what they tried to hide could be read with the aid of a light table and a magnifying glass. While the redactions did obscure some sensitive security problems, other portions of the inspection reports hardly seemed worthy of a black marker.
For example, in the report on the East Hidalgo Detention Center, the Federal Detention Trustee redacted a section on spork protocol. “Sporks are not returned to food service for proper cleaning,” the redacted part reads. “All utensils should be properly washed.” A blacked-out section in the report on the LCS Brooks County Correctional Facility says, “Chicken was thawing in a sink for over two hours on Nov. [ ], 2007 and a turkey product was thawing at room temperature for over 7 1/2 hours on Nov. 7, 2007.”
The agency even redacted areas of the inspection where the prisons received passing marks.
As a legal basis for the secrecy, the agency cited a provision in the Freedom of Information Act that allows an agency to withhold information that “could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual.” But doesn’t the real danger to human safety come from the sorry state of the detention centers, not the disclosure thereof?
Lawyer Marc Falkoff gave a harrowing description of life in Guantanamo at the Rothko Chapel in Houston Thursday. Falkoff who is part of the foundation’s speaker series, represents 16 Yemeni prisoners in Guantanamo. Of the 800 prisoners that were detained in Guantanamo, 500 have been released. The Europeans and Saudis have all gone home, he said, and those that remain are primarily Yemeni. Unfortunately, their government has little interest in lobbying the United States for their release.
He illustrated life in detention there through one of his clients Adnan who has deteriorated over the past five years into a shell of a man. Currently, on a hunger strike, Adnan is being force fed through a tube in his nose. Adnan, had been in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border seeing a doctor when 9-11 happened. After 9-11, the CIA dropped thousands of flyers over the region saying it would pay $5,000 a head for any Al-Qaeda member. Pakistani Security Forces under Pervez Musharraf rounded up anyone who looked Arab. Adnan was detained by the Security Forces and flown to Guantanamo in 2002 where he was kept outside in a cage. He has never been formally charged and is still waiting for his day in court.
Falkoff said over the years, he has tried to keep Adnan’s faith in the American legal system alive. “Death would be more merciful,” is what Adnan told him during their last meeting. Falkoff said he and other lawyers representing Gitmo detainees are having a hard time believing in the system themselves.
“Many of us lawyers feel we are fighting for America’s soul and the rule of law” he said.
Falkoff is currently part of a lawsuit to see whether his emails and phones are being tapped. “I believe the NSA has been monitoring my emails and phone for some time,” he said. One thing Falkoff has done to remind the American people about the plight of the detainees is to release a book of poems written by them called: Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Any written scrap of paper Falkoff collects from the detainees must be kept in a classified high security building in Virginia. All of the poems for the book had to be cleared by the Pentagon first.
The following poem is from detainee Jumah al Dosarri, a 33-year-old Bahraini national. The father of a young daughter, he has been held at Guantanamo more than five years. Falkoff said he had tried to kill himself 12 times, and on one occasion, his lawyer found him hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.
DEATH POEM
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”
“Hutto: America’s Family Prison,” a short film by filmmakers Matthew Gossage and Lily Keber, details the prison-like conditions at the for-profit T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, near Austin. Hundreds of immigrant men, women, and children - many of whom are fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries - are incarcerated at Hutto in conditions that, until recently, were abysmal. A grassroots movement to shut down Hutto and a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and attorneys with the UT Immigration Law Clinic has improved the lot of those warehoused at Hutto, but calls persist to shutter the detention center. Watch the film and then read the Observer’s interview with the filmmakers below.
Texas Observer: Some of the most harrowing accounts of being detained at Hutto came from young children. They evidently thought they had done something wrong to be in jail and would ask their moms or dads, “Why has God abandoned us?” Many kids said they were threatened by guards with separation from their families if they misbehaved, as your film shows. Moreover, a child psychologist for the defense in the ACLU-UT Law Clinic lawsuit against the feds gave a preliminary assessment based on interviews with several children and their mothers. The psychologist said he found evidence of regression (including a reversion to bedwetting and nursing among kids who had outgrown this), trauma, and PTSD among young children. Civilized nations consider children to have a kind of existential and legal innocence, and they enjoy special rights under long-established law. How did we, then, get to the point of locking minors behind bars for no reason other than they accompanied their immigrant parents - many of which are bona fide asylum-seekers - to the U.S.?
Matthew Gossage: I feel that several regressive and conservative policies all came together with the operation of Hutto. We have a conservative federal administration that wants to appear “tough on immigration” and a criminal justice system which is more and more driven by a profit motive. These two together encourage a system of dealing with immigration on a prison model, instead of addressing the social and economic causes of immigration.
TO: You call Hutto the largest family internment since WWII. “Internment” is a strong word, carrying much historical and political significance. Why did you choose that word and why do you believe Hutto constitutes internment?
Lily Keber: We chose the term ‘internment’ to place what’s happening at Hutto in a broader historical context. Of course one thinks of the Japanese-American internment during WWII. Families of Japanese, German, and Italian descent were all removed from general population because of the perceived threat they might pose. It took until the 80s, but finally politicians apologized for that and admitted it was unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity. I think one day we, as a nation, will look back on what Homeland Security is doing right now and say the same thing.
MG: “Internment” is loaded in our culture and history. We hope that making this comparison will cause debate and conversation about other examples in our history where we have reacted with hysteria and fear towards people that aren’t part of the dominant power structure and have fewer civil rights.
TO: Homeland Security maintains that Hutto was opened to keep families together. But as your film shows there are less restrictive alternatives, such as keeping people under supervision or housing them in non-prison settings. Why do you think the authorities have written off these more humane and cheaper alternatives?
MG: I would love to hear Michael Chertoff (Director of Homeland Security) explain why he doesn’t use more humane options for immigration and border enforcement. But my opinion is that it is politically advantageous for the Bush administration to appear that they are taking a hard-line approach towards immigration to appease the Republicans’ more conservative and xenophobic base. There are also people that are getting very wealthy off these less-humane and more expensive detention facilities. These same people contribute financially to politicians of both parties to continue the growth of the prison industry. If more humane and cheaper alternatives exist, that by definition means that there will be less money for these prison corporations and contractors.
TO: What sort of access did Corrections Corp. of America (CCA) or the Dept. of Homeland Security grant you to film inside?
LK: None. They are extremely restrictive with media access. There was an official media tour about a year ago, but for that they cleaned out the jail, put teddy bears on the beds, literally shackled the pregnant women and bussed them out of the prison so no one could photograph them. When we tried to contact CCCA and DHS about getting access inside, it was the typical bureaucratic run around- ‘No, you have to call this other person’ or ‘No, that’s this other department’, that sort of thing. We tried very hard to get an interview with them and include their side of the story. But they declined. They made that choice, meaning they decided to continue hiding behind their veil of bureaucracy and secrecy.
TO: What was it like making this short film - did you set out to make an advocacy documentary or did you come into this project with an “open mind,” if that’s possible?
LK: I didn’t set out specifically to make an advocacy documentary. There was such a paucity of meaningful media available on Hutto in the beginning that we just were trying to get anything out there. A couple papers in Texas covered it, and there were some reports on Univision and “Democracy Now!”. But beyond that, there was very little information available. Very soon into the filming, though, I started to realize just how topical the issue is. The government built Hutto as a prototype, and had hopes of building family detention centers all across the country. It’s only because of the negative outpouring they’ve gotten about Hutto that’s made them re-evaluate their plans. We felt it was important to include that this outcry was just by ‘ordinary’ people, and how important it is for people to get involved.
MG: Yeah, I made no illusions to myself or others that this would be an objective film. Even before we started thorough research of Hutto, my perspective was clearly opposed to it. It is definitely advocating the reversal of these immigration policies.
TO: You end on a high note in the film: that the public activism and outcry surrounding Hutto succeeded. Talk a little bit about the movement to shut down Hutto. Obviously the facility is still open but conditions have evidently improved. Are people satisfied with that outcome? And what’s next for you, and for the movement against the growing immigrant detention complex in America?
LK: Conditions have improved. The barbed wire has come down, accountability is up. Are people happy with that as an end result? No. At its core, Hutto is still a for-profit prison channeling money into the pockets of the largest corrections corporation in the US at the expense of the taxpayer. It still is holding men and women and children who have no crime against them other than a civil violation. As long as our government sees fit to traumatize children, incarcerate adults with no criminal background, and inordinately and unjustly criminalize people of color who seek to enter the country, people will not be satisfied with the conditions at Hutto.
MG: Well, at the least we hope that our film puts detention on the radar of non-activists as to what our government’s actual policies are. I feel that when most people hear about “tougher immigration”, they imagine more Border Patrol agents in Jeeps hunting down drug dealers and terrorists. They don’t imagine incarcerating tens of thousands of people every day and paying corporations hand-over-fist to do it and build more prisons. And what’s next for us is to continue using media to educate and advocate for a more just immigration and prison system.
