The Texas Observer

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.

Brooks and Willacy both passed more limited inspections conducted by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

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.

While attention has been focused on the inane border wall, immigration authorities have been weaving a much more insidious legal dragnet along the border. Bush’s Border Patrol announced today that it is expanding its “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigrants from Del Rio and Yuma, Arizona to the busy Laredo sector. In a nutshell, that means the agency will try to throw every single immigrant they catch into jail. Doing so will require yet more detention centers, jails, and prisons. Zero tolerance likely won’t stop in Laredo. Border Patrol assistant chief Ramon Rivera was quoted in the Houston Chronicle as saying, “We’re hoping it goes nationwide.”

The courts in Laredo are already swamped. Public defenders I talked to two years ago for a story said it was all they could do to provide a basic legal defense for their clients. The courts then were corral-like, with dozens of defendants coming before the magistrate on a daily basis. Laredo had to build a new 1,500-bed detention center to hold them all. That year the Southern District of Texas (Laredo’s district) led the nation in the number of immigration-related convictions - 17,307 in 2005 - even besting Texas Western (where Del Rio is located) at 3,054. How in the world will defenders, prosecutors, and judges handle the caseload once every single illegal entrant is booked, charged, prosecuted, and jailed?

If the Bush administration, with the backing of a pliant Congress, is really intent on expanding zero-tolerance to the whole border and perhaps even moving the program into the heartland, it will necessitate another huge expansion in detention centers, jails, and prisons. The Immigration and Customs Service (ICE), which runs immigrant detention centers, is asking Congress to fund 40,000 beds - 14,000 over the 26,000 beds the nation has right now. Increased prosecutions will also increase the need for more jail and prison beds. Much of that demand will be met by for-profit prison corporations.

This is all fine and dandy for some people, maybe even most people in this country. Some will say the law’s the law and, after all, THEY’RE ILLEGAL. This says something about our priorities. Because the reality is that resources are finite. Prosecutors must make decisions on what crimes they prosecute, administrations have to set budgets for law enforcement, and societies have to decide collectively what behavior to reward and punish. Just consider this: Immigration is now the number-one federally prosecuted crime - not drugs, weapons, white collar crime, or even terrorism. And the most prosecuted immigration crime is illegal entry, the simple offense of an economic immigrant, one that is committed hundreds of thousands of times every year.

Is there a war on children in this country? When we’re not denying them health insurance or leaving them to wallow in feces, we’re telling them that they have to suffer the sins of their parents - in prison.

Eye on Williamson County turned us onto a video of Williamson County Commissioner Cynthia Long explaining last week why she’s not overly concerned about the morality of the for-profit T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor. Long thinks the immigrant families, babies and pregnant women included, at Hutto got it good.

“The conditions at the facility are light years better than what many of these people have come from,” Long said to an audience packed mostly with employees of prison operator Corrections Corporation of America. One guy unironically held a sign that read “T. Don Hutto is the American Way.”

In fact, the conditions have improved recently. But that’s only because the ACLU and the UT Immigration Law Clinic successfully sued the government and people raised hell. Before, conditions stunk.

But do go on, Ms. Long: “The thing we forget is the adults that are being detained have broken the law, and unfortunately as children sometimes we have to suffer with the sins of our parents,” Long continued, digging her hole deeper. “Those children are probably not there by choice. But their parents have made a choice for their family, and they have to deal, they have to be — or suffer, if you can call it that, because of their parents’ choices. But I think the worst choice would be to take that child away from their parents and put them to a situation that would be even worse.”

Is this what Republicans mean when they talk about family values? Is this what Williamson County means when it talks about “gittin’ tuff on crime”? Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?

Long says the kids “probably” didn’t choose to be at Hutto. They might have, though. One day they woke up and said, “Mommy, let’s go to America so we can be in jail at the T. Don Hutto detention center. Please, mommy, please.”

Aside from being asinine and fairly calloused, Long doesn’t really have her facts straight. The immigrant detainees at Hutto haven’t in fact broken any criminal law. At worst, they have violated civil immigration code. And many of them are asylum-seekers, including Chaldeans fleeing persecution and war in Iraq. If these families are sinners, as Long would have it, then blessed be the sinners. We should be grateful such brave people come to America.

When in debt, borrow more. That’s the Willacy way! Not content with just $129 million in prison-related debt, the Willacy County Commissioners Court voted last week to finance its fifth or sixth (who’s really counting?) project. This time it’s a $50.1 million, 1000-bed addition to the privately-run 2000-bed “Tent City” for immigrants. With the new addition, the extremely poor county earns several bragging rights: more jail beds - 4,600 in all - than the country of Finland; the largest immigrant detention camp in the country; and more debt than any rural county in Texas.
(For details on the private prison craze in Raymondville see my October, 2006 story in the Observer.)

Willacy is an economic backwater in South Texas with a near-comically dysfunctional local government. For over a decade area leaders have been trying to dig their way out of the doldrums by building prisons, jails, and detention centers and turning them over to private outfits for management. Raymondville, the county seat that locals are calling “Prisonville,” is host to what’s probably the largest concentration of privatized jail facilities in the world. It’s a great deal for the companies. They assume virtually no risk and get to collect healthy profits.

Meanwhile the county has to worry about paying down its staggering amount of debt, approaching $180 million, or about $8,700 for every man, woman, and child in the county. At times, the government has struggled to make the payments. But instead of putting down the shovel, they just keep digging deeper. It’s the American way! In the case of the 2000-bed immigrant detention center, which was built just last year, the county needed an average of 1,800 detainees to make the $2.6 million in debt payments every month. The Valley Morning Star reports that the number of detainees has hovered around 1,500. It’s not clear how the county is covering its obligations to bondholders. Even less clear is how building another 1,000 beds will improve the situation.

“I look at it as an economic opportunity,” Commissioner Eddie Chapa told the Star. “It’s an opportunity for Willacy County to get additional employment for the citizens of the county and more income to the county.”

The county leaders argue that the jails bring much-needed jobs and secondary economic benefits to the area. In the jobs department, they arguably have met with some success. Unemployment has plummeted from 24.1 percent ten years ago to 8.7 percent today based on Census figures. However, it should be noted that surrounding counties, without prison-based economies, have seen a similar drop in unemployment over the same time period.

Everybody on the outside loves a good mystery. This one comes to us from Del Rio, home of the Val Verde Correctional Facility, a private detention center run by the Florida-based Geo Group. It seems detainees at the 875-bed lockup have been getting sick and dying from what the San Antonio Express-News dubbed a “mysterious illness.” [Cue creepy Twilight Zone theme.] So far two inmates have died and two more have been hospitalized. More people, including guards, are rumored to have fallen ill. Three of the men were undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Mexico.

The men showed symptoms of erratic behavioral changes followed by incontinence and dehydration, reported the Express-News. Geo Group officials and the Texas Department of State Health Services haven’t figured out what befell the men, so they’ve called in the big guns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate. The CDC team has not provided any answers publicly, but have promised a statement soon.

The criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast wonders if the Unsolved Mystery could be tuberculosis, a jailhouse scourge. State health officials haven’t ruled that possibility out. “I can’t tell you it isn’t tuberculosis,” Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu, an official with state health services told the Del Rio News Herald. “The presence of tuberculosis is almost expected in any correctional facility.”

That equivocation doesn’t sit well with Grits.

Because of its method of transmission, prisons and jails are a prime breeding ground for TB. But for exactly those reasons health officials should be scurrying to prevent it. If TB was the cause of not one but two inmate deaths in Del Rio, that’s a much bigger deal than Guerra-Cantu makes it out to be.

Incidentally, at another Geo-run detention camp in Tacoma, Washington 300 immigrant detainees recently became sick, possibly from food poisoning. But officials aren’t sure and are calling that incident a “mystery” as well.

But what’s not a mystery is that like many for-profit prison operators, Geo Group’s track record in Texas does not inspire confidence in its ability to prevent or manage problems. (The company owns and/or operates 18 “corrections” facilities in the state.) Geo’s corporate rap sheet is longer than that of its inmates. Two high-profile lawsuits have highlighted conditions at the Val Verde prison, which holds detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, and also county inmates. A 2006 suit brought by the Texas Civil Rights Project blamed Geo for the death of 23-year-old LeTisha Tapia, who hung herself in 2003 after allegedly being raped and beaten. The suit was settled for $200,000 earlier this year. As part of the settlement, an independent monitor was appointed to oversee the facility.

A discrimination lawsuit, filed in 2005 by a former guard who is African American, alleged that a jail supervisor had a fondness for KKK paraphernalia, which he kept in his office. Last year, in Willacy County, a jury returned a $47.5 million verdict to the family of a man who was beaten to death by other inmates, finding that Geo Group (then called Wackenhut) were negligent in the man’s death. In July, MSNBC reported on an inmate suicide, linked to squalid conditions, in a Geo-run lockup in Spur. A top Idaho prison authority investigating the Spur jail, where Idaho had sent a surplus of its offenders, declared it the worst facility he had ever seen and “beyond repair.”

But the steady drumbeat of scandal has done little to harm the company’s bottom line. Geo’s second-quarter profits are up 96 percent and the stock has made analysts’ “buy” lists. The CEO of Geo, George Zoley, told analysts recently that they typically squeeze a 25-30 percent profit margin out of each prisoner in the facilities they own, such as Val Verde. That brings to mind a troubling, if entirely unoriginal, thought: what if the unbelievable profit margins are the product of running an inhumanely bare-bones operation?