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RETRO REPORT

For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business

A surging inmate population in the 1980s led to a boom in for-profit prisons. Today, privately run prisons have become the government’s default detention centers for undocumented migrants.

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For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is Big Business

An inmate population surge in the 1980s led to the growth of for-profit prisons. Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

As the Trump administration continues to crack down on undocumented immigrants, the majority of them will be sent to detention facilities run by private companies. “Private prisons. They are cashing in on President Trump’s get-tough policies at the border.” How did immigration detention become more than a billion-dollar industry? And does it matter that detention is now heavily privatized? Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz grew up gay in El Salvador, where he says he was persecuted for years, targeted by gangs and extorted. After receiving death threats, he fled to the United States hoping for asylum, was caught crossing the border and sent to a detention facility in Adelanto, California. But when Cortez Diaz and others launched a hunger strike, they say the guards roughed them up, pepper sprayed them and threw some of them into hot showers. The company that runs Adelanto, GEO Group, says these claims are completely baseless. But Cortez Diaz’s lawyer, Rachel Steinback, says she believes the problems at Adelanto were exacerbated because of the fact that the facility is privately run. “The main goal of a private prison company is to maximize profit, and to maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures. All of the incentive is to get more people in, hold them there for longer and provide them with the barest necessities possible.” But GEO Group says they are proud of their long-standing record of providing high-quality detention services that meet standards set by the government. The use of private companies took hold in the 1980s, as the country faced a crisis: overcrowded and unsafe public prisons. “American business is becoming bullish on prisons.” And a new company, the Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, now called CoreCivic, offered an alternative. “At CCA, we have an answer to your problems.” “We intend to be the IBM, if you will, of the corrections business.” But the idea of prisons for profit was met with skepticism. “A highly controversial idea: turning the jail keys over to private business and trying to make crime pay to investors.” James Stewart, a Justice Department official, was studying the issue. “They had no history, and you’re saying, ‘What’s your experience?’ They go, ‘Well, um, we’ll get a warden. We’ll hire a couple of people to train them. We can do it.’ And you’re like, ‘Uh, I’m not sure this is going to work,’ right?” “What about the prisoners? Who is accountable for their welfare? Critics of private prisons say making a profit off imprisonment is not compatible with the administration of justice.” But the test of the controversial idea came not with prisoners, but with immigrants. “President Carter today declared parts of Florida to be under a state of emergency because of the enormous influx of Cuban refugees.” “Illegal aliens, more than a million of them in the past year, have come across the Mexican border.” Immigration authorities were overwhelmed. “Part of the problem, says the Immigration Service, is that there are not enough places to hold all the illegal immigrants.” “They were scratching their heads saying, ‘What are we going to do?’” The Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, the predecessor to ICE, turned to the private sector. “INS was the first government agency to really come out strongly for privatization. I mean, they were under the gun to do it.” Richard Crane believed privatization would not lower standards and could lead to better conditions. “A lot of people had the misimpression that, in order for them to make a profit, they had to cut corners. When I was with CCA, they didn’t cut corners.” “This construction site in Houston, Texas, will soon become the first completely free enterprise prison in the United States. It is being built to detain up to 300 aliens charged with entering this country illegally and awaiting deportation hearings.” “It was like a proof of concept. What it did is it provided evidence that this could work and it could be, you could get more for the same amount of money, and right now we needed more.” “We built the facility in six months...” Building on that success, the industry began to expand. “The private prisons are clean, spacious and well-managed.” “In here, it’s enchanted, I mean very enchanted.” Soon, private companies were running local, state and later federal jails and prisons. “They will find ways to economize. And so we said, ‘Look, if you’re going, going to have the private sector, you’re going to have to be sure you have inspections. That’s part of the price. You have to build that into the contract.’” “The denial of freedom is now clearly big business.” But over the years, problems began to make headlines. “Arizona inmates rioted twice at this private prison in less than a month.” “New questions are being raised tonight about the wisdom of turning public prisons over to private operators.” “Charges have been filed against them now in three other states and the Justice Department says it is watching closely.” Civil rights groups like the ACLU argued that private companies shouldn’t be performing a government function. “Handing control of prisoners over to a for-profit company is a recipe for abuse and neglect. There are serious human costs that have been documented over and over again.” But companies like CoreCivic say that they maintain high standards of care for detainees and that, in fact, their sole job is to help the government solve problems, including the fluctuating need for detention space. The government has expanded its detention of immigrants over the years - increasingly so starting under the Clinton administration. And private companies have stepped up. “Immigrant detention has turned into a gold rush for the private corrections industry.” Alonzo Peña had spent his career in customs and immigration enforcement. But when he became deputy director of ICE in 2008, he says he saw widespread problems with detention. Issues were apparent in government-run facilities, but Peña says that many of complaints coming in were about privately-run ones. “These private companies, it wasn’t their priority, uh, to ensure that the highest standards were being met. When I found out that guards mistreated people, uh, you know, violated women, abused women, didn’t provide medical care, those things troubled me. And I kept thinking why are we not able to prevent things?” Peña says ICE shares the blame. “We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical, but unfortunately it was in the execution and the monitoring, and the auditing, we fell behind, fell short.” “Immigration detention has been the private prison industry’s fastest growing sector for years.” ICE says they thoroughly investigate complaints of misconduct, and hold contractors to high standards. Today, about 70 percent of detained immigrants are overseen by private companies, according to an analysis of ICE data. “We have zero tolerance for people that enter our country illegally.” With these companies already so enmeshed in immigration enforcement, Peña says they’re here to stay. The question is where we go from here. “It’s important that the government maintain good oversight of these companies. Because they’re not citizens, they’re not going to be afforded the same protections. We’re dealing with human beings. That’s the thing not to be lost.” “There are some real advantages to having the private sector. But, like anything else, it has to be reasonably well controlled and paid attention to. Vigilance is the price of freedom.” Rachel Steinback says lawsuits like the one she has filed on behalf of Cortez Diaz and some of the other hunger strikers can help hold private companies accountable. “There’s very little transparency. So I think they, they feel like they can operate with impunity, do whatever they want and get away with it.” Cortez Diaz is no longer in detention. Last year, a judge granted him asylum and the opportunity to start a new life in the United States.

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An inmate population surge in the 1980s led to the growth of for-profit prisons. Today, despite their mixed record, private prison companies are overseeing the vast majority of undocumented migrants.

Thomas W. Beasley had something for sale, and figured he could market it the same as any other merchandise. “You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers,” he told an interviewer.

That was three decades ago. Only Mr. Beasley wasn’t hawking new wheels, beachfront property or beef patties. His stock in trade was prison bars. As a co-founder of Corrections Corporation of America in 1983, and with a get-tough-on-crime spirit ascendant in the country, he sold lockup space to federal and state governments that were jailing people faster than they could find room in their own institutions.

[In a new book, an investigative journalist goes undercover as a guard to get behind the scenes of the private prison industry. Read our review.]

Mr. Beasley’s company, renamed CoreCivic two years ago, became a leader in what is now a roughly $4-billion-a-year American industry: for-profit prisons, privately owned and operated. Some bad-to-the-bone criminals are among the people guarded by private prisons. But a key function these days is watching over undocumented immigrants. Their detention centers, located mainly in the South and the West, are where the government sends most people caught trying to enter the United States illegally.

How ably these companies discharge their duty — or not — shapes this Retro Report video, the latest in a documentary series examining major news stories of the past and their continuing impact. The treatment of migrants has new urgency in the Trump era, given this administration’s efforts at strict border control, which include detaining large numbers of children. Data obtained by The New York Times showed that in mid-September, 12,800 migrant children were held in federally contracted shelters, five times the number in custody a little over a year earlier.

One picture of private prisons captured in the video includes barely edible food, indifferent health care, guard brutality and assorted corner-cutting measures. It is framed by the experience of Josue Vladimir Cortez Diaz, a gay man from El Salvador who fled through Mexico to the United States after enduring what he described as persecution and death threats in his homeland. Captured at the California border, he was sent to a private detention center run by GEO Group, formerly the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. This was in Adelanto, Calif., about 60 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Mr. Cortez Diaz, 26, was freed after a judge granted him asylum last November, but not before he and other detainees staged a hunger strike to protest their treatment at Adelanto. Prison guards beat and pepper-sprayed them, they say, and they are now suing GEO and federal and local authorities for what they say were rights violations.

“The conditions in the detention center, they’re bad, right down to the food,” Mr. Cortez Diaz told Retro Report. He added, “They don’t care if someone is sick, if the food goes bad. That’s how we came to say we have to protest.”

A spokesman for GEO, Pablo E. Paez, dismissed those assertions as “completely baseless” and said that the federal authorities reviewed that situation and “found that the officers acted in accordance with established protocol.”

Complaints about private prisons are not new. They go back almost to the advent of the prisons themselves in the 1980s. Those were the Reagan years, when government sought to shift some of its functions to private hands. At the same time, voters wanted harsher measures taken against criminals. Thus, cellblock populations rapidly grew, and prisons became alarmingly overcrowded.

But the appetite for locking people up was not matched by a willingness to spend taxpayer money on new government-run cells and support services. Enter for-profit prisons. They were ready to bear some of the burden — for a fee, of course. At federal and state levels, they now operate in more than two dozen states, often in relatively remote regions where jobs can be scarce. It is not unusual in some states for big city crime to become a rural area’s economic development.

The private companies, with CoreCivic and GEO Group dominant, tout their virtues by saying they build and operate prisons more cheaply than governments can, what with the public sector’s many mandates. Their day-to-day operations are similarly more efficient and less costly, they assert, and they do it all without compromising public safety. The bottom line, they say, is that they allow governments to free up public funds for pursuits that mean more to most taxpayers than how felons are jailed.

“Privately operated facilities are better equipped to handle changes in the flow of illegal immigration because they can open or close new facilities as needed,” said Rodney E. King, CoreCivic’s public affairs manager.

Critics tell a different story. They cite moments like a 2015 riot to protest poor conditions at a prison in Arizona run by another major private player, Management & Training Corporation. Earlier at that same institution, three inmates had escaped and murdered two people.

Stories abound of scrimping by prison operators, with bad food and shabby health care for inmates, low pay and inadequate training for guards and hiring shortages. At immigrant detention centers, operators see little need to offer extensive educational programs or job training, since people held there are mostly destined for deportation.

“To maximize profit, you minimize your expenditures,” Rachel Steinback, a lawyer for Mr. Cortez Diaz and other Adelanto hunger strikers, told Retro Report.

Beyond pragmatic considerations, philosophical questions have dogged private prisons from the start. They boil down to this: If someone violates society’s code of behavior, is it not up to government to punish the offender as society’s representative, and not some profit-seeking entity? As far back as 1985, M. Wayne Huggins, then the sheriff of Fairfax County, Va., asked, “What next will we be privatizing? Will we have private police forces? Will we have private fire departments? Will we have private armies?” Those questions have not disappeared.

Private companies house about 9 percent of the nation’s total prison population. But they take care of a much higher share of immigrant detainees — 73 percent by some accounts. Alonzo Peña, a former deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, acknowledges that the companies have all too often fallen short. “It wasn’t their priority to ensure that the highest standards were being met,” Mr. Peña said.

ICE, he said, deserves some blame. “We set up this partnership with the private industry in a way that was supposed to make things much more effective, much more economical,” he said. “But unfortunately, it was in the execution and the monitoring and the auditing we fell behind, we fell short.”

Studies suggest that governments save little money, if any, by turning over prison functions to private outfits. And in 2016, under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department concluded that private prisons were in general more violent than government-operated institutions, and ordered a phaseout of their use at the federal level. Reversing that order was one of the first things that President Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, did on taking office.

The Trump administration leaves no doubt that it will detain as many undocumented immigrants as it can and send them to for-profit centers. And to help make sure that happens, the companies spend millions on campaigns and lobbying efforts (not unlike businesses that sell cars, real estate or hamburgers).

They have thus far figured out how to prevail, a point noted by Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. Ms. Eisen explored this in a recent book, “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” Her conclusion: “There is no reason to think the private prison industry will go away anytime soon.”


The sharp rise in the detention of migrant children has been the focus of recent Times coverage. A federal review from 2016 found private prisons are more dangerous than government-run prisons for both guards and inmates; the Trump administration indicated earlier this year that it will expand their use. This is a reversal of an Obama administration decision to phase out the use of private for-profit prisons to house federal inmates because the number of such inmates has been dropping since 2013. That order was canceled in February in an announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: For Private Prisons, Detaining Immigrants Is a Big Business. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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