Our New Anahuac

September 1st issue of El Pueblo Newspaper is now available.In it, you will find my column, other stories and classifieds. Check it out, or just read my column here.

As a teen, I first heard of corporate prisons in 1996 in an unlikely place, the Geto Boys’ Resurrection album. Larry Hoover, himself a prisoner, told everyone who heard the album that “big companies” had interests in prisons. He rattled through the names of a few, “Master Card, Smith Barney.” I did not process the significance of his claim for a few years, and I did not come face to face with the beast that is the corporate prison complex until last year. In April of 2009 I joined a long-established coalition of activists who were fighting to close Hutto, an immigration jail which “housed” immigrant children and their parents. The New York Times’ photograph of a crib behind bars at Hutto still haunts me today.

Even though the political pressure resulted in some success on the child detention issue, profit-driven prisons are still a great problem. Correction Corporation of America (CCA) still has the contract to operate the Hutto facility in Taylor, Texas, even though children are no longer being detained there. Recent reports and arrests of Hutto guards prove that a lack of oversight at corporate detention facilities has led to abuses which amount to torture.

The Austin American Statesman reported on August 20th that a resident supervisor, William Dunn, was arrested and charged with three counts of official oppression and two counts of unlawful restraint. In essence, he fondled several women while in the process of transporting them. A few days later, on August 26th, Human Rights Watch released a report detailing incidents of sexual torture at a for-profit prison in Texas. The report describes an incident in Willacy County at a facility operated by Management and Training Corporation. In this incident a guard locked a female detainee in a room with a male detainee to whom he “owed a favor” so that the female could be raped.

According to TexasPrisonBidness.org, the private prison model faced declining profits earlier this century, but after September 11, 2001, their fortunes changed. There became a new political demand for prisons to hold immigrants prior to deportation, and herein lies part of the problem. Prior to September 11, 2001 immigrants who were not considered a flight risk were often not detained prior to their hearing. However, because there were some immigrants who opted to abscond instead of appearing at their hearing, there was a great political will to detain a great deal of immigrants facing hearings, even at great cost to the taxpayers.
At the same time, there are great profit motives to hold detainees that need not be detained according to mandatory detention statutes. It’s not that hard to figure out: The longer these detainees are held in these facilities, the more money that these companies make. These company executives are savvy enough to figure out that if they can buy the right politicians, they create the right policies which allow them to hold people who otherwise would pose no threat. The connections between politicians and private prisons are well documented.

One of the most notorious cases was revealed last month, when it became clear that two of Arizona Governor Brewer’s top advisors had a financial interest in corporate prisons. With the passage of Arizona’s anti-Mexican law, the advisors had a potentially lucrative profit motive in passing the law. The more immigrants that the state would cause to be detained, the more money these two advisors stood to gain.
This is only one of many connections, however. Many conflicts of interest involve county jails, rather than immigration facilities. In late July, The San Antonio Express News reported a potentially illegal scheme involving over $100,000 between the Bexar County Sheriff and his ilk and a private prison, which involved the local county jails.

Early in the twentieth century, the State of Texas became conscious that the mix of profit and human detentions did not make for a good mix, and they abolished relationships with such contractors. The profit motive often led to abuses of power and to the preference of profits over justice. One El Pueblo reader called me last week and equated profits in the private prison industry to slavery. In the wake of a miserable economy, in which the ruling class has had a notably difficult time in raising profits, the private prison industry has been remarkably resilient. In a recent article, The Final Call Newspaper cites a report which states that since 2005, and estimated $1.2 billion has been funneled to Texas alone in order to house undocumented immigrants. One report cited that it was more expensive to detain a child at Hutto than it was to educate that child at Harvard University. Any society which allows a segment of its populace to enrich itself at the unnecessary imprisonment of another segment can no longer consider itself a society of and by the people.