How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet

CARs thus act as a middle-arena that wouldn’t exist if the federal government simply conducted immigrant enforcement through the civil system, which is what used to happen. But in 2005, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice jointly instituted a program called “Operation Streamline” that mandated migrants be prosecuted by the US government in addition to being processed for deportation. There’s little reason to criminally prosecute migrants in addition to processing them for deportation except to send a message.

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As states move for the first time in decades to address swollen prisoner populations, federal immigration detention centers are the new front in private prison corporations’ business strategy, and undocumented migrants their easy cash cows.

Around the country there are 13 Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons, which are managed by private companies contracted by the federal Bureau of Prisons to house a total of 25,000 prisoners convicted of living in the United States without proper documentation. In the pursuit of profits, private prison corporations have created utterly fetid and psychologically frying conditions within these CARs, making even the most squalid prisons for citizens look better by comparison. The vulnerability of an inmate population without recognized citizenship, combined with aggressive immigration policy and legal statutes allowing for-profit detention centers to operate with lax oversight, have created conditions under which carceral corporations can operate legal gulags with an endless supply of incoming prisoners.

Over the last four years, the American Civil Liberties Union investigated five CARs in Texas that together house a total of 14,000 inmates, and on Tuesday released its findings in the report Warehoused and Forgotten: Immigrants Trapped Our Shadow Private Prison System. Shockingly, they found that all of five CARs were serviced with contracts from the Bureau of Federal Prisons that include provisions requiring the CARs have a 10% “isolation cell” quota, which is double the rate at publicly federal managed prisons. With perverse incentives to send prisoners to solitary confinement—a measure the UN has condemned as torture—inmates have reportedly been thrown into isolated cells for complaining about food and medical care or pursuing legal grievances. The profit motive has rendered the CARs nearly absent all drug and medical treatment, along with opportunities for inmates’ self-development. In one facility in Raymondville, Texas, near the Mexican border, the center is so overcrowded that inmates live in cramped, vermin-infested Kevlar tents.

How US Private Prisons Are Making Millions by Jailing Migrants in Deplorable Conditions | Alternet