Under Mister Trump Private Prisons Thrive Again
For a brief moment, the future looked bleak for the multibillion-dollar individual prison industry. Prison house populations, while still large, had shown some signs of declining for a number of years. Discussions of criminal justice reform entered the political mainstream, and efforts to curb mass incarceration gained bipartisan support at both the federal and state level. Private prisons became the target of successful divestment campaigns, and the corners they cut for the sake of profit were publicly exposed with growing regularity.
Deputy Attorney Full general Sally Yates speaks during a press conference in Washington, D.C., June 28, 2016.
Photo: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
In August, the Department of Justice announced plans to gradually phase out the use of private contractors to run its Agency of Prison house facilities. Although the declaration had a relatively limited immediate touch on — affecting merely 13 federal prisons and some 22,660 inmates — private prisons' stocks plunged, and the Department of Homeland Security announced its own investigation into the utilize of private contractors.
So Donald Trump won the election. Within hours, the same stocks that had plunged over the summer soared. The stock of Corrections Corporation of America jumped by lx pct before leveling at 34 percentage, and the GEO Grouping's rose by xviii percent. Market pundits chop-chop declared private prison companies "a clear winner nether Trump," and rushed to predict his assistants would walk back the DOJ's phase-out of individual contracts and expand immigrant detention to unprecedented levels.
At least some private prisons had seemed to put more than just their hopes in a Trump presidency. Just 1 24-hour interval after the DOJ appear it would terminate its private prison contracts, a subsidiary of the GEO Grouping made a $100,000 donation to pro-Trump PAC Rebuilding America Now. That contribution, which a campaign finance watchdog reported to the Federal Election Commission, was potentially illegal because federal contractors are prohibited from making political donations while negotiating or performing contracts. Before in August, the GEO Group PAC — a political committee allowed to brand contributions — also donated $50,000. Pablo Paez, a GEO Group spokesperson, defended the donation'south legality on the grounds that GEO Corrections Holdings Inc. is a subsidiary of the GEO Group and not the entity directly engaged in government contracts. "As a matter of long-standing policy, our visitor does not take a position on or advocate for or against any specific criminal justice, sentencing, or immigration policy," he said in a statement to The Intercept.
Trump himself mentioned private prisons simply once during the campaign, but his promises of "police force and social club" and his insistence, later on being elected, that he would quickly deport — and "incarcerate" — 2 to 3 million people, left little doubt his presidency would be "a huge gift" to the private prison manufacture, co-ordinate to Carl Takei, an attorney at the ACLU's National Prison house Project .
As The Intercept has reported, the system for incarcerating and deporting immigrants is very much in place and ready to be exponentially expanded, thanks largely to the already massive increase in immigration detention carried out under President Obama, though deporting that many people would cost billions and take years.
Photograph: Will Weissert/ AP
Corruption, Neglect, and Perverse Incentives
Even before the ballot, private prisons seemed well on runway to recover from earlier setbacks. Despite its phase-out promises, the Agency of Prisons quietly renewed two of its private contracts — for the CCA-run McRae Correctional Facility and the GEO-run D. Ray James facility, both in Georgia.
In that location were also signs that DHS would go along to be a loyal customer of the private prison house manufacture. Clearing and Customs Enforcement, for example, has continued negotiating new or expanded contracts to house an immigrant detainee population that before this calendar month reached a record 41,000 people. To house them, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said he authorized the bureau "to learn additional detention space" — even though the findings of DHS's ain review of private clearing detention are not expected until Wednesday. An Ice official told the Wall Street Journal in Oct that the bureau was "scraping the bottom looking for beds."
Just weeks afterwards the DOJ appear information technology would end its partnership with individual prisons, Ice took over ane of those contracts and moved to reopen the Cibola Canton Correctional Heart in Milan, New Mexico, as an clearing detention center to exist operated by the same private contractor, Corrections Corporation of America, the country's largest private prison visitor.
That facility, and CCA, take a history of medical fail, including operating for months without a doctor on staff, which is one of the reasons the DOJ cut its contract short. "So information technology'south terrible, just information technology's good enough for immigrants?" asked Danny Cendejas, an organizer with Detention Watch Network, a group that fights immigration detention and deportations nationwide.
Cibola was not the just problematic facility that Water ice was working to keep open up. Days earlier, the bureau renewed its contract for the S Texas Residential Eye in Dilley, Texas, the largest immigrant detention center in the state and a facility with a history of corruption.
There are more than 200 immigrant detention facilities across the country, most in remote areas, and more than half privately operated. Since the Baronial DOJ annunciation, Detention Watch Network has learned of at least 15 new or expanded contracts, with both private prisons and local jails, calculation more than 3,600 beds.
"Criminalization of migrants has get a driving force for these facilities," Cendejas said at a recent workshop on immigration detention. "The migrant crisis is something that this country has played a huge role in creating, but information technology doesn't accept responsibility; instead, ICE is running around trying to ready contracts with anyone that they can, trying to discover more facilities to lock people in."
As they seek out new contracts, private prisons are also diversifying their portfolio, and expanding their influence over the criminal justice appliance with halfway houses and supervision programs like ankle monitoring systems.
"That'southward something they've been doing for the past few years, because they saw the writing on the wall as both in Congress and in united states of america at that place was more and more discussion of getting people out of prisons," said Takei. "The way these companies responded to these criminal justice reform discussions was to think nearly ways that they could continue to profit from the criminal justice system even if people were moved from prisons to other parts of the system."
Private investment in reentry services and incarceration alternatives is hardly expert news for people moving through the criminal justice organisation. Applying a turn a profit motive to every footstep of the process gives service providers an incentive to proceed people in the system as long every bit possible. "In that scenario, the only outcome that doesn't generate revenue for corporate shareholders is if a person successfully exits the criminal justice organisation and does non render," Takei said.
To mark its expansion into a broader array of criminal justice services — and, critics say, to obfuscate its explicit connection to the caging and surveillance of people — CCA announced last month that it was rebranding equally CoreCivic, a "regime solutions company." "Rebranding as CoreCivic is the culmination of a multi-year strategy to transform our business from largely corrections and detention services to a wider range of government solutions," Damon Hininger, the company's CEO, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, every bit immigrant detention booms and private prison companies explore new ventures, reports of abuse and neglect too continue. At least 165 people have died in Water ice custody since 2003, including eleven this year. The latest in a series of investigations into the detention conditions, released terminal week past a coalition of immigrant rights groups, details systemic deprival of due procedure as well every bit inhumane conditions at vi facilities — both privately and publicly operated — across the Southward. Based on interviews with 300 immigrants, the report includes allegations of ICE officials using forcefulness on detainees who refused to sign documents, denial of medical handling resulting in at least five deaths, and detainees receiving food contaminated with mold, worms, and insects. The report warns that flooding the system with hundreds of thousands of additional people would inevitably lead to "a grave human rights crisis."
"Our investigation yielded a disturbing pattern of prison mismanagement," Paromita Shah, director of the National Clearing Projection at the National Lawyers Order, 1 of the groups backside the study, said in a statement. "Sadly, President-elect Trump volition inherit immigration agencies that have perfected the fine art of abandoning responsibility for their sprawling detention centers, leaving people vulnerable to abuse."
A guard serves lunch to an immigrant detainee in his "segregation cell" during lunchtime at the Adelanto Detention Facility on Nov. 15, 2013, in Adelanto, California.
Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
Prisons Under President Trump
In addition to pledging to deport ii to 3 million people, the president-elect as well said he plans to end so-called "catch and release" practices — funneling even more than people into detention and keeping them behind bars until their cases are heard. The ACLU estimates that would require an additional 100,000 detention beds in the first year alone. Separately, Trump's support for a proposed bill that would set a mandatory five-year minimum judgement for certain groups of immigrants illegally re-entering the country would besides require the improver of nine new federal prisons. These estimates are extremely conservative and presume Trump's assistants would besides fund severely backlogged immigration courts, something the president-elect has never talked most.
As with most of his proposals, it's still unclear how Trump plans to implement his campaign promises and how his presidency might impact the DOJ phase-out of private contracts. As for the seemingly inevitable expansion of ICE detention, Trump might turn prison structure into an "enormous, WPA-style, public works program," or he might turn to the individual prisons industry, "consequent with the fashion that the bureau has filled its expansion over the last ii decades," Takei suggested.
Last week, the Trump camp's recurring talk of a national registry for immigrants from Muslim countries took an even more sinister turn when 1 of the president-elect'south surrogates cited Globe War Ii-era Japanese-American internment camps equally a "precedent" for the proposal.
Outrageous as that notion is, the immigration detention system Trump is nearly to inherit is not then far removed. At the Dilley South Texas Family Residential Center, children and mothers, most of whom have fled violence in Cardinal America, are counted three times a 24-hour interval and exposed to frequent "bed checks." Guards wake upward the children every day at 5.30 a.m. with shouting and lights. There are no toilets or showers within the housing units.
"I visited the Dilley family detention camp in 2015, and it was hitting to me how much information technology resembled the World War II Japanese-American prison camps," said Takei, whose ain family unit was detained in such a camp during that war. "It substantially is a modernized, updated version of that, down to the way in which the living space is constructed, with multiple unrelated families being housed in the same billet together, and children having to walk to separate latrines exposed to the elements."
The Word War Ii internment camps were built by a public agency created for the purpose — the State of war Relocation Dominance – and guarded by U.S. Army soldiers. But if Trump is looking for precedents, he does not need to go that far back in time. "Whether you could have an internment army camp ran by a individual prison company, the answer to that is something that the Obama administration created," Takei said.
Photo: Eric Gay/AP
Is Criminal Justice Reform Dead?
More broadly, criminal justice reform at the federal level is now in question. Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick for attorney general, is hardly a fan, and Trump has promised a return to heavier-handed policing and more incarceration.
"We had a moment and an opportunity to laissez passer a federal deal on criminal justice reform — the Sentencing Reform Corrections Act," said Breon Wells, a director of the incarceration reduction campaign #cut50, while speaking at a criminal justice workshop shortly after the ballot. "Nosotros yet take the lame-duck session, but allow's exist real, it'due south going to dice. Then we have Trump coming in, and all we know in terms of his criminal justice plans are three words, constabulary and order, which have non worked well for brown and black people."
But while progress on criminal justice reform at the federal level is probable to stall, the president and Department of Justice have relatively little power over the decision-making of land prisons and local jail systems, which account for the bulk of the country's mass incarceration problem. As evidenced by some election initiatives passed on election day, criminal justice reform is still moving forrad at the state level, and fifty-fifty in more bourgeois jurisdictions, the enormous cost of incarceration has not been lost on elected officials and prison house is condign an increasingly unpopular resort.
The federal government tin can threaten to withhold funds from states and local governments refusing to align to its guidelines — and Trump has already promised to do and then with cities resisting his anti-immigration policies — but justice advocates accept already promised to ramp upwards their local efforts to fight off the bear on of Trump's presidency one country at the time.
"All is non lost, we just to change our focus." said Wells. "All politics is local, let'due south become dorsum to the ground game."
Update: Nov. 28, 2016
This story has been updated to include comments from CoreCivic and the GEO Group provided after publication.
Superlative photo: Immigrants sit in a housing cell in the women's fly of the detention facility in Eloy, Arizona, on July 30, 2010.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2016/11/28/private-prisons-were-thriving-even-before-trump-was-elected/
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