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Tag: mass incarceration
DHS To Revisit For-Profit Immigrant Prisons: Will It Also Revisit Mass Detentions?

DHS To Revisit For-Profit Immigrant Prisons: Will It Also Revisit Mass Detentions?

The Department of Homeland Security said Monday that, taking a cue from the Department of Justice, it will review its widespread practice of incarcerating immigrants and refugees in for-profit detention centers.

The announcement was hailed by human rights campaigners as a positive development, put on the map by immigrants forced to resort to hunger strike to protest their cruel conditions of confinement. Yet, the DHS statement also left some wondering whether the federal agency will take meaningful action to curb the Obama administration’srecord levels of deportations and mass incarceration targeting people fleeing war, violence and poverty, given that the announcement includes no indication of future plans to reduce detentions.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who has overseen an escalation in raids and deportations this summer targeting refugees fleeing Central America, released astatement Monday which said, “On August 18, the Department of Justice announced that the Bureau of Prisons will reduce and ultimately end its use of private prisons.” Johnson was referencing the DOJ’s recent claim that it will phase out or reduce for-profit prison contracts in the future. The move affects only 13 facilities, most of them Criminal Alien Requirement prisons that lock up non-U.S. citizens, and will not reduce the overall prison population. That DOJ decision followed a searing report from the Office of Inspector General that exposed widespread human rights abuses in privately run BOP prisons.

“On Friday, I directed our Homeland Security Advisory Council, chaired by Judge William Webster, to evaluate whether the immigration detention operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement should move in the same direction,” Johnson said. However, Johnson made no explicit commitment to change DHS policies, instead stating that he will set establish “a Subcommittee of the Council to review our current policy and practices concerning the use of private immigration detention and evaluate whether this practice should be eliminated.”

It is not clear, at this point, what impact Johnson’s announcement will have on the people incarcerated in immigrant detention centers, which rights campaigners say are more like prisons or even internment camps.

The incarceration of immigrants, migrants and refugees is the area of greatest growth for the private prison industry in the United States, with the companies Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group making windfall profits. According to the latest figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more than 70 percent of all ICE beds are operated by for-profit companies.

In turn, these corporations have been instrumental in pressing the U.S. government to adopt heavy-handed immigration policies. A report released last year by the organization Grassroots Leadership, which opposes prison profiteering, reveals that the for-profit prison industry in 2009 successfully pressured Congress to adopt the congressional immigrant detention quota, which today directs ICE to hold an average 34,000 people in detention on a daily basis.

Amid soaring profits, private immigrant detention centers have been rocked by protests and hunger strikes against inhumane conditions. Mothers held with their children at the Karnes County Residential Center in Texas have staged repeated protests against nearly free labor, lack of legal representation and contaminated drinking water. In 2014, numerous women detained at the prisonalleged that guards sexually assaulted them. These protests have been instrumental in raising the public profile of abuses committed in these facilities.

However, Tania Unzueta, organizer with Mijente and #Not1MoreDeportation, told AlterNet that the human rights violations that plague private detention centers also extend to publicly operated ones. “We see the same problems in public prisons to various degrees,” said Unzueta. “For example, there has been a large movement led by transgender women to end the detention of transgender women because of the high rate of sexual assault and rape that they face at all centers. We also see the abuse of women and other so-called vulnerable populations, as well as a lack of accountability at both private and public prisons.”

Because of the role the private prison industry plays in lobbying for harsh immigration policies, any step toward reduce its role in the mass detention system is likely to bring positive human rights results, say campaigners. “Corporations like GEO Groups or CCA are constantly pushing for more incarceration,” Brenda Perez, organizer with Comite Popular-Nashville, told AlterNet. “This [DHS] announcement is, minimally, a step in the right direction. But we need to move away from mass detention overall.”

From immigrant detention to the war on drugs, the U.S. public is growing increasingly weary of mass incarceration. Some groups say they hope DHS will not just shuffle undocumented people from private to public facilities, but take meaningful steps to curb mass detentions.

“There are a lot of things that DHS can do right now to reduce reliance on detention, things like reviewing the high amounts that immigration courts set for bonds for immigrants,” Unzueta told AlterNet. “We’re talking about $50,000 bonds that people can’t afford.”

Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership, told AlterNet that DHS should “end private prison contracts while reducing the number of people detained. And we need to end the practice of family detention and deprioritize detentions completely.”

Since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has overseen the deportation of more than 2.5 million immigrants, marking a 23 percent increase over the George W. Bush presidency and surpassing any other president. Starting in 2014, the Obama administration made the mass detention of families a cornerstone of its response to large-scale displacement from Central American countries where violence and poverty have been worsened by U.S. policies.

“It’s past time that DHS end the practice of detaining immigrants and this review should move it in that direction,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, Mijente field director on behalf of the Not1More Deportation Campaign. “Whether it is in the CCA-run Eloy facility where a series of suspicious deaths sparked hunger strikes and four recent sexual assault cases remain uninvestigated or in the Berks family detention center where refugee mothers demand their freedom, or the trans pods in Santa Ana where detainees face abuse, the country’s detention system represents a major crisis made worse by companies profiting from the suffering of the people kept inside.”

Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet. A former staff writer for Common Dreams, she coedited the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

Photo: Photo Credit: sakhorn / Shutterstock.com

Tom Cotton Thinks Iraq And Afghanistan Are Good Models For Law Enforcement

Tom Cotton Thinks Iraq And Afghanistan Are Good Models For Law Enforcement

Despite the United States housing 25 percent of the world’s prison population, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton claimed Thursday that America had an “under-incarceration problem,” comparing our failure to jail more of its citizens to similar post-occupation failures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I saw this in Baghdad. We’ve seen it again in Afghanistan,” said Cotton, an Army veteran of both wars, of the prospect of releasing convicted felons from prison early. “Security has to come first, whether you’re in a war zone or whether you’re in the United States of America.”

Given Cotton’s legislative history, the comments should come as no surprise. But how could a sitting senator reach such an outlandish conclusion?

“Take a look at the facts. First, the claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: for the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted, and jailed,” Cotton said in his speech at The Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, according to his prepared remarks. “Law enforcement is able to arrest or identify a likely perpetrator for only 19 percent of property crimes and 47 percent of violent crimes. If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.”

Cotton has been a consistent opponent of any sort of criminal justice reform. In January, he led a clique of Republican senators fighting against a bipartisan effort to reform mandatory minimum sentencing, citing unvalidated claims that releasing thousands of felons would result in a spike in crime.

“It would be very dangerous and unwise to proceed with the Senate Judiciary bill, which would lead to the release of thousands of violent felons,” said Cotton in an interview with Politico. “I think it’s no surprise that Republicans are divided on this question … [but] I don’t think any Republicans want legislation that is going to let out violent felons, which this bill would do.”

However, two new studies by the American Society of Criminology and a trio of criminology professors point to a different result. The studies, observing the consequences of California’s mass release of 27,500 felons since 2011, concluded that there has been no noticeable increase in violent crime rates across the state.

Meanwhile, California’s prison population has been reduced by 17 percent and has slowly reversed a troubling trend — some prisons were formerly up to 300 percent over capacity. The reduced prison population has saved the state nearly $500 million. On the national level, the “epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year,” according to CBS News.

Asides from aspiring to “an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history,” the state was ordered to release prisoners from its overcrowded prisons by the United States Supreme Court, who ruled that the overcrowding of the state’s prisons constituted cruel and usual forms of punishment. California voters also voted in favor of Proposition 47, which reclassified a number of drug and property crimes as misdemeanors instead of felonies, further reducing the burden on the state’s prison system.

The statistics used in Cotton’s speech were from a 2010 FBI report on crime, according to his office. The latest edition of complete numbers, from 2014, showed that the percentage of unpunished crimes has remained roughly consistent. Violent crimes rose by 0.5 percent between 2010 and 2014 while property crimes, the other metric Cotton used in his speech, dropped by 6.8 percent over the same period.

A study of crime rates between 1990 and 2013 by the Brennan Center for Justice, a policy institute associated with New York University, found that violent crime had dropped by over 50 percent and property crime by 43 percent. At the same time, 1.1 million Americans were jailed, nearly doubling the prison population.

“Since 2000, the effect on the crime rate of increasing incarceration, in other words, adding individuals to the prison population, has been essentially zero. Increased incarceration accounted for approximately 6 percent of the reduction in property crime in the 1990s (this could vary statistically from 0 to 12 percent), and accounted for less than 1 percent of the decline in property crime this century,” said the report.

But Cotton remains ideologically committed to the preservation of the prison-industrial complex. Rather than acknowledge the changing conversation around mass incarceration, he cited his experiences in two war zones as proof that he knew better about how to handle Americans locked up for crimes punished less heavily in other countries.

Of course, the United States is not under military occupation (as much as some Republican voters would like to imagine it were), and the criminal justice system we need is entirely different from the experience of occupying countries opposed to being invaded. Using the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a framework for criminal justice policy here should worry the American public.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Analysis: Sanders Pledge Shows How Plans To Curtail Mass Incarceration Fall Short

Analysis: Sanders Pledge Shows How Plans To Curtail Mass Incarceration Fall Short

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

INDIANOLA, Iowa — After years of plunging crime rates, hugely expensive incarceration budgets and troubling racial disparities in criminal punishment, it has become fashionable on the presidential campaign trail to declare the nation’s uncommonly high rate of imprisonment unacceptable.

Just don’t press candidates to explain how to significantly change it.

Hillary Clinton began demanding an end to the “era of mass incarceration” almost from the day she launched her campaign. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont recently made a pledge that would include cutting the prison population by more than one-quarter within four years.

On the Republican side, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky calls mass incarceration the Jim Crow of our time. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey says the country’s distinction of having more people locked up than any other nation is not what he has in mind when trumpeting American exceptionalism.

But ask what it would take to accomplish their goals, and all their campaigns struggle. The politically palatable prescriptions packed into bullet points in the candidates’ criminal justice plans wouldn’t get the country even close.

The U.S. imprisons roughly 2.2 million people, according to the most recent figures from the government’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. The runner-up, China — a much larger country that puts a far lower premium on freedom — is believed to imprison about 1.7 million, according to an international study.

The proposals the candidates have embraced so far would make but a tiny dent in that population.

If the candidates are aware of this, they aren’t letting on.

Sanders has made the most specific promise, generating considerable excitement among liberal activists for a pledge he made at Simpson College in Indianola.

“I don’t make a whole lot of promises,” Sanders said, “but here is one I will make to you: If elected president, by the time I end my first term, this country will not have more people in jail than any other country.”

Sanders has railed against what he characterized as a racially unjust prison-industrial complex that feeds on mass incarceration.

Scholars questioned whether Sanders was aware of just how big a promise he was making. Cutting the U.S. prison population by the more than half a million needed to get down even to China’s number could be accomplished only by substantially softening penalties for violent criminals, they say.

Nothing in Sanders’ detailed prisons plan suggests that he grasps the immensity of the task.

Sanders told his audience that his goal was embedded in his broader policy vision. Raising the minimum wage, eradicating youth unemployment and legalizing marijuana would substantially reduce the flow of Americans into the prison system, he said.

“If anyone thinks there is not a direct correlation between outrageously high youth unemployment and the fact that we have more people in jail than any other country on Earth, you would be mistaken,” he said. “We spend $80 billion a year locking people up. In my view, it makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and education rather than jails and incarceration.”

The experience of the past several decades makes it clear that the relationship between crime rates and unemployment is, at minimum, more complicated than Sanders’ statement suggests. When unemployment soared during the 2007-09 recession, crime went down. Violent crime rose steadily from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, during good economic times and bad.

Moreover, Sanders’ emphasis on marijuana legalization fits a pattern he shares with several other candidates: an ambitious goal backed by a squishy plan.

“If we are going to make the really significant reductions that are necessary to move us out of the top spot in the world, we are going to need to move beyond proposals that just deal with low-level drug offenses,” said Ryan King, a fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington research group that favors shrinking the prison population.

Drug offenders make up only about one in six people in state prisons, which hold the lion’s share of people incarcerated in the U.S., according to data compiled by the institute. Few of those are low-level offenders locked up for simple possession.

To reduce the combined federal, state and local prison population by the amount Sanders’ pledge contemplates, King said, would require softening penalties for violent convicts, too.

“No candidates are talking about that,” he said.

Violent offenders convicted of such crimes as murder, rape and robbery accounted for 54 percent of the men in state prisons in 2013, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Justice. When the prison population surged between 1980 and 2009, for each new inmate who had committed a drug crime there were three new inmates who had committed a violent crime.

“There just is not an easy and politically palatable solution that reduces the prison population that much,” Patrick Egan, a professor of politics and public policy at New York University, said of the goal Sanders set. “While Americans have become more supportive of criminal justice reform lately, they are still quite afraid of and quite aware of crime.”

Some advocates for reducing mass incarceration have proposed cutting sentences for violent criminals, which are longer on average in the U.S. than in many other developed countries. Few political figures have been willing to touch ideas like that.

“It’s hard for candidates to talk about what to do with violent offenders,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School. “It scares voters.”

©2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders greets supporters at a campaign rally outside the New Hampshire State House in Concord, New Hampshire November 5, 2015. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Should Prisoners Raise Your Food?

Should Prisoners Raise Your Food?

Fellow foodies, here’s a question for your conscience: Do you wonder whose hands helped bring your meal to the grocery?

As you dollop the farm-fresh goat cheese on top of your micro greens and remove the antibiotic-free tilapia from under the broiler, would you lose your appetite if you found out that workers who helped produce it earn in a year what you make in a week?

Whole Foods worried that you might.

So the company announced that it was severing business relationships with suppliers that use prison labor to bring fish and cheese to some of the more than 430 Whole Foods stores in America. Yes, prisoners herd and milk some of those goats and peel the scales from that fish. And their pay is reportedly between 74 cents and $4 a day.

At first blush that sounds appalling, but is it?

According to NPR, Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy in Longmont, CO, and Quixotic Farming, a sustainable seafood company with facilities in Missouri and Colorado, partnered with Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI), a division of the state’s Department of Corrections, to put prisoners to work. According to the companies and CCI, it’s a way to teach inmates skills, give them valuable work experience and reduce recidivism — all good things, to be sure.

But a handful of well-meaning prison reform advocates in Texas, End Mass Incarceration Houston, caught wind of the relationships and staged a protest outside a Houston Whole Foods store.

By the following Monday, Whole Foods said it would stop carrying the inmate-labor products by April 2016, a decision reported widely by the Associated Press‘ food industry reporter.

That’s a loss for inmates.

It’s valid to be concerned about low wages, and about whose pockets are lined by the cheap labor, but the protest ran roughshod over another social and moral consideration: the duty of our prison systems to rehabilitate convicts. The Colorado program, like others elsewhere, is voluntary and was undoubtedly aiding inmates toward future employment by offering them on-the-job-training.

It’s tricky to pitch fair-wage arguments on behalf of inmates. After all, they are being housed, fed, and cared for by the public, at considerable expense. The opportunity costs to inmates are negligible, but society has a huge stake in helping them become employable once they leave prison.

The concerns of prison reform advocates and businesses like Whole Foods don’t have to be at odds with each other. But companies have to be honest and open about their motives and not cave at the first hint of negative publicity. Are they solely motivated by lower-cost labor, or is there a social goal as well that fits the company’s values? Given Whole Foods’ hasty retreat, one has to wonder.

This is not an isolated case. The for-profit corrections sector has blossomed over the past few decades, which means inmate labor accounts for more and more products and services. So the term “prison-industrial complex” is not just a conspiratorial myth.

Given that a massive bipartisan prison reform package was introduced in Congress the same week as the Whole Foods imbroglio, I wish the controversy would have been spun differently. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act should have offered the perfect opening to discuss how we can help inmates leave prison and lead more productive lives.

America is in dire need of prison reform. We have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s inmates. It’s difficult for the average person to grab the enormity of our penal system. The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition reports that more than 70,000 people leave Texas prisons every year. Another million more offenders cycle through the state’s local jails annually.

Most dismaying is that many will be back, locked up again due to a new offense or a parole violation. Imagine if more had a skill, a trade or a work history upon which to rely. There are ways that inmates can acquire that in jail. Yes, companies will make a buck off of giving those inmates that chance — and perhaps we should discuss some regulatory guidelines about that — but it can certainly be a fair exchange.

Quixotic Farming, the fish company working with inmates in Colorado, described its philosophy aptly on its website: “We believe in teaching a man to fish and giving him a second chance.”

If that ever becomes the ethos of America’s corrections system, we’ll all be better off.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via email at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

Photo: Organic vegetables are shown at a Whole Foods Market in La Jolla, California. REUTERS/Mike Blake