Why we can't have nice private corporations
August 3, 2015 9:46 PM   Subscribe

Paid $1 to $3 a day, unauthorized immigrants keep family detention centers running (LA Times) "Cruz, 36, cleaned bathrooms, hallways and other areas of the government-contracted detention center for $3 a day. At the commissary, a bag of potato chips cost $4, bottled water $2. The facility in Karnes City is run by Geo Group, the country’s second-largest prison company."
posted by pjmoy (26 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
The free market is always fair, right? (It isn't... ever.)
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:58 PM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


In 1950, Congress passed a law allowing the dollar-a-day pay rate for voluntary labor in immigrant detention. When lawmakers last reviewed the rate in 1979, Takei said, they chose not to raise it, and an appellate court upheld the rate in 1990, finding “alien detainees are not government 'employees.' "

For fuck's sake.
posted by CrystalDave at 10:29 PM on August 3, 2015 [21 favorites]


I read this at first having quickly read the amount and believed it was a dollar an hour, and thought that was horrible. But a dollar a day? For real?
posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:33 PM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


“The program allows detainees to feel productive & contribute to the orderly operation of detention facilities"

(brain explodes)
posted by raihan_ at 11:00 PM on August 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


You know, I don't think this is that bad. I hear some of the detention center owners will free the detainees on their deathbeds, granting them the right to run overpriced vending machines of their own.
posted by benzenedream at 11:04 PM on August 3, 2015 [19 favorites]


The perfect solution to your mistreated and underpaid employees leaving for better jobs: detain them in their own workplace/prison. Because feudalism worked so well the first time, for the landowners at least.
posted by Rangi at 11:04 PM on August 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


“It's ironic — it's illegal for them to work, but they’re working for the immigration service in a sense,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank in Washington.
When the guy from the anti-immigration conservative think tank remarks upon the hole in your free-market logic, it must be a really gigantic hole. (I mean, yes, he goes on to say that he doesn't have any problem with it but still.)
posted by gingerest at 11:38 PM on August 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Because feudalism worked so well the first time, for the landowners at least.

In Western Europe at least, serfs had very specific rights and the feudal relationship was reciprical (if badly unbalanced). Peasant rebellions were mostly caused by violations of those rights rather than a radical desire to overthrow the social order.

So these guys are worse than the Medieval French nobility. And that's damning.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:14 AM on August 4, 2015 [36 favorites]


As long as we have for-profit prison companies, the US will continue to have the largest prison population on the planet.
posted by hippybear at 2:34 AM on August 4, 2015 [7 favorites]


As long as we have for-profit prison companies, the US will continue to have the largest prison population on the planet.

Just so we're clear, only about 3% of US prisoners are in for-profit prisons. So this is definitely false.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:19 AM on August 4, 2015


Just so we're clear, only about 3% of US prisoners are in for-profit prisons. So this is definitely false.

Corrections Corporation of America has 4% of US prisoners on it's own, and is not the only private prison company, so the above claim is definitely false. And beyond that, the above claim ignores the many other for-profit players in the prison-industrial complex.

That said, the problem is definitely not as simple as eliminating the perverse incentives of private prisons. There are layers and layers in this onion.
posted by whisk(e)y neat at 4:39 AM on August 4, 2015 [4 favorites]


Fair enough, but we have continually developed an economic engine around prisons and prison labor for at least the last century, so I can't imagine Capitalism would back off just because it's horrible and degrading to prisoners and society.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:44 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wikipedia seems to say that in 2013 the Department of Justice said the figure was 8.4% of the prison population and that the figure is slowly rising. So I'm not sure where this 3% number is coming from.
posted by delicious-luncheon at 4:45 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Can't we solve this disagreement by agreeing to define the U.S. Government as a For-Profit Public Prison Corporation?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 4:47 AM on August 4, 2015 [11 favorites]




Does the term "for-profit prison" include state-owned facilities being managed by private corporations?
posted by Thorzdad at 5:09 AM on August 4, 2015 [8 favorites]


"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Always remember the United States constitution still explicitly allows enslaving people.
posted by srboisvert at 5:27 AM on August 4, 2015 [18 favorites]


Corrections Corporation of America has 4% of US prisoners on it's own, and is not the only private prison company, so the above claim is definitely false. And beyond that, the above claim ignores the many other for-profit players in the prison-industrial complex.

I got my numbers wrong, a little. The number is 5% for the total for-profit prison population. (CCA has most of the market share.) I got my numbers for private prison beds from Pro Publica, who got them from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. We can trust the private prison bed numbers because they come from SEC filings and actual bills for bed usage. (If anything, we'd assume they were a little high because of overbilling.) However, they understate the number of prisoners in the US by quite a lot, because of the methods that the BJS uses to approximate daily prison populations and because they ignore some forms of imprisonment.

Becky Pettit wrote a whole book about the undercounting, and she says we have 2.3 million people in prisons and jails. The number almost triples if you include people on some form of CJS supervision or monitoring, like parole and probation. Basically 3% of the population.

That said, this is prisons in general. Private detention centers play a much larger role in immigration detention, which is the focus of this post. Immigration exacerbates the problems of prisoner counting, because people are processed relatively quickly so most beds are inhabited by multiple people in the same year. That means that hundreds of thousands of people are incarcerated in the same 34,000 beds each year, 67% of which are run by for-profit corporations.

In the spirit of the original claim, unless you're willing to call Corrections Officers Unions to account, the focus on private prisons is a red herring. This really is a public, democratic problem, not a capitalist problem. Don't blame rich people: blame your government and your fellow citizens. This is an "us" problem, not a "them" problem.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:26 AM on August 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


The more relevant point here is that almost half of immigration detainees are now in private detention centers. Found via By the Numbers: The U.S.’s Growing For-Profit Detention Industry, from Pro Publica.

In fact it's more than that: 2/3, not 1/2. But that's a vanishingly small part of the overall prison population.
posted by anotherpanacea at 6:29 AM on August 4, 2015


Everyone should be sure to check anotherpanacea's 34,000 beds link, which discusses the little-known 2009 law that ICE has interpreted to mean it must have 34,000 detainees in detention each day:

This directive established what would become a controversial policy interpreted by ICE as a mandate to contract for and fill 33,400 (increased in 2013 to 34,000)[3] detention beds on a daily basis. The directive would come to be known as the “immigrant detention quota” or “bed mandate.” The immigration detention quota is unprecedented; no other law enforcement agency operates under a detention quota mandated by Congress.

Since its implementation, the quota has become a driver of an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement strategy. The immigrant detention system has expanded significantly since the implementation of the quota, and the percent of the detained population held in private facilities has increased even more dramatically. Two major private prison corporations have emerged as the main corporate beneficiaries of immigrant detention policies: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group.


This has come up in previous immigrant detention threads, most recently in regard to the trans immigration activist's White House protest, which was in part about ICE's higher rate of retention of LGBT immigrants against its own officials' recommendation for release, which some suggest is a result of the 34,000 daily bed quota.
posted by mediareport at 6:50 AM on August 4, 2015 [3 favorites]


In fact it's more than that: 2/3, not 1/2. But that's a vanishingly small part of the overall prison population.

It's not vanishingly small. The immigrant detention is increasing and the overall prison population is decreasing since 2008, though it went up last year. So immigrant detention is a growing small part of the overall prison population.
posted by srboisvert at 6:51 AM on August 4, 2015 [2 favorites]


I read this at first having quickly read the amount and believed it was a dollar an hour, and thought that was horrible. But a dollar a day? For real?

Welcome to the wet dream of just about every American CEO, and one that ALEC, the American Enterprise Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, etc. are working hard to bring off.*

*Except that the wet dream might actually be that detainees are herded, fed, and disciplined by robots.
posted by ryanshepard at 7:12 AM on August 4, 2015


Similar articles to this one come across my desk from time to time, and I'm always glad when they hit some sort of public attention. But they never seem to mention the absolutely bizarre temporal logic that has to operate.

To wit: Most of the time that migrants are in detention, they have not yet been adjudicated to be in the US improperly. It's definitely not an infallible system, as the deportations of American citizens demonstrate (e.g. Pedro Guzman, Bianca Alfaro, Mark Lyttle). I have personally met American citizens in immigration detention, where ICE does not accept that they are, in fact, citizens. My experience is that the system moves slowly up until a judge says that someone is deportable, and fairly fast after that.**

It's being an immigrant and/or a prisoner that means that you can be paid less than minimum wage. But this is, literally, not decided at the time the work is performed. The thing that makes you not have rights doesn't legally exist until it's made to exist in retrospect--even though such a function doesn't work outside of prison. (In other words, even undocumented immigrants are entitled to minimum wage on the outside.)

It's the stripping of rights punitively but also retroactively but also as if they never get anything wrong.

**Bonus factoid! My experience is also that, if you sign a stipulated order (saying you won't contest the deportation, which means you don't need to see a judge etc) and ICE knows that it's because you want to get back soon (e.g., you have a child close to being born), they will intentionally hold you as long as they can, typically several months.
posted by migrantology at 7:20 AM on August 4, 2015 [12 favorites]


It's not vanishingly small. The immigrant detention is increasing and the overall prison population is decreasing since 2008, though it went up last year. So immigrant detention is a growing small part of the overall prison population.

It's a percentage point. It's a drop in the bucket. It's also a gross human rights violation, so I'm not really interested fighting over the meaning of adverbs. I don't understand the nitpicks, here: none of them change the basic story which is that for-profit prisons have not driven mass incarceration nor the inhumane treatment and exploitation of undocumented immigrants. It's not state-good, market-bad! It's state & market bad. It's democracy-bad, because the voters like to screw non-voters.

That stuff is classic projection: we blame the corporations and capitalism so we don't have to blame the Obama administration and ourselves. It was liberals who argued that safety from crime was the first civil right and literally co-opted the rhetoric of Martin Luther King to incarcerate a million black men every year.

Incarceration has grown by 700% since 1970, and the vast majority of that growth has been in Democratic cities and states, not due to federal policies (although I think asset seizure has probably helped a lot) and not even due to drug crimes! Meanwhile, we're actually detaining more people under Obama than we did under Bush even if Obama has returned fewer people, he's done more of it through the detention and processing this thread is part of attacking.

And it's libertarians like Jacqueline Stevens who have done the most to bring these issues to light and filed lawsuit after lawsuit to show that this practice, the specific underpaying in immigrant facilities, is unconstitutional. (I met Stevens this summer and she is just the kind of irritating libertarian we all know and love to hate, but she doesn't care about taxes, she just wants to see justice done for the human rights of migrants. It was kind of inspiring in a weird way....)
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:27 AM on August 4, 2015 [4 favorites]




It's democracy-bad, because the voters like to screw non-voters.

Nah, they like screwing other voters too, at least if they're black.
posted by phearlez at 2:22 PM on August 4, 2015


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