By Chris Hedges
Marela, an undocumented immigrant in her 40s, stood outside
the Elizabeth Detention Center in Elizabeth, N.J., on a chilly afternoon last week.
She was there with a group of protesters who appear at the facility’s gates
every year on Ash Wednesday to decry the nation’s immigration policy and
conditions inside the center. She was there, she said, because of her friend
Evelyn Obey.
Obey, 40, a Guatemalan and the single mother of a
12-year-old and a 6-year-old, was picked up in an immigration raid as she and
nine other undocumented workers walked out of an office building they cleaned
in Newark, N.J. Her two children instantly lost their only parent. She
languished in detention. Another family took in the children, who never saw
their mother again. Obey died in jail in 2010 from, according to the sign
Villar had hung on her neck, “pulmonary thromboembolism, chronic bronchiolitis
and emphysema and remote cardiac Ischemic Damage.’ ”
“She called me two days after she was seized,” Marela told
me in Spanish. “She was hysterical. She was crying. She was worried about her
children. We could not visit her because we do not have legal documents. We
helped her get a lawyer. Then we heard she was sick. Then we heard she died.
She was buried in an unmarked grave. We did not go to her burial. We were too
scared of being seized and detained.”
The rally—about four dozen people, most from immigrant
rights groups and local churches—was a flicker of consciousness in a nation
that has yet to fully confront the totalitarian corporate forces arrayed
against it. Several protesters in orange jumpsuits like those worn by inmates
held signs reading: “I Want My Family Together,” “No Human Being is Illegal,”
and “Education not Deportation.”
“The people who run that prison make money off of human
misery,” said Diana Mejia, 47, an immigrant from Colombia who now has legal
status, gesturing toward the old warehouse that now serves as the detention
facility. As she spoke, a
Catholic
Worker band called the Filthy Rotten System belted out a protest song. A
low-flying passenger jet, its red, green and white underbelly lights blinking
in the night sky, rumbled overhead. Clergy walking amid the crowd marked the
foreheads of participants with ashes to commemorate Ash Wednesday.
“Repentance is more than merely being sorry,” the Rev. Joyce
Antila Phipps, the executive director of
Casa de Esperanza, a community
organization working with immigrants, told the gathering. “It is an act of
turning around and then moving forward to make change.”
The majority of those we incarcerate in this country—and we
incarcerate a quarter of the world’s prison population—have never committed a
violent crime. Eleven million undocumented immigrants face the possibility of
imprisonment and deportation. President Barack Obama, outpacing George W. Bush,
has deported more than 400,000 people since he took office. Families, once
someone is seized, detained and deported, are thrown into crisis. Children come
home from school and find they have lost their mothers or fathers. The small
incomes that once sustained them are snuffed out. Those who remain behind often
become destitute.
But human beings matter little in the corporate state. We
myopically serve the rapacious appetites of those dedicated to exploitation and
maximizing profit. And our corporate masters view prisons—as they do education,
health care and war—as a business. The 320-bed Elizabeth Detention Center,
which houses only men, is run by one of the largest operators and owners of
for-profit prisons in the country, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA,
traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has annual revenues in excess of $1.7
billion. An average of 81,384 inmates are in its facilities on any one day.
This is a greater number, the American Civil Liberties Union points out in
a 2011
report, “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration,” than
that held by the states of New York and New Jersey combined.
The for-profit prisons and their lobbyists in Washington and
state capitals have successfully blocked immigration reform, have prevented a
challenge to our draconian drug laws and are pushing through tougher detention
policies. Locking up more and more human beings is the bedrock of the
industry’s profits. These corporations are the engines behind the explosion of
our prison system. They are the reason we have spent $300 billion on new
prisons since 1980. They are also the reason serious reform is impossible.
The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison
population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU.
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says that
for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners
and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all
of the new prisons built between 2000 and 2005. And nearly half of all
immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit
prisons, according to
Detention
Watch Network.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which
imprisons about 400,000 undocumented people a year, has an annual budget of
more than $5 billion. ICE is planning to expand its operations by establishing
several mega-detention centers, most run by private corporations, in states
such as New Jersey, Texas, Florida, California and Illinois. Many of these
private contractors are, not surprisingly, large campaign donors to “law and
order” politicians including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
In CCA’s annual report to the Securities and Exchange
Commission for 2011, cited by the ACLU, the prison company bluntly states its
opposition to prison reform. “The demand for our facilities and services could
be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in
conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the
decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by
criminal laws,” it declares. CCA goes on to warn that “any changes with respect
to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration” could “potentially
[reduce] demand for correctional facilities,” as would “mak[ing] more inmates
eligible for early release based on good behavior,” the adoption of “sentencing
alternatives [that] ... could put some offenders on probation” and “reductions
in crime rates.”
CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to
candidates for federal or state office, political parties and 527 groups (PACs
and super PACs), the ACLU reported. The corporation also spent $1.07 million
lobbying federal officials along with undisclosed funds to lobby state
officials, according to the ACLU.
CCA, through the
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
lobbies legislators to impose harsher detention laws at the state and federal
levels. The ALEC helped draft Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law SB 1070.
A March 2012 CCA
investor
presentation prospectus, quoted by the ACLU, tells potential investors that
incarceration “creates predictable revenue streams.” The document cites
demographic trends that the company says will continue to expand profits. These
positive investment trends include, the prospectus reads, “high
recidivism”—“about 45 percent of individuals released from prison in 1999 and
more than 43 percent released from prison in 2004 were returned to prison
within three years.” The prospectus invites investments by noting that one in
every 100 U.S. adults is currently in prison or jail. And because the U.S.
population is projected to grow by approximately 18.6 million from 2012 to
2017, “prison populations would grow by about 80,400 between 2012 and 2017, or
by more than 13,000 additional per year, on average,” the CCA document says.
The two largest private prison companies in 2010 received
nearly $3 billion in revenue. The senior executives, according to the ACLU
report, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.
The for-profit prisons can charge the government up to $200 a day to house an
inmate; they pay detention officers as little as $10 an hour.
“Within 30 miles of this place, there are at least four
other facilities where immigrants are detained: Essex, Monmouth, Delaney Hall
and Hudson, which has the distinction of being named one of the 10 worst
detention facilities in the country,” Phipps, who is an immigration attorney as
well as a minister, told the gathering in front of the Elizabeth Detention
Center. “The terrible secret is that immigration detention has become a very
profitable business for companies and county governments.”
“More than two-thirds of immigrants are detained in
so-called contract facilities owned by private companies, such as this one and
Delaney Hall,” she went on. “The rise of the prison industrial complex has gone
hand in hand with the aggrandizing forces of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, or ICE, which, by the way, has filed suit against the very
government it is supposed to be working for because they were told to exercise
prosecutorial discretion in their detention practices.” [
Click here to
see more about the lawsuit, in which 10 ICE agents attack the administration’s
easing of government policy on those who illegally entered the United States as
children.]
There is an immigration court inside the Elizabeth facility,
although the roar of the planes lifting off from the nearby Newark Airport
forces those in the court to remain silent every three or four minutes until
the sound subsides. Most of those brought before the court have no legal
representation and are railroaded through the system and deported. Detainees,
although most have no criminal record beyond illegal entry into the United
States, wear orange jumpsuits and frequently are handcuffed. They do not have
adequate health care. There are now some 5,000 children in foster care because
their parents have been detained or deported, according to the
Applied Research Center’s report “Shattered
Families.” The report estimates that this number will rise to 15,000 within
five years.
“I am in family court once every six to eight weeks
representing some mother who is surrendering custody of her child to somebody
else because she does not want to take that child back to the poverty of
Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador,” Phipps said when we spoke after the rally.
“She has no option. She does not want her child to live in the same poverty she
grew up in. It is heartbreaking.”
We have abandoned the common good. We have been stripped
of our rights and voice. Corporations write our laws and determine how we
structure our society. We have all become victims. There are no politicians
or institutions, no political parties or courts, that are independent enough
or strong enough to resist the corporate onslaught. Greater and greater
numbers of human beings will be consumed. The poor, the vulnerable, the
undocumented, the weak, the elderly, the sick, the children will go first.
And those of us watching helplessly outside the gates will go next.
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