Texas Prison Bid'ness

A United Nations human rights expert will be visiting the US to review our treatment of immigrants, and will make a stop at the T Don Hutto prison in Texas. Jorge Bustamante, an independent expert for the Human Rights Council, will visit for over two weeks, visiting the border region along with Florida, Washington DC and New York. The U.S. government is facilitating the visit.

Bustamante will present his findings to the 47-member rights council in June.

This week, the GEO Group, Inc. ("GEO") announced that it has signed a contract with the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee for the development and operation of a 1,500-bed Detention Facility to house U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) prisoners in Laredo, Texas. The new private prison is scheduled to open in 2008. The contract has an initial term of five years with three five-year renewal option periods, for a total contract term of 20 years.

Currently, Texas operates more than 12,000 proposed or recently constructed private prison beds. The majority of these beds are intended to house federal detainees from the USMS or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). There are a few exceptions including the Reeves County Detention Center, a facility that received a contract to house incarcerated immigrants from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) under a Criminal Alien Requirements (CAR) contract. Many of these beds are being built or proposed as speculative prison beds, but several thousand are being built on contract from the ICE and USMS.

The expansion of immigrant detention facilities significantly increased in Texas due to changes in federal immigration policy. The number of unauthorized immigrant detainees has exploded from 6,785 in 1994 to over 22,000 in 2006.

Earlier this year, the news media took the guided tour of the T Don Hutto prison, which holds children while they and their parents await their immigration hearings. Media members were allowed to film a few areas, but not allowed to interview anyone imprisoned there. But they were allowed to talk to someone from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about what a good idea it is to lock up entire families.

Strangely, the ICE spokespeople (and the ICE website) say that the children being held at the Hutto prison are not forced to wear "prison garb," but in the video (carefully shot so that no faces are shown), it's plain that all the kids are wearing the same clothing --- the medical-style "scrubs" that are familiar to us from other prison settings. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement web page for Hutto explains, "Residents are provided with t-shirts, sweat shirts and/or medical-style scrubs. (“Jail uniforms” are not worn)." So even though 400 people who are confined there wear the same clothes, and they're not the same clothes as the people who work there, we shouldn't call them "uniforms."

Not that the clothes are the worst part of this, compared to the reports from the some of the parents and children in the prison. You can read the profiles of some of the families imprisoned at Hutto at the ACLU website. Parents have reported being separated from their kids (in separate cells), the lack of access to medical care, and that some of their children are not eating enough (due to short mealtimes and poor quality food), so have lost weight. One recurring theme is staff threatening the children with being separated from their parents if they don't behave. Not only does it sound like a prison, it sounds like the worst kind of prison. How much longer can this go on?

Shutdowhutto.org has several excellent videos that explain the problems with T. Don Hutto, Corrections Corporation of America's "prison for the whole family." They're also collecting names on an online petition with five key points on it:

1. That the United States government shut down T. Don Hutto Residential Facility,
2. That the inhabitants of Hutto be given full legal rights and not be deported or imprisoned again,
3. That none of the families at Hutto be separated, and that the reunion of Hutto residents with other family members elsewhere be allowed,
4. That the practice of jailing civilians for immigration charges cease,
5. That the United States government immediately review its practice of contracting imprisonment out to private companies.

Visit the site, sign the petition, and let's get T Don Hutto closed!