Texas Prison Bid'ness

There were a number of stories on private detention centers in Texas this past week. The headlines included:

• Former Laredo CCA Detainee Reports Abuse: A Wisconsin businessman who has been a U.S. resident since 1964 recounts being abused in CCA’s Laredo Processing Center. Tomas Contreras, who was detained re-entering the country after a vacation to Mexico for a minor drug arrest from the 1980s, says he was beaten by CCA guards in retaliation for protesting the poor treatment of other detainees. The link includes a video of Contreras telling his story.

• Blog Weighs in on Raymondville: Via Gritsfor Breakfast, the Mex Files has weighed in on the expansion to the Raymondville detention center, calling the group of Kevlar-domed tents "RITMO" to signify the nickname of the infamous Guantanamo prison. More on the expansion and protests from our archives.

• Detained Family at Hutto Reunited with Cuban Father: The Miami Herald reports that a Venezuelan family that was detained at the T. Don Hutto family detention center has been reunited with their Cuban father. The story is an example of the discrepancy in U.S. immigration law where the Cuban father, due to the “wet foot, dry foot” rule, was released while his Venezuelan family was immediately detained at the Hutto detention center and placed in deportation hearings.

We recently posted that Harris County is searching for juvenile detention beds as a result of a restructuring of the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). The County has authorized funding for leasing prison capacity from private lockups, and is considering buying a new prison over an hour away. This story once again emphasizes that local policies implemented by the District Attorney's office and law enforcement agencies are driving up incarceration numbers. As a result, county officials must rethink these policies and identify innovative solutions that don’t rely on adding new beds to the system.

I recently toured Harris County's Juvenile Detention Center in downtown Houston. The facility was at full capacity and was basically a prison for kids. County juvenile detention facilities are residential facilities that hold youths awaiting court decisions. The lockup held kids as young as 10 years old. That Harris County is considering obtaining additional capacity in a county more than an hour a way is seriously troubling.

As I walked the halls of the juvenile lockup, staff requested that I and the others on the tour volunteer to mentor kids in the lockup and show them the attention and care that many young people need and crave. As county officials consider placing these children in lockups away from their home communities they must also consider the impact on their behavior, their ability to undergo treatment, and their families.

In fact, during my tour, one of the young girls had been sentenced to a TYC facility a few hours away because of her behavior. According to guards this fourteen-year-old who had been previously placed in other residential facilities was acting out because her mother had not been able to visit her regularly during her detention stay. The guards emphasized that her original offense was not serious or violent, although they did not go into detail. She was sentenced to a TYC prison facility for a 9-month stay.

Residential facilities designed to incarcerate young prisoners in the juvenile system are either pre-dispositional or post-dispositional. Following adjudication, courts can set penalties such as probation, confinement, or community service for those found delinquent. Additionally, post-dispositional facilities accept youths placed with them by court order. These institutions vary in the degree of security, the length of stay, and the focus of programs they provide.

State law requires each county to have a juvenile board which consists of district and county judges and is responsible for overseeing the operations of the juvenile justice system in that county. The Harris County Juvenile Board sets policy for the county’s juvenile justice system and designates juvenile judges, appoints the chief juvenile probation officer, and manages the department’s budget.

According to Harris County officials, juvenile prisoners are serving shorter sentences. In 2004, the average stay was 58 days; this year length of stay decreased to 38 days.

Yet since the board continues to search for new beds, a lot of work could still be done to contain capacity and eliminate the need of Harris County to obtain new beds.

The board could work with law enforcement agencies and the district attorney’s office to rethink the way it deals with chronic misdemeanants who are being held for truancy and other nonviolent crimes. Rather than relying on incarceration, identifying ways to strengthen low-income communities in order to effectively structure the time of at-risk youth would reduce recidivism and improve public safety.

In what you’d think would be normal common-sense procedure, the Idaho Department of Corrections Director will actually visit GEO’s Val Verde Detention Center this Thursday before his state sends 56 prisoners there in September.

As we’ve reported, Idaho’s experience with Texas private prisons has been troubled, to say the least. Last August, Idaho moved prisoners from the Newton County Correctional Center, a GEO Group-run prison in east Texas, after reports of inmate abuse included prisoners being forcibly cuffed and maced. From Newton, the Idaho prisoners were transferred to GEO’s Dickens unit where an inmate escape and eventual suicide led to scrutiny and withdrawal of some of the prisoners from the “squalid” jail last month.

Now GEO is scheduled to move 56 prisoners to the Val Verde Detention Center, which has already been subjected to two well-documented lawsuits. In a 2005 suit, an employee reported that his superior displayed a hangman’s noose in his office and took pictures in his prison uniform donning KKK garb.

The second lawsuit was brought by a civil rights organization on behalf of the family of a detainee, LeTisha Tapia, who committed suicide after reporting that she had been sexually assaulted and denied medical care. GEO settled both suits.

After the problems with GEO facilities came to light in a series of stories by the AP’s John Miller, the Idaho DOC has announced its pre-transfer visit to the facility and the creation of a 13-member “virtual prison” team of Idaho DOC employees to oversee the more than 2,400 Idaho prisoners in county jails and out-of-state private prisons.

How effective these new oversight mechanisms will be is anyone’s guess. As Kathleen has pointed out, Idaho DOC’s own data shows that more effective substance abuse programs and paroling could largely reduce the state’s need to ship inmates to out-of-state private lock-ups. But instead, current plans are for them to ship yet more people to Texas.

In today's Houston Chronicle article (also available here) about neglect, physical and sexual abuse in private prisons for youth, Paula Morelock claims problems have never resulted in fining TYC contractors because, "If it comes to that, we'd just stop the contract." Yet when Morelock was responsible for contracting at the Texas Youth Commission (TYC), one of the worst cases of prisoner abuse in the history of privatization in Texas resulted in rewarding the contractor with a larger contract.

GEO Group (then called Wackenhut) hired Rufino Garcia, a man who’d been arrested in 1974 for a sex offense against a child, to work as a "lead careworker" at its Coke County prison, which then held young girls.

When Garcia met Sara Lowe at Coke County in 1994, he was 39 years old. Sara Lowe was just 15. In 1996, when he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecency with a child and two counts of sexual assault of a child (all second degree felonies), Garcia admitted that two weeks after he first sexually assaulted Sara Lowe—touching her breasts and making her perform fellatio—he submitted a “level change” request slip for her, writing that “Ms. Lowe has been very positive and has been improving every day.”

After Sara was released from the Wackenhut lockup, Garcia began telephoning her at her home. He told her family that he wanted to know how she was doing. When asked about his calls, Sara confided to her sister that she had been raped and molested repeatedly by Garcia, who had threatened that he would kill her sister and her mother if she told anyone about the abuse. Her family went into action and contacted TYC, who investigated the charges.

Horrified to learn of the sexual abuse of their daughter by a Wackenhut staffer, the Lowe family filed a lawsuit against the company. Eventually Wackenhut’s executives decided to settle the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money. But Sara was highly distraught because Wackenhut’s top managers had been allowed to avoid any admission of responsibility for her rapes. The day the settlement was finalized, Sara committed suicide.

Even before Garcia was convicted for his crimes, auditors had catalogued serious program deficiencies at Coke County. They determined that Wackenhut had failed to meet standards for medical care, casework services, recreation, education, and therapeutic interventions.

Yet even after receiving evidence of shocking abuse and contract failure, TYC’s top managers never closed their contract with Wackenhut. They did not take conclusive steps to prevent the abuse of girls placed at Coke County until 1998, when they switched the facility’s juvenile confinement population from girls to boys. They increased the number of contracted beds at the Coke County lockup from 104 to 200.