Texas Prison Bid'ness

KWTX has a story ("Sheriff’s Officers Concerned About Private Jail Proposals" June 24, 2008) about McLennan County Sheriff's Deputies protesting turning over even more of the county's jail system to a private company. According to the article,

Sheriff’s officers packed the meeting of the McLennan County Commissioner’s Court Tuesday to air concerns about proposals that would turn operation of county jail facilities over to a private company.

A private firm now operates the downtown jail, but other facilities are still county-run.

But the county is under mounting pressure to solve its jail-overcrowding problem and one option commissioners are considering is construction of a new jail big enough to hold a thousand prisoners.

The price tag for the facility could run as high as $60 million. Among the options on the table is hiring a private company to build and operate the new jail.

Without the new facility, County Judge Jim Lewis projects that by 2010, the county will be renting space for almost 450 prisoners it doesn't have room for, at a total cost of nearly $27,000 a day or almost $10 million a year.

We believe that a county can't build its way out of an overcrowding problem. And, as both Nicole on this blog and Grits for breakfast have noted here and here, common sense solutions to reduce the incarcerated populations exist in nearly all Texas counties.

CiviGenics, operating as CEC these days, currently operates part of the McLennan County jail system. The company has had a series of problems at the McLennan County facility - where a sexual assault scandal involving a CiviGenics employee and a controversy over company payments to the County Sheriff raised questions - The company has also been rocked by sexual assault scandals at its Liberty County and Texarakansas jails.

We'll keep you updated on developments from McLennan County.

KGBT is reporting ("Detention Center Plans for Raymondville," June 26) that one of the three new family detention centers proposed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, similar to the notorious T. Don Hutto detention center in Taylor, might be located in Raymondville, Texas. According to the story,

A new facility to house illegal immigrants and their children could be coming to Raymondivlle if city leaders have their way.

Federal officials recently put out a bid to construct three new detention facilities modeled after one in Hutto, Texas.

Raymondville leaders are putting in a bid to land one of them right here in the Valley.

If approved the facility would be built on city-owned land next to a jail complex that already houses 46-hundred local, state and federal inmates.

Raymondville is already home to 4,600 detention beds, including the windowless kevlar detention center known as "tent city."  ICE may believe it can easily contract for another detention center in a community that already has so much detention center infrastructure.  However, as we've reported, there is growing opposition to family detention here in Texas and from national organizations that might complicate that effort.  We'll keep you updated on news about family detention centers. 

The Nashville Scene, Corrections Corporation of America's hometown alternative weekly, has published a blistering expose ("Locked and Loaded," June 19th) on the company, with particular attention paid to CCA's T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, Texas. The story draws heavily on court documents from the lawsuit against the facility, including this heart-breaking testimony:

After she arrived in Taylor, Elsa and her family shared a tiny living area, where they’d be loudly awoken at 5:45 a.m. Elsa, Richard and Angelina then had 20 minutes to eat breakfast. When they didn’t finish on time, guards would just snatch their food and throw it in the trash. “When this happens, the children cry and cry,” Elsa later explained in an affidavit that chronicled her plight.

The detention center was very cold, so much so that the guards walked around wearing gloves. But they’d yell at Elsa if she asked for a blanket. One time they came into her cell and confiscated two of her sweaters.

“They don’t care that we are cold,” she said. “They don’t care if we eat or if we don’t eat.”

Elsa and her children wore prison uniforms and spent hours in their pod, often with no toys or books for the kids. One day, Elsa and her family were in the doctor’s office, where all the kids were playing with crayons. Angelina drew a picture, but a guard grabbed the girl’s artwork. She cried a lot at Hutto, wondering what her family had done wrong.

“Mommy, where is God that he doesn’t want to help us? Mommy, tell God to come and take us out of here and take us to our house,” Elsa recalled her daughter saying. “Mommy, why do they have us as prisoners if we have never killed anybody?”

Unfortunately, such stories of horrid conditions at Hutto were almost common-place before the settlement between the ACLU and UT Immigration Law Clinic and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Amongst the more interesting elements of the article are the revelation that internal ICE memos were highly critical of conditions at Hutto. According to the story,

Just about everyone else who walked through the gates at Hutto, including federal authorities, saw it as a deeply troubling facility. In March 2007, ICE inspectors visited Hutto and, in their own distinct bureaucratic language, corroborated the anguished accounts of the detainees. The inspectors noted that their “overall review of the facility can be accurately rated as deficient” and determined that the staff wasn’t following basic standards of detention.

“The Review Team’s observation of CCA’s overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency in their work performance,” the agency noted in its report.

A month later, an interoffice memo from ICE said that at Hutto, CCA is “losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” That’s because the company was only paying its detention officers around $10 an hour, nearly $4 less than what they could make at the county jail.

“As long as CCA continues to hire employees at this rate per hour, they will continue to experience the problems they are currently experiencing on the floor,” read the memo. “The current problems CCA is experiencing are a direct result of what ‘they are paying their employees for.’ Unfortunately, it is at ICE’s expense.”

We'll keep you posted on further developments on Hutto. For more information, see our previous coverage or check out tdonhutto.blogspot.com.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) released its latest numbers in June regarding the national rate of incarceration and provided state level data as well. According to the BJS the total number of prisoners in custody during 2007 numbered 2.3 million.

As usual, Texas ranks high among the number of prisoners incarceated in state custody. Prisoners in Texas comprised nearly 173,000 of the total number of people in federal and state custody. Additionally, 18,720 of Texas prisoners were detained in private facilities (see chart below); a total 0f 10.8% of prisoners in the state. During 2006, Texas imprisoned about 18,220 prisoners in private facilities for percen-change of plus 2.74% in a single year.

Last year, lawmakers passed reforms meant to reduce the state's reliance on incarceration. Those policies have been lauded by the recent Pew Report and other states as a model. Time will tell if Texas is able to minimize it's overal prison population, and the number of people in private lockups as well.

Largest 20 State Private Prison Populations 2007

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics