Texas Prison Bid'ness

A prisoner who helped negotiate the end of a major 2008 uprising at the GEO Group's Reeves County Detention Center is suing the private prison company claiming the GEO Group reneged on its promises and retaliated against him instead, according to the Odessa American ("Prisoner sues GEO Group," July 23),

Paul Ohaegbu claims GEO Group jail officials reneged on a promise that he and other prisoners involved in negotiations to resolve a hostage situation would not face prosecution. Last year, a federal grand jury indicted Ohaegbu and about two dozen of his fellow prisoners on federal riot charges.

While several of Ohaegbu’s co-defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced to additional prison time, prosecutors dropped the charges against Ohaegbu, citing “insufficient evidence.” Ohaegbu claims jail officials became angry when the charges were dropped and fabricated an incident report to “convict” Ohaegbu of disorderly conduct at a disciplinary hearing and strip him of good time and privileges. Ohaegbu, 51, is seeking several million dollars in actual and punitive damages.

... The charges against Ohaegbu stemmed from a riot involving more than 1,200 prisoners at the Pecos lockup in December 2008. Court documents show the prisoners took two guards hostage and demanded better medical attention, food and recreation.

Ohaegbu, in a 14-page lawsuit he filed on his own behalf, offers a detailed prisoner’s perspective of the chaos, attributing the uprising to the outrage sparked by the death of Jesus Manuel Galindo, a 32-year-old epileptic prisoner.

“The inmates housed in the segregation became irate and started a fire in one of the cells,” Ohaegbu said in the suit. “The general population inmates saw a body bag being removed from segregation and became aware of the death.”

Court documents show the riot began after two prisoners in a cell across from Galindo’s exposed the wires behind an electrical outlet and used them to set fire to a mattress. “It sounds like a design flaw to me, but that’s how they started it the best we can tell,” FBI agent Justin E. Fleck told a panel of 20 grand jurors last year, according to a transcript of the hearing.

The December 2008 uprising was the first of two riots at the facility sparked by a rash of prisoner deaths.  The disturbances drew national media coverage to the facility, and caused more than $1 million to the facility.  We'll keep you posted on updates t

I'll be driving out to Taylor for the vigil this Saturday at Corrections Corporation of America's notorious T. Don Hutto detention center,

Please join Texans United for Families, Grassroots Leadership, and organizers from across Texas for a vigil to draw attention to the nation's unaccountable and out-of-control detention system. The vigil will mark the one-year anniversary of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) announced detention reform and the end of family detention at Hutto. ICE currently heralds Hutto as a model detention center despite the recent revelation in May that a CCA guard was accused of sexually assaulting several women detained at this 500-bed facility. 

Texas holds 10,000 beds in detention centers to date, with plans for continued expansion.  Please join us to call for Dignity NOT Detention for immigrants.  The vigil takes place starting at 7pm. For details or carpooling information, please email blibal at grassrootsleadership dot org.

Contact me for more information through our contact form.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has unveiled its long-awaited online detainee locator.  The service makes it easier for families and advocates to find detainees in ICE's vast system of largely contracted private prisons and county jails.  Before the service, there was no centralized way for family members to determine if and where their loved ones were being detained by ICE. 

I tried the service out, and appears to be fairly workable.  However, the system may be complicated by the growing criminal prosecutions of migrant border-crossers under programs like Operation Streamline.  Because immigrants criminally prosecuted end up U.S. Marshals facilities awaiting trial, they don't end up in the ICE database until after they complete whatever sentence they may be given, a process that is often confusing the family members.  

In other ICE-related news, I received news over email last week that, starting today, immigration hearings at GEO's South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall will be heard at the detention center and will not be handled via televideo to the immigration court in San Antonio.  This should make it easier for detained immigrants to get a fair immigration hearing. However, for witnesses to hearings:

“When planning to observe an open hearing held within a detention facility, however, you should contact the detention facility in advance to learn of any security clearance requirements for entry to the building.”

A new "green paper" released Monday entitled Operation Streamline: Drowning Justice and Draining Dollars along the Rio Grande takes a look at the impact of Operation Streamline on the private prison industry.  I co-authored the report for Grassroots Leadership, a sponsor of this blog. 

Operation Streamline, initiated in 2005 in Del Rio and expanded to much of the Texas and Arizona border, mandates that immigrants apprehended at the border are detained, prosecuted, and incarcerated in the criminal system in addition to the civil immigration system.  This is a departure from previous policy in which most immigrants were only dealt with in the civil immigration system.

The result has been a mess.  In Texas alone, 135,000 immigrants now have criminal records and many have done real prison time under the Streamline before being deported (far from streamlining the process, the policy adds another layer of incarceration on top of the existing civil detention system). 

While most researchers believe that the program hasn't deterred unauthorized immigration, the program has affected the judicial system in serious ways.  The federal court system is horrendously over-booked.  54% of 2009's federal prosecutions across the country were for immigration violations.  In the Southern District of Texas, a district that includes Houston, a full 84% of April prosecutions were for two immigration violations - unauthorized entry (1325) and unauthorized re-entry (1326).  With a mandated focus on prosecution of immigration violations, diligence to other prosecutions has fallen off dramatically.

So, who wins in this scenario?  Our research indicates that, since 2005, more than $1.2 billion in federal money has been spent on the detention and incarceration for unauthorized entry and re-entry in Texas alone.  Nearly all of that  prison beds - contracted by the US Marshals and Federal Bureau of Prisons - are operated by private prison corporations.  Prisons like the GEO Group's Laredo Superjail, Emerald's LaSalle County Detention Center, and LCS's Coastal Bend Detention Center have sprung up around south and west Texas to win US Marshals contracts, largely driven by increased immigration prosecutions.  Could it be that Operation Streamline is a billion dollar give-away  to the private prison industry?

Check out the full report and a new blog on Operation Streamline at www.grassrootsleadership.org.