February 28, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

CRIME PAYS FOR PRIVATE PRISONS

There shouldn't be a profit to be made in everything. Common decency would suggest that profiting from the misery of others is morally and ethically wrong. Now we have private prisons that literally profit from crime. In this article Amy Goodman talks about the booming business of prison for profit. The article is at www.commondreams.org:

CCA is the largest publicly traded private prison operator in the U.S. CCA has close to 70 facilities scattered across the country, recent earnings of $1.33 billion and a gain in its stock-share price of 85 percent in the past year. Industry analysts gush at the profit potential promised by private prisons. Their commodity: human beings.

A recent report issued jointly by two nonprofit agencies—the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service— titled “Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families,” paints a grim picture of the conditions these families endure. While in 2005 Congress directed the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain families in “non-penal, homelike environments,” the report details how prisonlike the Hutto facility is. While ICE announced Hutto as a new facility, it was formerly a prison.

Children as young as 6 are separated from their parents, kept in prison cells with heavy steel doors equipped with a sensitive laser alarm system. The children wear prison uniforms. They get one hour of school per day, and one hour of recreation. All non-lawyer visits are “non-contact,” through a plexiglass window speaking over a phone, to obviate the “necessity” of a full-body cavity search after each visit. Yet the chairman of the CCA board of directors, William Andrews, begs to differ: “The reports come from special-interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. ... The family facility, particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home.” Recent reports put the total number of children at Hutto between 170 and 200.