Costly, Inefficient And Unaccountable: The Case For Outlawing For-Profit Prisons

By Christina Fialho and Grisel Ruiz of CIVIC

Last year, GEO Group Inc. and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the two largest private prison corporations in the country, reported revenues of $1.84 billion and $1.79 billion, respectively. These same companies have lobbied for a Congressional mandate requiring that 34,000 immigration detention beds be maintained (and paid for with tax dollars).

Private prison companies have been so profitable because our government at all levels has underwritten private prison expenses by passing laws and maintaining contracts that guarantee a minimum number of beds. In fact, private prisons detain 73 percent of all immigrants. That is a total of 24,820 people per day and approximately 300,000 people per year.

What’s more, Congress has ensured private prisons remain exempt from taxpayer oversight by refusing to pass legislation to include them in the federal disclosure system. For example, as the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not apply to private prisons, the public is denied access to records regarding prison operations.

Government regulation of these private prisons is toothless and sporadic due to the comfortable relationship between regulators and the regulated. As a former deputy director of ICE recently pointed out, for-profit prison companies have been hiring former immigration officials to help them secure favorable contract terms. Therefore, the vast majority of private immigration detention contracts do not include any robust penalty provisions for failing to meet government standards. Oversight of these private companies is left almost entirely to nonprofits and faith communities that volunteer to visit and monitor detention facilities with little or no formal support from the government.

In the immigration detention context, private prisons have circumvented open market competition for federal dollars by contracting with local governments who in turn contract with the federal government. A CCA Vice-President admitted that 30 percent of its federal contracts are obtained through non-competitive bids.

In California, GEO Group contracts with the City of Adelanto and the City of McFarland to detain a total of nearly 1,400 immigrants per day for US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the federal agency responsible for immigration detention. GEO Group does not have to compete with any other company or service provider for federal dollars.

Until recently, our federal government had neglected to do a comprehensive cost analysis or study on private prisons to determine if they were operating humanely and more cheaply than government-run facilities. This is why the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recently released report on private prisons is so significant, even if it is 30 years late.

The DOJ’s investigation found more safety and security incidents per capita at private prisons than at comparable government-run facilities as well as more sexual misconduct and higher rates of assault. In addition, audits of the private prisons revealed millions of taxpayer dollars used in ways that were either “unallowable or unsupported” by their contracts.

We have long argued that holding people in private prisons does not benefit anyone but the companies that manage them. In fact, immigration detention (in both private and public facilities) is incredibly costly, not only to taxpayers but also to the individuals who lose their jobs and to the families who lose their primary breadwinners as a result of detention.

Eliminating private prisons is necessary in order to make way for solutions that treat everyone with dignity and do not profit off of human suffering.

CIVIC visits and monitors over 40 immigration detention facilities weekly and has been piloting and scaling a community-based alternative to detention in California. Instead of being detained, immigrants are allowed to remain living with their families. If they are recent asylum seekers without family, then they are housed with volunteers or in group homes while the courts process their immigration cases.

Studies have shown that effective community-based alternatives cost only $12 per person per day, compared to approximately $164 per person per day through the private prison system.

Yet, the lobbying power of private prisons has prevented true low cost and humane alternatives from expanding. Instead, GEO Group has created two subsidiaries, GEO Care and BI Inc., to absorb the funds appropriated for alternatives and advance other forms of detention, such as ankle monitoring.

So as we work towards the adoption of more effective and humane solutions to immigration detention, we also are simultaneously working to end private immigration detention contracting.

A piece of legislation called the Dignity Not Detention Act (SB 1289), authored by Senator Ricardo Lara (D- Bell Gardens), and co-sponsored by CIVIC (Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement), the nonprofit that we run, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), that would have closed private detention facilities across the state of California and created enforceable standards of care across all facilities, was vetoed recently by Governor Jerry Brown.

But we are not giving up. We will find other ways and other supporters to help immigrants caught in our detention system, and we hope you will join us at Endisolation.org. We believe in #DignityNotDetention.

Christina Fialho is an attorney and the co-founder/executive director of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement (CIVIC). Grisel Ruiz is the board chair of CIVIC, and a staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC).