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for-profit prisons
Senator Booker, Pick a Side: Shut Down Elizabeth Detention Center
For the people of New Jersey, a future without immigration detention facilities is within sight. The only migrant jail left in our state is CoreCivic’s EDC.
Aug 22, 2023
On Monday August 14, in Trenton, New Jersey, CoreCivic, the private-for-profit prison giant,
had its day in court as it argued for an injunction against a 2021 New Jersey law that would close the Elizabeth Detention Center, or EDC, the last operating Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in the state, and one of the oldest and most notorious migrant jails in the United States—one with a three-decade history of neglect and abuse.
Many people may be surprised to learn that President Joe Biden’s administration supports CoreCivic’s lawsuit, arguing that closing the EDC would be “catastrophic” for ICE. The proximity of this particular facility to Newark Liberty Airport and JFK make it “mission critical” to deporting people without citizenship both from New Jersey and from other parts of the country. Despite widespread consensus from communities and a broad range of constituencies across New Jersey who have made explicitly clear they want the EDC shut down, most of the Democrats from our state’s federal delegation in Congress have remained silent as the Biden administration and CoreCivic attempt to sidestep our demands. Those who remain silent include Senator Cory Booker, a progressive champion for people in both the criminal legal system and the immigration system and who has his own bill that calls for ICE to stop using for-profit detention facilities.
New Jersey immigration activists aren’t surprised by this. We’ve known for a long time that Democrats, like Booker, have spoken out of both sides of their mouth on this issue. When former President Donald Trump was in office, they rushed to critique ICE, as if Trump’s overtly xenophobic and racist rhetoric made ICE overnight into a cruel and brutal extrajudicial agency that acts with impunity. Under Trump, the Democrats simply began to acknowledge and to echo what people in detention and advocates had been voicing under three previous administrations. So where are those legislators with their critiques of Biden, as his administration continues to sideline our communities and pour resources into maintaining the unnecessary system of ICE detention that he promised to address?
For the next four years, Booker and other local Democrats, including Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), railed against the evils of Trump, whether it was the Muslim Ban or separating parents from their children, using the Elizabeth Detention Center as their backdrop.
It was only nine days after Trump’s inauguration in 2017 when Booker led an estimated 800 people in chants up and down the street in front of the Elizabeth Detention Center to demand an end to Trump’s racist and inhumane travel ban. For the next four years, Booker and other local Democrats, including Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), railed against the evils of Trump, whether it was the Muslim Ban or separating parents from their children, using the Elizabeth Detention Center as their backdrop. Rallies, many numbering in the hundreds, featured everyone from local mayors, to candidates for governor, county commissioners, and U.S. congresspeople and senators. They brought with them press and TV cameras to document their outrage, including on Father’s Day morning in 2018, which filmed as a delegation of congresspeople from New Jersey and New York banged on the glass and demanded that an employee of CoreCivic provide entry to the facility.
Local activists, who had been fighting against immigration detention for decades, redoubled their efforts, making it clear that this was a state, county, and local issue as well as a federal one. Detained immigrants staged brave hunger protests throughout New Jersey’s immigration detention centers, which at the time included the EDC and Hudson, Essex, and Bergen County jails. Bowing to unceasing pressure from activists, New Jersey democrats began to speak out against detention contracts—both county contracts and private detention. It was all “blood money,” a term that even Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) adopted. Once Bergen, Hudson, and Essex identified and secured a replacement for the revenue they were receiving from ICE, they began incarcerating different populations of people.
During Trump’s presidency Booker brought the fight to D.C. In June of 2019 he called on the Senate Judiciary Committee to investigate abusive practices of ICE after a report was released by The Intercept and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about how ICE used solitary confinement as a “tool” to manage and punish people in detention. Booker rightly called out the use of solitary confinement as akin to torture. However, the overuse and abuse of solitary by ICE detention centers in New Jersey was not a new development under the Trump Administration, nor was it a new revelation. The use of solitary confinement for people in ICE detention in New Jersey’s county jails was investigated thoroughly by NYU law students in 2015 during the Obama administration. Solitary confinement is also where Boubacar Bah was placed for over 13 hours in 2007 after falling while detained at the EDC instead of being rushed to the hospital for what proved to be a fatal head injury.
In 2021, the New Jersey legislature passed AB5207 which prohibited “State and local entities and private detention facilities from entering into agreement to detain noncitizens.” Menendez and Booker issued a joint statement. In it they referenced the end date of CoreCivic’s contract, August 31, 2023, and referred to “a future without immigration detention facilities in New Jersey.”
So here we are in 2023 and yet another report about the “barbaric” practices being carried out against people in ICE detention has just been released. For the people of New Jersey, that future without immigration detention facilities is within sight. The only migrant jail left in our state is CoreCivic’s Elizabeth Detention Center—an enterprise that is so deeply unpopular that even its landlord is trying to evict CoreCivic from the building. Menendez has been clear that the Biden administration is “making the wrong decision,” but Booker, when pressed by a reporter, said he just has “lots of thoughts.” New Jersey activists want him to put those thoughts into action and pick a side in the fight against CoreCivic. We would welcome his presence in the street leading chants again but we would be happy with a statement that is at least as clear and direct as his own legislation.
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Blueprint Offers Biden Path to Ending For-Profit Corporate Prisons
"Over the last 40 years, the carceral system has grown into a vast network of corporations that use public-private partnerships to profit from the incarceration of our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones," said one campaigner.
Feb 06, 2023
Campaigners from two national justice advocacy groups on Monday released recommendations for the Biden administration to act on in order to fulfill the president's longtime promise to "stop corporations from profiteering off of incarceration."
President Joe Biden "took the first step in fulfilling this commitment" shortly after taking office in January 2021 when he issued an executive order to end the U.S. Department of Justice's reliance on federal private prisons, said the two groups, Color of Change and Worth Rises.
"But the 14,000 people incarcerated in federal private prisons represent a small fraction of the nearly 155,000 people currently detained across all federal prisons," said the groups, let alone the total of two million people who are incarcerated in state, local, and federal facilities as well as immigration detention centers.
To end the era in which prisons have become what Worth Rises executive director Bianca Tylek called "a business—one that is threatening our families, communities, and public safety," the Biden administration must dismantle an industry that "has worked itself into every corner of the carceral system as incarceration has exploded over the past 40 years," said the group.
"This is a pathway forward to a more just criminal legal system that does NOT put profits over people," tweeted Color of Change.
\u201cBREAKING: COC x @WorthRises are partnering to put an end to prison profiteering in 2023 & beyond!\n\nThis is a pathway forward to a more just criminal legal system that does NOT put profits over people.\n\nLearn about how we can #EndPrisonProfiteering now! \u27a1\ufe0f https://t.co/RYmpsZTqZl\u201d— ColorOfChange (@ColorOfChange) 1675715413
The recommendations in the groups' policy blueprint, Bearing the Cost, include:
- Prohibiting for-profit healthcare in prisons, providing medications and hygiene products at no cost, and requiring better reporting on medical care;
- Setting basic standards for food and commissary goods and preventing bundling of the services;
- Making communication free and accessible and strengthening antitrust oversight;
- Eliminating fees for money transfers and debit release cards and directing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to strengthen regulations for financial services for incarcerated people;
- Conducting a comprehensive review of electronic monitoring of incarcerated people nationwide; and
- Supporting the Abolition Amendment to end the use of unpaid labor in prisons.
"Over the last 40 years, the carceral system has grown into a vast network of corporations that use public-private partnerships to profit from the incarceration of our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones," said Tylek. "They have created a carceral crisis and collected the windfalls on the taxpayers' dime while the rest of us suffered. This policy blueprint provides the clearest roadmap for fulfilling the promise of justice that the Biden-Harris administration made and many expect it to meet."
The blueprint was released a month after Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 to empower federal regulators to ensure that charges for calls from correctional and detention facilities are "just and reasonable." Currently, incarcerated people are charged as much as $9.99 for a cellphone call and $5.70 for a 15-minute landline call.
"People ask what structural racism is. This is it," Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, said Monday. "Our blueprint provides a clear path of action for President Biden and all public officials who believe these financial attacks on our communities must end. We outline a clear set of steps for eliminating superfluous and inflated fees, revising the terms of government contracts with corporations to prevent gouging, and more."
"The incarcerated people and families that corporations have targeted with these profiteering practices know all their tricks, inside and out," Robinson added. "This blueprint reflects their unique knowledge about what is happening and how to stop it."
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'Expose the Slaveholders': Activists Disrupt For-Profit Prison Corp. Meeting
Dream Defenders and other civil rights groups converge on GEO Group shareholder meeting
Apr 29, 2015
As the for-profit prison corporation GEO Group held its annual shareholder meeting in Boca Raton, Florida on Wednesday, human rights organizations calling for an end to incarceration converged on the company's headquarters to demand accountability and divestment from the prison industry.
The prison-industrial complex "not only profits off the imprisonment of of America's most vulnerable, but also corrupts our system through draconian legislation and our education system," said one activist, Joshua McConnel, who joined the march organized by Dream Defenders, Prison Legal News, Grassroots Leadership, SEIU Florida, and other groups.
Taking up the call for other institutions to divest from the prison industry, McConnel continued, "My own university, the University of Central Florida... takes my tuition dollars and so many others and invests in companies just like GEO Group and CCA [Corrections Corporation of America]."
\u201cConnecting dots on criminalizing communities of color, #privateprisons & University of Central Florida #prisondivest\u201d— Grassroots Leadership (@Grassroots Leadership) 1430315723
Documenting the action on Twitter, organizers made clear how they see GEO Group's role in the industry, adding #Slaveholders to numerous posts. The action itself was dubbed, "Expose the Slaveholders."
"Opportunities for Black and Brown communities have been intentionally thwarted through intergenerationally maintained oppression. What drives this? The same institution that has fueled this country since its birth--slavery," reads a blog post by the civil rights group Dream Defenders. "Through the proliferation of prisons for profit, the United States is a slaveholder, and private prisons are the cruel overseers who go through extreme means, including documented physical and sexual abuse, lobbying for increased mandatory minimums and fraudulent reporting, to maximize profit."
GEO Group is the country's second-largest for-profit prison operator. It owns Karnes County Detention Center in Texas, which holds immigrant families and is the site of an ongoing hunger strike by detained mothers, as well as Reeves County Detention Center, currently the subject of a Department of Justice investigation.
As Dream Defenders points out, GEO Group has been sued over a hundred times for human rights violations in the past 10 years, including sexual mistreatment of prisoners and drug smuggling in the facilities. The corporation also gives large donations to the Republican Governors Association.
The Washington Post also reported on Tuesday that GEO Group has close ties with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl).
"While Rubio was leading the House, GEO was awarded a state government contract for a $110 million prison soon after Rubio hired an economic consultant who had been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust," freelance journalist Michael Cohen wrote. "Over his career, Rubio has received nearly $40,000 in campaign donations from GEO, making him the Senate's top career recipient of contributions from the company."
In a press release ahead of the march, organizers noted several key facts about mass incarceration in the U.S.:
- The US has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners
- 2.4 million people are incarcerated in the US. This is a 500% increase over the past 30 years
- Black and Latino men make up more than 60% of the prison population, but only 15% of the male population in the US
- One in 28 children have a parent behind bars
- In 2013, 67% of all federal criminal convictions were for immigration-related crime
- The US spent $80 Billion on incarceration in 2010 alone
- The GEO Group and other prison profiteers spend millions lobbying politicians to keep it that way, because they are getting rich off leaving people locked in cages.
Wednesday's demonstration took place ahead of a two-day action next week to strategize for an end to criminalization, incarceration, and immigration enforcement.
The third annual We Want Freedom: Breaking the Chains & Transforming Communities session is organized by a coalition of human rights groups, many of which were present at Wednesday's action, and will take place May 3-4 in Boca Raton. "State and corporate repression has increased as a result" of recent protests against police brutality, the organizers wrote in a statement. "If you are a person of color or immigrant, police encounters either take your life or land you in prison. The police funneling of people of color into cages is a key tactic for the state and corporations for social control. But their dams will not stop this flow of righteous anger and visionary love."
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