Expensive and Inhumane: The Shameful State of US Immigrant Detention

By Sadhbh Walshe, Guardian UK

04 December 12

Last year, it cost US taxpayers $1.7bn to house record numbers of mainly Latino immigrants in facilities Ice has failed to overhaul

ince mandatory detention laws were introduced in 1996, the number of immigrants who are held in custody as they fight deportation orders or seek asylum has increased from around 70,000 per year in the mid 1990s to a record 425,000 in 2011. This has been a major boost for private prison companies who have captured (literally) about half of the lucrative immigrant detention market. Their good fortune, however, has been a disaster for the mostly Latino immigrant population, which is being warehoused in substandard facilities to generate it.

In the wake of a litany of reports of abuse and deaths in custody in 2009, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), cheered on by the Obama administration, promised radical reforms (pdf) to the unholy mess our immigrant detention system has become. So far, however, these promised reforms have failed to materialize, and conditions in detention centers and county jails that contract with Ice are so appalling that advocacy groups are now demanding that the worst of these facilities be immediately closed down.

This month, the Detention Watch Network (DWN) launched its new campaign "Expose and Close", identifying ten facilities in the country that they believe are beyond repair. According to DWN's spokesperson, Silky Shah, these ten facilities - we're not supposed to call them prisons although that is effectively what they are - are "unfit for any human to live in". The range of complaints about the conditions are varied, but some of the highlights include inedible, worm-ridden food; medical neglect to the point where detainees have died from treatable infections; little or no outdoor recreation; overuse of solitary confinement on mentally ill detainees; and no contact visits with loved ones. (At three facilities, Pinal, Baker and Etowah County Jails, families have to travel long distances in order to visit their loved ones via video call only.)

Pedro Guzman, a Guatemalan-born immigrant, spent nearly 19 months at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia from 2009 to 2011, after being arrested when his paperwork went awry. Stewart is the largest immigrant prison in the country with 1,752 beds, and is owned and operated by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Ultimately, Pedro's removal order was revoked and he has been restored to his American-born wife and son, working again and paying taxes.

This is a much better situation for him - and for other taxpayers who had to fork $160 per night, which comes to a total of $92,000, to fund Guzman's 19-month stay at CCA's private prison. (All told, the taxpayer pays out approximately $1.7bn per year to imprison people like Pedro.) However, the cost to his family and the trauma inflicted on his son, who was two and a half years old when he witnessed his father's arrest by armed Ice agents, is inestimable.

Unsurprisingly, Pedro has very little good to say about his $92,000 stay at CCA's taxpayer-funded compound. He told me that they kept the facility freezing cold during winter ("to kill bacteria"), that the food was inedible and made his stomach sick, that the detainees would have to wait days to get medical attention and that, for the majority of his stay, there was no doctor on staff. Detainees spent 23 out of 24 hours indoors in a small pod with only a television for entertainment. Showers and toilets in the pod had no doors or curtains, so the men had absolutely no privacy. The only diversion in the outdoor yard where the men got to spend an hour a day was a football to kick about. The CCA did not respond to requests for comment on Guzman's account of his stay in its facility.

The worst part of the stay, however, was the family visits. Pedro's wife and baby had to drive 9.5 hours each way to have a one-hour, non-contact visit with him through a plexiglas screen. No one at Ice, or seemingly anywhere, can come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why visits at immigrant detention centers, which are supposed to be "civil" detention centers, are non-contact. When you consider that the majority of detainees do end up being deported, denying them the opportunity to have contact with their loved ones - the chance to kiss or hug their children goodbye - seems unnecessarily cruel.

Clearly, something must be done to fix this costly and inhumane mess (Ice acknowledged as much in 2009, when they promised a host of reforms). To be fair to them, they have made some progress in consolidating facilities and trying to establish better oversight, but overall, little has changed; and last year, more immigrants were subject to detention than ever before.

If we have learned anything from the recent election, however, it is that Latinos are a formidable voting bloc. Anyone wanting to court that vote in the future may wish to consider the wisdom of locking up their friends and relatives.