The Invisible New Face of American Prisons

In an excellent article in the current issue of The Boston Review, immigration reporter Tom Barry looks at where profit, poverty and immigration policy converge. Barry writes that in depressed communities along the U.S. southwest border, a series of public/private prisons are opening up that are changing the face of the nation’s imprisonment policies.

These facilities are owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in areas where jobs are desperately needed—a combination that has often led to abuse, Barry writes.

Here is how his story begins:

County Clerk Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside the small West Texas town of Pecos. “The prison is burning again,” she announced.

About a month and a half before, on December 12, 2008, inmates had rioted to protest the death of one of their own, Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32. When Galindo’s body was removed from the prison in what looked to them like a large black trash bag, they set fire to the recreational center and occupied the exercise yard overnight. Using smuggled cell phones, they told worried family members and the media about poor medical care in the prison and described the treatment of Galindo, who had been in solitary confinement since mid-November. During that time, fellow inmates and his mother, who called the prison nearly every day, had warned authorities that Galindo needed daily medication for epilepsy and was suffering from severe seizures in the “security housing unit,” which the inmates call the “hole.”

I arrived in Pecos on February 2, shortly after the second riot broke out. I had driven 200 miles east from El Paso through the northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.

Pecos is the seat of Reeves County in “far west” Texas and home to what the prison giant GEO Group calls “the largest detention/correctional facility under private management in the world.” The prison, a sprawling complex surrounded by forbidding perimeter fences on the town’s deserted southwest edge, holds up to 3,700 prisoners. Almost all are serving time in federal lockup before being deported and are what the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security (DHS) call “criminal aliens.”

Although the term “criminal aliens” has no precise definition, its broadening use reflects a trend in dealing with immigrants. …

You can read the rest here.

Prison has long been big business. Nowhere, it seems, is it bigger in America than in the newly burgeoning immigration prison system.

Terry Gross interviewed Tom Barry on Fresh Air on Thursday for a radio version of the story.