Private Prison as Stimulus

[Change.org's Criminal Justice blogger Matt Kelley guest blogs here today about the consequences of privatization and proliferation of immigration detention.  Check out Matt's blog today for my guest post there about the DREAM Act. - DB]

Cities and towns from coast to coast are struggling to stay afloat in this recession and they're grasping for any new industry that will move to town  - including one that profits from locking up immigrants, private prisons. It's sad that the warehousing of immigrants is one of few stable industries in the United States today, but it'll stay that way as long a cycle of profit surrounds our immigration policy.

Local governments are tripping over one another to get a piece of the private prison pie. Two news stories this week - from Baldwin County, Georgia and Morton, Mississippi - make plain the unapologetic drive of municipal governments to become prison towns to create jobs and industry when manufacturing and other industries are dying and moving away. The destructive immigration policies that siphon thousands of people into these prisons are viewed as nothing more than fodder in an economic machine.

It doesn't have to be this way. Instead of locking up undocumented immigrants, we could focus on enabling hard-working people to pursue their dreams and stimulate the economy through work and innovation rather than through prison profits.

Today on the Criminal Justice blog, Dave Bennion writes about the promise of the DREAM Act, which - as you know - would allow undocumented immigrants to pursue legal status through college education or military service. Passage of the DREAM Act would be a big step in the right direction, for an America that should allow us to pursue our personal and professional goals. But until progressive reforms like this take root, we're dangling the American Dream before the eyes of millions, only to divert them to being warehoused in our private prisons, working and living for someone else's profit.

There's a feedback loop that fills these facilities for private profit. Right now, big private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO lobby the government to maintain strict immigrations laws that will keep their prison beds filled. Congresspersons don't want to let down constituents in Baldwin County and Morton, so they vote for stricter immigration policies and further privatization. The community most directly affected by this warehousing of human lives doesn't vote, so they're left out of the loop altogether.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are detained in these prisons for countless reasons - many of them unfounded or simply mistakes. While undocumented immigrants can't legally work on the outside, they can work in private prisons - for a dollar a day while the prison corporation profits from their labor.  Conditions are poorly regulated and solitary confinement is common. A man in a GEO Group prison in Texas died last year after spending a full year in isolation.

Just like in the criminal justice system that has relied on incarceration for three decades and has failed to address crime, ever-expanding raids and private prisons aren't a solution for immigration. There's so much to gain by shifting the focus from mass incarceration to a path to legal status. But until the profit is cut from the equation, it'll be a hard fight to win.