Private Prison Companies Happy with Obama

The nation's two biggest private prison management companies are pretty happy with the signs they're seeing from the new President.

A column in The American Prospect this week by Business of Detention co-authors Renee Feltz and Stokely Baksh reviews the massive expansion of immigrant detention under the Bush Administration and questions whether President Obama is committed to changing things.

In 2006, the Bush administration began to encourage local law enforcement to help federal immigration authorities apprehend "criminal aliens." The Obama administration has responded to criticism of the program by touting Secure Communities, a new initiative that supporters say will be more focused in its pursuit of undocumented immigrants with felony records. However, there is growing concern among immigrants' rights activists that this new program has begun to veer off course as well.

Obama's strategy lies in Secure Communities and the focus on deporting people with criminal records. But Feltz and Baksh point out that the database isn't too discerning.

The National Immigration Law Center's immigration policy director, Joan Friedland, says Secure Communities has a "deceptively benign appearance." The database, she notes, could punish both guilty and innocent immigrants and fails to distinguish "why they were arrested and whether or not their arrests were based on racial or ethnic profiling or were just a pretext for checking immigration status."

And whether it's Bush's lockup or Obama's lockup, the private prison companies are loving it. Most people detained for allegedly entering the country illegally are held in privately run facilites. Most of those facilities are managed by the Corrections Corporation of America or the GEO Group. CEOs of both companies told investors recently that the the outlook is good for growth of federal detention.

"We believe ... ICE will continue providing meaningful opportunity for the industry foe the foreseeable future," CCA Presorent Damon Hininger told investors on a recent conference call.

I agree that deporting people convicted of violent crimes is more important than deporting moms who work 60 hour weeks to feed their kids. But I worry about the slippery slope when we start deporting people who  are simply arrested or accused of a crime - those policies fuel the perpetuation of broken law enforcement and detention practices without real reform. Feltz and Baksh sum it up well by looking to next week:

Obama should keep this in mind when he meets with his Cabinet on June 8 to discuss comprehensive immigration-reform proposals. Putting enforcement before reform doesn't address what to do with an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and it would be too cumbersome and costly to deport all of them, not to mention a humanitarian and public-relations fiasco. As (North Carolina Rep. David) Price says, "The best-designed enforcement program in the world can't carry out comprehensive immigration reform."