Reply #10: Old news. Time to fill 'em up!!!

[Karenina]

The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, 2002

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.php

It was a shaky spring for the correctional workers of Hastings, Nebraska (pop. 24,064), as the stagnation in the nation's prison population and the increasingly high costs of incarceration jostled the sleepy town, some two hours' drive from Lincoln. On April 9, the 84 employees of the Hastings Correctional Center were told that the 186-bed facility would be closing at the end of June. State funds were scraping bottom, and the $2.5 million annual price tag for the prison was too big a burden to carry. "We really didn't know what we would do," says Jim Morgan, who had been working at HCC for 15 years and lives to this day in the house where he was born. "There aren't a lot of job opportunities out here, and most of us have homes and kids and couldn't even think about moving somewhere else." For two months, the workers scrambled, filling out applications at nearby meatpacking and cardboard-container plants and anticipating long hours in the unemployment office.

Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.

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Immigrant Incarceration Booms

Quite the contrary. The number of INS detainees—people being held administratively as they await the outcome of deportation proceedings—tripled since 1994, from an average daily population of 5532 to nearly 20,000 last year. Some have been apprehended at the border, others nabbed for staying in the country without documents, and still others have completed prison sentences for crimes that have made them deportable. On any given day, the INS holds about 4500 of them in facilities the agency runs itself, while some 2000—many of them asylum seekers—languish in private lockups under contract with the INS. Some 10,000 are farmed out to county and state prisons. For the INS, that's still not enough. The proposed $6.3 billion budget for fiscal 2003 slates more than $50 million for the "construction of detention facilities."

<snip>

Bidding Wars

Advocates are watching uneasily as the government increasingly courts the private prison operators. They worry about bidding wars among potential jailers, who might be willing to further cut services to detainees in exchange for contracts. Many state and local providers, the advocates charge, already fail to meet the INS's own weak detention standards.

"We have already seen how destructively the profit motive can undermine justice," says Matt Wilch, director of asylum and immigration concerns at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. "We've seen that trying to keep costs low means setting up in isolated, rural areas, far from attorneys and support networks; avoiding expenses for special medical or dietary needs; attracting low-wage employees who aren't sufficiently professional."