How Private Prisons Game the Immigration System

http://www.thenation.com/article/173120/how-private-prisons-game-immigration-system


Heat rises from the border road as a Border Patrol agent sits at an observation point along the international border separating San Luis, Arizona, from San Luis, Sonora, Mexico. (AP Photo/Matt York) - See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/173120/how-private-prisons-game-immigration-system#sthash.NRVl3EpI.dpuf

Thirty years ago in January, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now the biggest operator of private prisons in the world, opened its first prison, a federal immigrant detention center in Houston, Texas. Three Decades of Service to America, a page on the company’s website, features a video interview with the company’s founders looking back on that first contract. “We saw this big ol’ sign, ‘Olympic Motel,’ made an offer to lease the motel for four months,” recalls Don Hutto, who chuckles with fellow co-founder Tom Beasley, the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, as they remember hastily converting the building and staffing it with family members. The night of Super Bowl Sunday, “we got our first day’s pay for eighty-seven undocumented aliens,” says Hutto, who even fingerprinted the inmates himself. -



Three years after the company’s first contract in 1983, according to Southern Changes magazine, the company spent some $100,000 lobbying the state of Tennessee to secure a correctional facility privatization bill, which helped propel the business to financial success. Last year, the company brought in $1.7 billion in revenues, about a quarter of which came from contracts with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and federal Bureau of Prisons to incarcerate non-citizens in the United States.
?
For a company that began and later thrived by imprisoning immigrants, the federal immigration policy overhaul expected this year presents both opportunities and challenges. - See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/173120/how-private-prisons-game-immigration-system#sthash.NRVl3EpI.dpuf