by Jeremy Leaming
The failed “war on drugs” certainly helped the proliferation of for-profit prisons, but the federal government’s increasing reliance on many of the same companies to detain undocumented immigrants and others awaiting court resolutions is not only furthering private prison profits but the need for mass incarceration, a new report from The Sentencing Project reveals.
In “Dollars and Detainees: The Growth of For-Profit Prisons,” Cody Mason, a program associate for The Sentencing Project, repo
rts that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) have turned to for-profit companies to detainee individuals while the courts decide their fates. ICE detains undocumented immigrants and the USMS, among other things, holds “all federal detainees from the time they enter federal custody until they are either acquitted or convicted,” Mason writes.
Both of those entities, Mason explains jump-started the for-profit prison industry. ICE’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service first contracted in 1987 with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Today CCA and the GEO Group are the nation’s “largest private prison companies.”
Mason’s report shows that from 2002 – 2011 ICE detainees in private facilities jumped by 208 percent and the number of USMS detainees in for-profit facilities rose by 355 percent.
“In contrast there was respective growth of 28 percent and 67 percent in the number of state and federal prisoners held in private facilities. As a result, the combined population of privately-held ICE and USMS detainees nearly equaled the number of federal prisoners in private facilities in 2010,” Mason writes.
ICE’s increased use of private detention facilities, not surprisingly, provided a big boost to the prison companies’ profits, a $5 billion industry. Mason notes that the private detention centers are run by “many of the same companies that own and manage private prisons, and that it is common for these facilities to house detainees for ICE and USMS alongside persons sentenced for criminal convictions.”
our criminal justice system, noting that two laws enacted in the late 1980s created “hefty mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including mandatory penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were the harshest ever adopted for low-level drug offenses.”
In the midst of often rancorous debate on Capitol Hill, growing bipartisanship is developing in an area that many would have thought extremely unlikely: criminal justice reform. Just last week legislation to establish a national commission to examine the criminal justice system was introduced in the House by the unlikely mix of liberal Democrats William Delahunt and Marcia Fudge along with conservative Republicans Darrell Issa and Tom Rooney. The legislation mirrors a bipartisan bill, introduced by Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA), passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year. At the time of the bill's introduction, Sen. Webb wrote, "With so many of our citizens in prison compared to the rest of the world, there are only two possibilities. Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different - and vastly counterproductive. Obviously, the answer is the latter."