Tuesday, October 25, 2011

CCA Being Sued Over Sexual Assault of Immigrants

The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CCA on behalf of three women who were sexually abused at the T. Don Hutto Immigration Detention Center.  The facility was previously the target of a lawsuit that CCA lost over squalid conditions and negligent medical care; after the lawsuit, the facility was transitioned to a female-only prison.  Before, it had housed entire families of immigrants, including children who were forced to dress in prison scrubs and provided with the barest minimum of education and programming.  Converting the facility to female-only has not stopped the problem however, and this is not even the first instance of sexual abuse of immigrants AT THIS PRISON.

To allow CCA to continue to operate this, and other, facilities is a reprehensible moral failure.  We as a nation have an obligation to our fellow human beings, these immigrants, many of whom come to this country seeking asylum from their homelands, to treat them respectfully and humanely.  Despite all the rampant anti-immigrant settlement sweeping the nation, many of the 400,000+ people who pass through ICE custody each year are only guilty of status violations, not a major criminal offense.  Private prison companies are quite efficient at avoiding effective oversight (which is about the only thing they're efficient at), a situation which has permitted companies like CCA to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from taxpayer dollars while systematically abusing and neglecting the human beings in their care.

This is Why I Hate CCA.

3 comments:

  1. Boy, are you misinformed....The public cost in not incarcerating criminals (yes, illegal aliens are criminals de facto, hence the name) is not even a number one could comprehend. Even with all the people incarcerated (read: temporarily detained by CCA, GEO, etc.), we still have vagrants at gas stations, 7-11s, and street corners everywhere. Dope pushers still manage to "survive." Child molesters multiply like flies, and illegals are everywhere. I hope more contracts are awarded to civilian entities to operate these needed facilities. This week alone, drunk drivers (a crime last time I checked) have killed nearly a dozen people in my area. You should clean up your mind and get the "ex-con" attitude purged.

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    1. what of our $70 billion correctional system do you not consider a "public cost?" Besides, many would argue that the proliferation of the criminal justice system and the prison population in particular have accelerated urban decline, and nearly every expert who has studied the incarceration rate as it relates to crime rates has found no correlation between the two.

      Do you really think spending more than $100 per day to incarcerate an immigration detainee is money well-spent? and if you must put them under criminal justice supervision, why not just have them all wear electronic monitoring devices, which cost in the area of $8-10 per person per day, and have as high, if not higher, success rate in getting people to show up for deportation proceedings?

      as long as there's a profit incentive in locking people up, we will just continue to incarcerate everyone until we're all behind bars

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    2. or I guess you just don't care that people are subject to sexual assaults and other abuses at higher rates in these private prisons? does that not matter to you?

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