Another Town, A Different Prison

About 1,500 miles south of Hardin in Karnes County, Texas, you find a very different story.

Last year, the county agreed to let a private prison company build a new 600-bed immigrant detention center there. It wasn’t a tough vote because the company, GEO Group, already had one facility in Karnes County it built in 1998.

“They have been tremendous corporate partners with the county and the people here in Karnes County,” former Karnes County Judge Alger Kendall says.

Each year, Kendall says, GEO Group gives the county $4,000 for school scholarships and $6,000 for maintenance and upkeep of the city’s courthouse.

GEO Group also gives money to the local Rotary Club, Toys for Tots, the Little League, Relay for Life and other local organizations and events, he says. And the people who work at the facility also help feed the local economy.

“I mean, that employment translates into other money being spent in the county,” he says.

When the detention center is complete, Karnes County is banking on 140 new jobs and $150,000 in tax revenue.

re: Minnecci v. Pollard

and I can sing allllll them songs bout Texas ….

nprfreshair:

Lyndon Johnson Watches the Apollo 11 Liftoff (by NASA on The Commons)

(via fuckyeahtx)

county line - cass mccombs

Ironically, it’s the federal and state criminal justice systems that produce the private prisons phenomenon and create the opportunity for private operators to capitalize. What they are capitalizing on is America’s obsession with handing out long prison sentences out of all proportion to the crimes committed.

Today, the United States has locked up more prisoners than any other country in the world - 2.3 million-plus people locked up in state and federal prisons and county jails. This has predictably resulted in a shortage of publicly owned prison beds - a shortage increasingly being filled by companies that charge so many dollars for each convict sent their way.

Detainees include immigrants who have applied for asylum in the US and others awaiting hearings before being deported. The number of people detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the sprawling Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the average detention is about one month, although some detainees are kept for years. The cost of detention is estimated to be $1.7 billion annually.

In the past five years, the nation’s largest private prison company has partnered with the federal government to detain close to a million undocumented people waiting to be deported or to appear before an immigration judge.

…

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas and El Paso co-counsel Mike Torres and Leon Schydlower filed a lawsuit on behalf of the survivors of Jesus Manuel Galindo. Named as defendants were the federal government and the GEO Group, the administrator of the West Texas for-profit prison where Galindo, 32, died on December 12, 2008, after suffering a seizure in solitary confinement where he had been placed for complaining about the facility’s failure to provide him medication to control his epileptic seizures.

At least nine immigrant prisoners have died in the Reeves County Detention Center in the last five years. The GEO Group has had at least six facilities in Texas shuttered or contracts canceled. The state of Idaho pulled its inmates from the Dickens County Correctional Center in the spring of 2007 in the wake of the suicide of inmate Scot Noble Payne and a subsequent investigation into “squalid” conditions at the lockup. Idaho also cut its contract with the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas, after the 2008 suicide of Randy McCullough. In October 2007, the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center was shuttered by the Texas Youth Commission after a damning investigation into conditions at the youth detention center.

Despite that record - ironically, on the very day the lawsuit was filed - the company was awarded a contract by ICE to operate a new 600-bed “civil” detention center in Karnes County, Texas. Texas has more for-profit prisons than any other state.

In another case, a former immigration detention guard was convicted of sexually abusing female detainees in the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, near Austin, Texas, which is managed by CCA. The resident supervisor, Donald Dunn, 30, was charged with three counts of official oppression and two counts of unlawful restraint, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

The ACLU said CCA officials were violating policy by allowing female immigration detainees to be isolated with male staff members. After an ACLU investigation into sexual abuse at the Hutto facility, Vanita Gupta, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the charges show additional need for reform.

Management and Training Corporation employees were met early Wednesday, June 29th, by a group of angry community members- largely composed of Anarchists. Activist’s beds were left vacant during the wee hours of the morning in preparation for a protest taking place in Centerville, Utah where MTC corporate headquarters are located. The protest focused both on the prison industrial complex and recent legislative efforts to normalize racism through oppressive laws.

Management and Training Corporation is the third largest private prison company in the country and gave campaign contributions to Russell Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s immigration law SB1070. MTC also runs the largest immigration detention in the country, the Willacy Processing Center in Raymondville, Texas, where they profit off each of the inmates that house the 2,000 beds in the “tent city.” The Willacy Processing Center is only one of 20 prisons operated nationwide by the MTC. MTC also received an astounding $121 million contract with the federal government for the soon-to-be-expanded Dalby Correctional Facility in Post, Texas.

The prison system in the US is a direct extension of slavery. It maintains white supremacy and incarcerates people of color at astronomically higher rates than their white counter-parts. The Prison Industrial Complex compliments capitalism by profiting off the criminalization and caging of women, queers, people of color, and the poor by ensuring their oppression and exploitation behind bars or outside, where they are threatened daily by the violent police.

Numerous corporations profit from exploiting cheap labor, ensuring that workers have no rights and cycled constantly across borders and through prisons where even more corporations profit in the inter-connected Prison Industrial Complex and Border Industrial Complex. The newest wave of prison profiteering is reliant on anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation such as SB1070 in Arizona, and proposed bills HB497 and HB116 in Utah. MTC is a key player in the industry that profits on average $200 a day from each detainee that fills the 150,000 prison beds nationwide that are designated for immigrants. This lucrative industry depends on government contracts and deportations, which are at an all-time high totaling close to 400,000 in 2010.

Protesters brought the following two demands to the MTC:

Firstly, close all their prisons, starting with the Willacy processing center in Raymondville, Texas (the largest immigration facility in the country). Second, take the $121 million from their U.S. Government contract and and pay retributions to the the communities that are being impoverished in Mexico by NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). Stories of deportation and detention were read loudly in the office to make the prison profiteers confront the voices that they silence. Protesters were escorted out of the office but were met by supportive motorists and neighboring business who were more receptive to their message. One passerby stopped and profusely thanked protesters for being there. Protesters carried banners and chanted slogans in opposition to the Prison Industrial Complex and the Border Industrial Complex. Signs read as follows: “No Borders, No Prisons”, “No one is illegal, No one is criminal” ,“Abolish Prisons” ,“Management and Training Corporation Funds

Racist Legislation” and “Management and Training Corporation (MTC) Profits From Destroying Families.”

For more information on future actions, please contact: slabc@riseup.net

fuckyeahtx:

fritopie:

Brisket

Brisket: What Texans name their dog.

WORD.

Enlace, in partnership with community groups and unions across the US, is calling on all public and private institutions to divest their holdings in Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, America’s largest private prison corporations which have profited from billions in taxpayer money.

oin Texans United for Families (TUFF) for a national day of action to protest the private prison industry’s role in the immigration detention system and in writing unjust legislation such as Arizona’s SB 1070. Stand with us as we gather outside of the Wells Fargo on 111 Congress Ave. and demand that Wells Fargo divest from the private prison/detention industry.

Wells Fargo is one of the TOP FIVE investors in the private prison corporation the GEO Group and has profited from the GEO Group’s lobbying efforts geared towards increasing the incarceration and dehumanization of people of color and migrants.

We are calling on Wells Fargo to divest their holdings in the GEO Group and to end their support of the construction of a new immigration detention center operated by the GEO Group in Karnes County, TX.