Immigrant Detention

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Incarcerated Women in California Pen Open Letter Against GEO Group’s New Private Prison

In April, The Bakersfield Californian reported that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) signed a contract with private prison company GEO Group to re-open and operate a women’s facility in Mcfarland, California.

GEO Group will own and operate the 260-bed facility and is expected to make around $9 million per year at full occupancy. Unfortunately, due to the lack of public access to private prison contracts, most of the details are unknown.

This week, a group of ten female prisoners from the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) and the California Institution for Women (CIW) have written an open letter calling on “California state legislators to direct CDCR to cancel the contract with GEO and implement existing release programs instead of opening a new prison!”

The women write that they are being “shuffled around without regard for our well-being or our human rights” due to overcrowding. They note that CCWF’s facility is currently operating at 185% capacity, and as a result, prisoners’ access to critical services such as food and healthcare have declined.

They are concerned, however, that this move by the state will not positively impact its mass incarceration problem, and women transferred to GEO Group’s new facility might not see their treatment improve.

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8,021 Comments Posted on All Posts, Immigrant Detention, Privatization

Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform Fights to Bring Out-of-State Inmates Home From Private Prisons

Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform’s Suzi Wizowaty joined VT Dept. of Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito for an excellent talk on Vermont Public Radio about the use of out-of-state prison transfers to reduce prison overcrowding, and the impact it has on inmates, their communities and mass incarceration.

Vermont currently sends over 500 prisoners to private facilities run by Corrections Corp. of America as far away as Kentucky (approx. 765 miles away) and Arizona (approx. 2,162 miles away). But the evidence suggests that these transfers can be devastating to prisoners, who experience further isolation and find it more difficult to maintain meaningful contact with their communities.

Some might rightfully ask that, if advocates oppose a state’s plans to send prisoners elsewhere to reduce overcrowding, does that mean we need to build more prisons at home? Where will all those prisoners be ‘kept?’ Wizowaty avoids this trap and makes clear she does not advocate new facilities. Indeed, the solution to overcrowding is not to send prisoners out of state or build more prisons, but to focus on means of actually reducing the number of people the state imprisons, returning them society. But under this policy of exile, prisoners, families and communities lose, and the prison industrial complex wins.

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11,513 Comments Posted on All Posts, Immigrant Detention, Privatization

MuckRock’s “Private Prison Project” and the Need for Transparency

MuckRock announces "Private Prison Project." Here's why it's so badly needed.

MuckRock announces “Private Prison Project.” Here’s why it’s so badly needed.

Last week, Muckrock.com announced it was launching the Private Prison Project: a long-term investigation of the use of for-profit prison companies to accommodate America’s exploding incarceration rate.

According to the website, which helps the public through the process of filing records requests to government agencies, the first step of the Private Prison Project will be to focus on the procurement and execution of private prison contracts:

We’re beginning our inquiry by requesting the contracts that every state has with private correctional prisons and the required corresponding contract monitoring reports. New Mexico has successfully issued fines due to breaches of contract, and it’s likely many others can do the same. We’re after the marketing materials these companies provided and the bids they placed; a questionable study done by Temple University, in part founded by the private prison corporations the study supports, argues that competition between these corporations is a good thing, but monopolies and single bid contracts are not uncommon.

Public disclosure is not just a powerful tool for reform, it’s an essential democratic right that applies to private prison contractors as much as it does the government that hired them to take over some of their work. Incarceration is inherently the duty of government, and just as we expect transparency in government, we should expect transparency from contractors that use taxpayer money to provide identical functions to that government.

If MuckRock is successful, public disclosure would remove the shroud of secrecy that allows private prisons to avoid public scrutiny and resist reform.

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