A Death in Texas: Profits, Poverty, and Immigration Converge

County Clerk
Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside the
small West Texas town of Pecos. "The prison is burning again," she
announced.

The Reeves County Detention Complex burns on the morning of February 2, 2009. Photo: Tom Barry.

About a month and a half before, on December 12, 2008, inmates had
rioted to protest the death of one of their own, Jesus Manuel Galindo,
32. When Galindo's body was removed from the prison in what looked to
them like a large black trash bag, they set fire to the recreational
center and occupied the exercise yard overnight. Using smuggled cell
phones, they told worried family members and the media about poor
medical care in the prison and described the treatment of Galindo, who
had been in solitary confinement since mid-November. During that time,
fellow inmates and his mother, who called the prison nearly every day,
had warned authorities that Galindo needed daily medication for
epilepsy and was suffering from severe seizures in the "security
housing unit," which the inmates call the "hole."

I arrived in Pecos on February 2, shortly after the second riot
broke out. I had driven 200 miles east from El Paso through the
northern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert.

Pecos is the seat of Reeves County in "far west" Texas and home to
what the prison giant GEO Group calls "the largest
detention/correctional facility under private management in the world."
The prison, a sprawling complex surrounded by forbidding perimeter
fences on the town's deserted southwest edge, holds up to 3,700
prisoners. Almost all are serving time in federal lockup before being
deported and are what the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland
Security (DHS) call "criminal aliens."

Although the term "criminal aliens" has no precise definition, its
broadening use reflects a trend in dealing with immigrants. With the
post-9/11 creation of DHS and its two agencies—Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—a wide sector
of aliens increasingly became the focus of joint efforts by immigration
and law enforcement officers. ICE's Criminal Alien Program, working
with local police, began targeting for deportation both legal and
illegal immigrants with criminal records. And CBP's Border Patrol began
to turn over illegal border crossers to the justice system for criminal
prosecution, instead of, as in the past, simply deporting them. Many
criminal aliens are long-term legal residents of the United States and
are also the parents, children, or siblings of U.S. citizens and lawful
residents.

Jesus Manuel Galindo and his son. Photo: Tom Barry.

When the prison started burning again I was in the County Clerk's
office tracking down the agreements, contracts, and subcontracts that
establish the paper foundation of the Reeves County Detention Complex,
the oldest county-owned immigrant prison, constructed as a speculative
venture and opened in 1988. Over the past eight years, immigration
prisons such as Reeves have boomed along the border in Texas, New
Mexico, and Arizona. Some hold ICE detainees, some U.S. Marshals
Service (USMS) detainees, and others, like the one in Reeves, prisoners
of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). But in the nine months I
traveled along the Southwest border visiting eleven prison towns, all
the prisons I saw had two common features: they were managed and
operated by private-prison corporations—including two of the world's
largest, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO—and they were
located in remote, rural areas, invariably described by locals as being
"in the middle of nowhere."

These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment
in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by
local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly
financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities.
Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these
prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison
consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development
tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The
possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned.

Sirens blared outside the Complex as an array of law enforcement
forces—county deputies, city police, Border Patrol agents, state
police, and GEO's own security guards—rushed toward it. Inmates had set
fire to a housing unit this time. David Galindo, Jesus' brother, told a reporter,
"They're afraid somebody might die there again." According to one
inmate, jailors placed a detainee, 25-year-old Ramon Garcia, in
solitary confinement after he complained of dizziness and feeling ill.
"All we wanted was for them to give him medical care and because they
didn't, things got out of control and people started fires in several
offices," said the inmate, who declined to give his name for fear of
reprisals by officials.

As smoke billowed up from the prison on that early February
morning, officials and staff at the county building expressed more
resentment than concern. Florez complained that the inmates can count
on three meals a day and a television to watch while they idle their
time away. Not to mention that their rent and electricity bills get
paid, while Pecos residents have to work every day to make ends meet.
(In September 2009 the unemployment rate in Reeves County—whose 13,300
residents have a per capita income of $10,800 a year—topped 14%.)
Others worried for the jobs of more than 400 county residents who
worked at the prison and the cost of repairing the damaged buildings.

"You can be sure that we will be paying for it," lamented one county employee.

• • •

The Pecos of the mythical Pecos Bill and the "Home of the World's
First Rodeo" was a famous cowboy crossroads where the Pecos River met
the Butterfield Route, Chisholm Trail, and Loving-Goodnight Trail. In
the late 1800s, rowdy saloons began giving way to more wholesome
establishments and hotels, and Pecos became a major transportation hub
with the arrival of the Texas and Pacific Railroad. For almost a
century, a progression of railway men, cotton farmers, ranchers, oil
riggers, wildcatters, and B-1 pilots filled the streets.

But the oil riggers and wildcatters began leaving town in the early
1980s. Except for the county courthouse, the sheriff's office, and a
few remaining retail stores, downtown Pecos is now dead. The old
railway depots are shut down; the Santa Fe depot was sold off for its
aged bricks and timber to a steakhouse in Odessa, an hour down the
interstate. With the railroad companies long since gone and ranching,
cotton, and oil booms collapsing, Pecos is valued today not as a
transportation and distribution center but rather for its isolation and
economic desperation.

Pecos was once a busy crossroads and hub of industry. Today, the downtown is dead. Photo: Tom Barry.

Debbie Thomas, curator of the West of the Pecos Museum (commonly
known as the cowboy museum), sighs when asked about the town's only
steady business over the past two decades. "Well, we don't want to be
known as a prison town, but it's better than being a ghost town," she
says. In 1985 Reeves County became the first of a few dozen Texas
counties to get into the speculative prison business, when Judge Jimmy
Galindo (no relation to Jesus Manuel Galindo) persuaded the County
Commissioners Court to take a bold step for Pecos's economic future. At
the time, Judge Galindo and other county leaders argued that Pecos
could cash in on the surge in incarceration rates that accompanied the
war on drugs. Years later, for the prison's two expansions, the county
and the private operators would rely on the federal government to send
them immigrant inmates.

Indeed, immigrant detention has been central to the growth of the
"privates" for more than two decades. The Immigration and
Naturalization Service's (INS) 1983 decision to outsource immigrant
detention to the newly established Corrections Corporation of America
gave birth to the private-prison industry; GEO Group (formerly
Wackenhut) got its start imprisoning immigrants in the late 1980s.

While the nation's nonimmigrant prison population has recently
leveled off, the number of immigrants in ICE (formerly INS) detention
has increased fivefold since the mid-1990s, and continues year after
year to reach record highs. Assuming current trends hold, ICE will
detain more than 400,000 immigrants in 2009.

The federal government's escalating demand for immigrant prison
beds saved CCA and other privates that had overbuilt speculative
prisons. Over the past eight years, the prison giants CCA ($1.6 billion
in annual revenue) and GEO Group ($1.1 billion) have racked up record
profits, with jumps in revenue and profits roughly paralleling the
rising numbers of detained immigrants.

Initially, most speculative prisons were privately owned, a case of
the federal government outsourcing its responsibilities. But prison
outsourcing is rarely that simple anymore. The private-prison industry
increasingly works with local governments to establish and operate
speculative prisons. Prison-town officials have a mantra: "If you build
a prison the prisoners will come."

Most of the time, these public-private prisons are speculative
ventures only for bondholders and local governments, because agreements
signed with federal agencies do not guarantee prisoners. For the
privates, risks are low and the rewards large. Usually paid a set fee
by local governments to operate prisons, management companies have no
capital investment and lose little, other than hefty monthly fees, if
inmate flows from the federal government decline or stop.

Prisons are owned by local governments, but local oversight of
finances is rare, and the condition of prisoners is often ignored.
Inmates such as those in Pecos are technically in the custody of the
federal government, but they are in fact in the custody of corporations
with little or no federal supervision. So labyrinthine are the
contracting and financing arrangements that there are no clear pathways
to determine responsibility and accountability. Yet every contract
provides an obvious and unimpeded flow of money to the private industry
and consultants.

In the case of immigration prisons, BOP, USMS, and ICE sign
intergovernmental agreements and contracts with local governments,
generally in remote, economically deprived communities. A prison
consultancy such as Innovative Government Strategies (IGS), a
Texas-based firm that specializes in selling private-prison projects to
rural governments, coordinates the deal.

Most often, a team of private-prison intermediaries—bond brokers,
design and construction firms, law firms—are brought together by the
consultancy, which is fronting for a prison-management consultancy. The
consultant and these private clients plant the idea of prison-led
development with one or two key community officials, and then wine,
dine, and fly them around to other prisons to sell and seal the deal.
The lead official promotes the project in the community as his or her
brainchild.

Once other county commissioners are also persuaded by the grand
promises of prison-led development, the county commission sets up a
paper "public facility corporation" for the sole purpose of issuing
so-called project revenue bonds—secured not by the general revenues of
the issuing government but by those from the bond-financed project—to
fund the prison. This corporation then leases the project back to the
county government, which signs an agreement with a federal agency that
authorizes it to hold federal prisoners. The county, in turn,
subcontracts the responsibility for managing and operating to the
private-prison firm represented by the consultant. In many cases the
rural government also subcontracts responsibility for medical services
to a provider specializing in "correctional health services."

Project revenues are the per diems paid by the feds—BOP, USMS, or
ICE—or by the corrections departments of the state governments. In the
case of ICE, these per diems now average $87 for every "man day." But
since the bondholders own the prison, the payments go not to the county
but to a trustee established to manage the payments to the bondholders
and all other parties in the prison project—county, consultants,
builders, and prison operator.

County governments see a new revenue stream from the federal per
diem—usually a mere $1-2 a day per inmate, depending on the terms of
the agreement with the prison operator—but only after the bondholders
and private operator have been paid. The privates receive hefty
operating fees (normally $500,000-$750,000 a month) and salaries for
their administrative team of wardens and assistants, while assuming
none of the capital, operating, or maintenance costs. Because the
prisons are public facilities, communities receive no property or sales
tax revenue (from construction and maintenance) but are expected to
provide the water and sewage services.

In Hudspeth County, Texas Judge Becky Dean-Walker signs the
agreements and contracts that have, since 2003, made Sierra Blanca an
immigrant prison-town. Situated 90 miles from El Paso, Sierra Blanca,
population 650, hosts the West Texas Detention Facility, a 500-bed
immigrant prison with another 500 still-unoccupied beds in three
adjoining structures awaiting overflow. The prison, a public-private
complex, is owned by bondholders until 2025.

In establishing the prison on the edge of town, Hudspeth, where one
in three families survives under the poverty line, incurred a $23.5
million debt in revenue bonds. Six years after the prison opened for
business, the county still has a debt of $21.8 million. According to
the Texas Bond Review Board, the remaining principal on the prison
bonds translates into a per capita debt ratio—debt divided by
population—higher than the county's annual per capita income of $9,549,
which is one of the lowest in the nation.

Emerald Corrections, a Shreveport, Louisiana-based corrections
management company, and its intermediaries promoted the prison as an
economic-development project, promising jobs and income growth. But
only a few locals work at the facility, with most employees bused every
morning from El Paso.

When the bonds mature in 2025, the facility will be a badly
depreciated investment, a community eyesore, and a reminder of the
delusional dreams of prison-based economic development. This is true in
many parts of Texas, such as Encinal, a town even poorer than Sierra
Blanca, with its very own Emerald-operated prison thanks to an
identical arrangement of consultancies, bond brokers, contractors, and
county officials. IGS walked away with a reported $700,000 in consultancy fees.

Bill Addington, who lives within easy sight of the prison in Sierra
Blanca and who opposed the prison proposal, said the prison was
approved by the county without any involvement in or specific knowledge
of the bond agreement or operating agreements. In fact, no one in
county government could find the agreement with USMS or the
bond-issuing statement, or even remember their details.

Hudspeth is hardly alone in this regard. Local governments
typically do not have anyone to keep track of the complex prison
business—a high-finance enterprise involving tens of millions of
dollars in bonds (more than $130 million in Reeves County) and millions
of dollars in annual federal payments. Not only had contracts seemingly
disappeared in the counties I visited, none could locate a full
accounting of prison-related expenses and income.

At a public meeting to consider the proposal for the first
immigrant prison in Otero County, New Mexico, county resident George
Bussing captured the confusion. "I'm smarter than most average bears,"
he said, "but I honestly don't understand what I'm reading here."

Despite dubious benefits to local economies, new prisons continue
to spring up. District Chairman Austin Nuñez of the Tohono O'odham
Nation is planning to use tax-exempt project revenue bonds to finance a
prison for immigrants on tribal land south of Tucson, in the district
of San Xavier. He describes it as an "economic-development project"
that will bring jobs and revenue to this poor Native American community
that spans the U.S.-Mexico border.

IGS is making the necessary arrangements. All the San Xavier
District has to do is sign a contract agreeing to subcontract its
imprisonment authority to a private-prison company.

The same team of private-prison intermediaries that interested the
Tohono O'odham community in prison-based economic development also
enticed a poor community in Montana. Two years after construction—with
most of the bond fund depleted from payouts to the prison consultants,
design and construction firms, and bond underwriters—the prison in
Hardin, Montana stands empty, and the local development authority that
issued the bonds has defaulted and is pleading with the Obama
administration to consider holding Guantanamo Bay detainees there.

There is no paper trail that explains how these speculative prisons
secure federal contracts. But like most scenarios in which public
governance meets private business, the partnerships are usually the
product of connections and influence, highly paid friends in the right
places.

That was the case in 2004 when Judge Galindo overrode the
objections of a Reeves County auditor in his bid to hire Public-Private
Strategies Consulting to represent the interests of the Reeves County
Detention Center to the BOP. The firm's president, Randy DeLay, charged
$120,000 a year plus expenses, but hiring him may have made good
political sense. Randy's famous last name is no coincidence—his brother
Tom, the Texas Republican, was the House majority leader at the time.
Reeves County secured one of four BOP prison contracts for detaining
criminal aliens the following year. Judge Galindo was unequivocal about
Randy DeLay's usefulness, arguing that he was able to get meetings with
people in Washington: "I think it's vital that we have a direct line
into the inner workings," Galindo told the Commissioners Court.

• • •

Though speculative prisons come with no guarantees, all along the
Southwest border—from Florence, Arizona to Raymondville, Texas—business
is good. Since early 2003, the criminal justice and immigration
enforcement systems have merged, breaking the longstanding tradition of
treating immigration violations as administrative offenses and creating
hundreds of thousands of new criminal aliens.

While the growth in immigrant detention is in part due to the
country's increased immigrant population, the shift in immigration
policy away from regulation and toward enforcement, punishment, and
deterrence is more significant. Unwilling to pass a reform bill that
would effectively regulate immigration, Congress and the executive
branch have turned to the criminal justice and penal systems.

New anti-immigrant laws and practices by ICE and CBP subject
immigrants, legal or illegal, to double jeopardy, punishing them twice
for the same offense. In 1996 the Republican majority in Congress led
approval of three anti-immigrant and anti-crime laws that spurred INS
to start cracking down on and deporting immigrants. These laws,
together with the executive branch's increased authority to devise
repressive immigration procedures under the post-9/11 pretext of a war
on terror, have created an enforcement regime in which noncitizen legal
immigrants face immigration consequences (as well as criminal
consequences) for past or present violations of criminal law. In other
words, illegal immigrants and even noncitizen permanent residents may
be jailed and deported for committing crimes or other offenses,
whether violent or not. DHS and the Justice Department are not only
combing the criminal justice system for legal and illegal immigrants to
be detained and deported, but the departments are also working together
to transfer illegal immigrants into federal courts and prisons.

Legal scholars have taken to calling this increasing merger of
criminal and immigration law and the integration of the criminal
justice and immigration systems "crimmigration."

The private-prison industry's executives are particularly upbeat
about new criminal alien programs such as CBP's Operation Streamline
and ICE's Secure Communities. GEO Chairman George Zoley told Wall
Street analysts in a July 2009 investment conference call: "The main
driver for the growth of new beds at the federal level continues to be
the detention and incarceration of criminal aliens." CCA's chief
financial officer, Todd Mullenger, emphasized the importance of
programs such as Operation Streamline to prison profits in a recent
investment conference call:

"Border Patrol has consistently indicated from the
planning stage of the initiative to the present that Operation
Streamline will require additional detainment beds due to increased
prosecution and length of stay anticipated by the initiative."

Operation Streamline was launched in 2005 as a pilot project of the
Del Rio sector of Texas and extends east to the southern Rio Grande
Valley and west to Yuma, Arizona. It is part of a national immigrant
crackdown that CBP and ICE variously call "enhanced enforcement" and
"zero tolerance." The program directs Border Patrol agents to turn
captured illegal border crossers over to the Marshals Service for
prosecution, breaking with the usual practice of simply returning
Mexican immigrants to Mexico or releasing non-Mexican immigrants with
an order to appear in immigration court.

A few mornings each week, detainees pack the federal courtroom in
Del Rio, Texas, where they plead guilty to illegal entry and are
sentenced as criminals. The scene in Judge Dennis Green's chamber is
replicated along much of the border. While the courtroom is quickly
filling, Del Rio's nearby Main Street, which once bustled with shoppers
from Ciudad Acuña across the river, is quiet, lined with empty and
closed stores.

More than four dozen young men and eight young women shuffle into
the courtroom on April 17, 2009, occupying the seats normally reserved
for visitors and family members. Only at the last minute do the
security guards allow me in, after determining that the back row will
not be occupied by the day's crowd of criminal aliens.

The clinking of chains fills the room as the accused are ushered
into their seats. Handcuffed, chained from waist to ankles, they stand
then sit in uniform when ordered by the attending U.S. marshals.

The scene was shocking the first time, but now I have witnessed it
in three courts of justice in the borderlands: shackled immigrants
filling up the courtrooms, and then, after an hour or two, shuffling
out, where they are taken back to USMS detention centers or a BOP
prison. At first I wondered if their laceless running shoes and work
boots, with their tongues hanging loose, were a new style for young
Mexicans. But later I understood that the marshals obligated them to
surrender the laces (as possible weapons or suicide instruments) and
that this, not the chains, explains why they walk without lifting their
feet out of their shoes.

At these mass convictions and sentencings, I was in a small
minority. The judges, the marshals, the lawyers, the security guards,
and me—all white and older, with jobs and homes. And them: criminal
aliens, all young and lean, most with strong arms and calloused hands,
all with black hair and weathered brown skin. These courtrooms are
where the South encounters the North, where the exclusionary
institutions on one side of the global economic divide collide with
collective desperation on the other. The power imbalance, so starkly
visible, is startling.

Before starting the overland journey north—sometimes from as far as
Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—each immigrant understood that he
or she was an economic castoff, marginalized by national and global
economic forces. But each hoped that the United States would be what so
many claim: the land of opportunity, where class and circumstances are
no barrier to economic security, as long as you are willing to work
hard.

Judge Green enters—"All rise," intones the court sergeant at arms,
and the immigrants stand up in unison, following the Spanish-language
echo of their bilingual courtroom manager.

Over the past day or two, each prisoner has told his or her story
in a few minutes to a paralegal who has organized a two-sentence
defense.

Unlike the U.S. criminal justice system, immigration law provides
no guarantees that all accused have the right to a court-appointed
lawyer. Those facing criminal charges in federal court for immigration
violations, however, do get free legal defense, but it is pro forma—a
windfall for many regional attorneys who thrive on government fees for
nominal defense work. The attorney representing the immigrants on April
17 in Del Rio was applauded publicly that day by the sitting judge for
having recently been appointed to take his place on the bench. (Judge
Green's congratulatory comment went untranslated.)

One by one, the defendants are escorted to the front of the court.
A CBP lawyer tells the judge that the accused has crossed the border
between the ports of entry without inspection (violating Title 8 USC
1325) and recounts any previous record of illegal entry or criminal
conviction.

More than 50 individual criminal hearings are streamlined—a
possible explanation of the operation's name—with the same judge, same
public defender, and same outcome: guilty as charged and remanded for
incarceration.

Before each case is heard and before each defendant is sentenced,
Judge Green asks them en masse if they have had time to consult their
attorney, if they have been forced or threatened to plead guilty, if
they have knowingly violated the laws of the United States of America
by crossing without inspection. They reply in a chorus of "Sí" and "No," bringing to mind an elementary school classroom.

Could one gather a group of unfamiliar U.S. citizens and see such cooperation, such compliance?

As each faces the judge, their collective defense attorney reads
from a sheet his assistant has prepared with the abbreviated stories
and pleas for mercy from this mass of immigrants.

No one has more than an eighth-grade education, three out of four
cite medical emergencies, all crossed to seek work and food, and many
hoped to reunite with families that need them. Story after abbreviated
story of fathers, mothers, wives, and children with brain tumors, heart
conditions, crippling accidents, no work, and little to eat.

Judge Green occasionally expresses sympathy, encourages them to
secure a visa the next time they want to come to the United States—a
near impossibility for Latin Americans with no bank accounts and no
property and utterly out of the question for these detainees,
imprisoned and eventually deported for illegal entry—and then asks if
they are guilty of breaking the laws of this country by entering
without permission. One after another they say, "culpable" or "guilty."

Before sentencing, the judge warns those who have never been
previously deported that they will be judged felons if they are caught
in the future. Depending on the time they have already spent in jail,
they are sentenced up to twelve days. Those with a record of previous
illegal crossings get harsher sentences, routinely as much as 180 days
and sometimes several years. Although the charge is always illegal
entry or reentry, the sentence varies based on the number of illegal
entries, whether the charged immigrant has a criminal record, and the
judge's discretion.

The defense attorney and government prosecutors pack up their
papers and leave the courtroom. Any hope on the part of an immigrant
that the judge would find mercy is now dashed. Ordered to stand, the
convicted and sentenced immigrants rise in unison, and, row by row,
exit the courtroom, feet dragging in their laceless shoes. It's back to
the GEO prison from whence they came that morning.

Between apprehension and removal, an unauthorized immigrant who is
criminally prosecuted is technically in the custody of, first, CBP or
ICE, then the Marshals Service, and finally BOP or the Marshals Service
again. Depending on how long it takes ICE to prepare the removal papers
and to present its case before the DOJ's immigration court, immigrants
may spend anywhere from a week to several years in detention before
being deported.

With its staggering administrative, legal, and detention costs,
Operation Streamline is certainly not quick and easy. But Operation
Streamline is less about law than strategy. The idea is that, having
suffered the humiliation of being branded a criminal and spending time
in prison, these immigrants will not come back once deported and will
tell others that the price of immigration is too high. As DHS Secretary
Michael Chertoff explained in 2006, "We are working to get [Operation
Streamline] expanded across other parts of the border" because "it has
a great deterrent effect."

Measured by the number of immigrants apprehended in the Del Rio
sector and others, immigration flows have decreased markedly, although
no one can say to what extent the drop is a result of deterrence as
opposed to recession. But nearly three years after the program's
initiation, immigrants keep crossing the river at Del Rio. What
strategy of deterrence could stop those forced to leave their families
from attempting, even at the risk of increased jail time, to return to
their loved ones back home in the United States?

• • •

Graciela and Jesus Galindo have filed a wrongful death suit on behalf of their son, Jesus Manuel. Photo: Tom Barry.

Jesus Manuel Galindo, a native of Ciudad Juárez, had compelling
reasons to come to the United States. His parents, originally from the
Mexican state of Chihuahua, are both legal U.S. residents. They live in
the border colonia of Anthony, New Mexico, just outside El
Paso. They obtained legal residency for their younger son and daughter,
and were in the process of getting papers for Jesus, their oldest.
According to them, it was easier to get papers for younger children.

Jesus was twice married to legal U.S. residents; his children are American citizens.

In 2006 Jesus was picked up by the police when he had a seizure at
a convenience store. When the deputies checked his records and saw that
he had no legal status, they turned him over to immigration officials.
He was deported to Juárez, where he remained a month or so, determined
to come back to his second wife and children.

According to his mother, Graciela, he had the "mala suerte,"
bad luck, to be caught by the Border Patrol. In the past the Border
Patrol had just sent him back to Juárez. This time, he went first to
the Otero County Prison Facility, and then spent three months in Sierra
Blanca before being sent to Reeves County Detention Complex. Although
he was convicted only of illegal entry, Galindo was sentenced to 30
months under a system of "penalty enhancement" that allows judges to
add time for past crimes—in Galindo's case, writing a hot check (for
which he had already spent time in other Texas prisons) and contacting
his ex-wife in violation of a restraining order—even if prior sentences
were served.

Graciela said he had been working hard at Sierra Blanca in the
laundry trying to reduce his time for good behavior, but it did not
count for anything. He did the same thing at Reeves until prison
administrators told him he could no longer work because of his seizures.

On December 11 he wrote to his mother:

"Don't despair … But tell the investigator [a paralegal
sent by federal public defenders] that I get sick here by being locked
up all by myself. They don't even know and I am all bruised up [from
falling and thrashing during seizures] … Tell the investigator that the
medical care in here is no good and that I'm scared. Well, mom, I love
you very much. I will write you on Monday. Kisses to everyone."

On the morning of December 12, Graciela called the prison to see
how he was. "They didn't want to talk to me. But I kept calling and
then they told me that my son was dead."

El Paso attorney Miguel Torres, who is preparing a wrongful death
suit on behalf of Galindo's wife, three children, and parents, calls
Galindo's death a "quintessentially avoidable tragedy." The suit will
likely be filed against GEO, Reeves County, and Physicians Network
Association (PNA), the contractor responsible for providing medical
services at the complex. According to Torres, both Graciela and fellow
inmates repeatedly urged prison officials to give Galindo his
medication and to get him out of the security housing unit
(SHU)—solitary confinement—where he had been placed for medical
observation in November after an emergency stay at an area hospital due
to a severe seizure. Graciela mailed the prison her son's medical
records, but they sent them back, instructing her not to send them
again.

"The doctor said Jesus had an attitude problem because he was
complaining about the lack of medical treatment that killed him three
days later," Torres told a reporter. "When they found him at 7 a.m., December 12, rigor mortis had set in, which meant he had been dead for three to five hours."

Galindo's father broke down as he discussed the conditions in which his son was kept:

"We don't understand how there can be so little
humanity there in the prison. Animals aren't even treated as badly as
they treated our son, keeping him locked up in the hole so sick and
without any company. It was so cruel, and he died sick and afraid."

In fact, lockdown in the SHU was Reeves's policy for all ailing
inmates. The prison does not have an infirmary. After the riots, BOP
requested that one be built as part of the prison reconstruction and
upgrade. At a public discussion, County Judge Sam Contreras explained
why the $1.8 million outlay was needed: "[The lack of infirmary beds
is] what caused the disturbance—because [prisoners] were placed in the
SHU when they didn't do nothing wrong. They are just sick."

Galindo is not the only casualty of a toxic mix of crackdown
policies and a burgeoning public-private prison complex. At least 104
immigrants have died in ICE custody since 2003. Given the lack of
oversight and legal protections, the gains to be made from
cost-cutting, and the apathy surrounding prisoner well-being, these
deaths are predictable. Indeed, the county awarded the medical care
subcontract to PNA primarily because the medical services provider
boasted that it would reduce the county's expenses by cutting back on
prescriptions, medical tests, and outside medical visits. And in this
regard, according to former Reeves Warden Rudy Franco, PNA did not fail.

• • •

PNA is the brainchild of a Lubbock, Texas physician, Vernon
Farthing. In 1991, after working as a contract doctor for Lubbock's
county jail, Farthing started PNA, which he calls "a leader in
correctional healthcare."

From his base in Lubbock, Farthing oversees operations in dozens of
prisons in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. PNA and prison operator
Management and Training Corporation (MTC) were the subjects of a
federal civil rights investigation into conditions at Santa Fe County
Detention Center, which houses a large population of Native American
inmates. The investigation was sparked by the suicide of pre-trial
inmate Tyson Johnson, who suffered from severe claustrophobia and other
mental illnesses.

In its report the Justice Department specified 52 actions needed
"to rectify the identified deficiencies and to protect the
constitutional rights of the facility's inmates to bring the jail into
compliance with civil rights standards." Thirty-eight of the 52
identified deficiencies related to medical services. According to the
report:

"The Detention Center, through PNA, provides inadequate
medical services in the following areas: intake, screening, and
referral; acute care; emergent care; chronic and prenatal care; and
medication administration and management. As a result, inmates at the
Detention Center with serious medical needs are at risk for harm."

In a story on the investigation, Suzan Garcia, Johnson's mother,
explained that she had tried to contact the jail because she was
concerned about her son's psychological condition. "I called the jail
and asked to speak to a doctor, but they said they didn't have a
doctor," Garcia said. "When I asked to speak to the warden, they just
put me on hold and then the phone would disconnect."

According to the Justice Department's findings and associated
reports, Johnson had asked to see a psychologist, but the 580-inmate
jail did not have one. Johnson was placed in solitary confinement, and
managed to hang himself from a sprinkler head in his windowless cell.

Soon after the Justice Department released the results of its
investigation, PNA pulled out of its subcontract with MTC, claiming it
could not continue because it was losing money. Within a year, MTC
terminated its contract with the county, also claiming it was losing
money.

Three years later, when seeking to renew its Reeves County
contract, PNA submitted what was at best a misleading statement about
its history of providing correctional health care. PNA told the county
commission that it was "proud of its record of no substantiated
grievances in any facility" and that it had "never had a contract
canceled or been removed from a facility."

The riots at Reeves brought PNA's medical services to the attention
of the Austin-based advocacy group Grassroots Leadership as well as the
American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, both of which are now focusing
on reform efforts. When asked about the liability that Reeves County
may face if the inmates take their cases to court, County Attorney Alma
Alvarez said she was not worried, noting that GEO and PNA had recently
secured accreditation for the prison from both the American
Correctional Association (ACA) and the Joint Commission on
Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. After visiting the prison
herself, she said she was confident that the medical care was up to or
above standards. She acknowledged, however, that she never spoke to any
of the inmates about the quality of medical care, only to the
administration.

Concerning the prisoner complaints made during the riots, Alvarez
said, "They want to be media stars. They call the media from their cell
phones and tell these stories because they want to be famous. It's like
they want to be on American Idol."

A framed certificate of achievement from the ACA hangs on the wall
of the prison's lobby. Awarded exactly a month after the December 12
riot, it honors the prison for "the attainment of excellence in adult
correctional care."

Sheriff Andy Gomez said of Galindo's death, "We investigate all the
deaths in the prison, but I can't remember every one." And Gomez summed
up a common sentiment in Reeves County when it comes to prisoners'
grievances about denial of medical attention: "These guys are
criminals," he said. "They need to realize that they are in jail."

• • •

Soon after opening its first immigrant prison, MTC named Otero
County Administrator Ruth Hooser a "Community Supporter of the Year,"
describing her as "The Best of the Best" and placing her among the most
appreciated public officials involved in 11 MTC correctional operations
in the United States, Australia, and Canada. In accepting the award,
Hooser said, "I just kept pushing and helping with whatever they
needed."

County officials play the role of smart economic developers and
prison companies respond with accolades and awards. The mutual
admiration is on display in the waiting rooms of the prisons, where
plaques from local chambers of commerce praising companies' civic
virtues, statements of appreciation from the high school marching band
or football team, and award certificates from the prison operators
plaster the walls. At least in prison towns along the border, there is
nearly universal agreement that the prison business is like any other.

Yet, while most government officials passively accept the
conditions of the prison deals, and hardly anyone harbors moral or
ethical reservations about the business, in some towns, including
Pecos, locals grumble that they should be getting a greater share of
the revenue. In Reeves County, many believe that the county could do a
better job of running the prison than GEO.

"We pay the same management fees and salaries to GEO no matter how
many inmates are out there," said County Treasurer Linda Clark, who
bemoaned the multiple riots and the millions paid GEO. County Auditor
Lynn Owens observed that GEO has never received a merit-based increase
in federal per diem payments, and both officials agreed that the county
should be in charge at the Detention Center.

The prison industry occasionally runs into resident opposition of
the not-in-my-backyard sort. In Otero County, residents of Alamogordo
blocked a proposed GEO immigrant prison because the intended site was
within the city limits. Several years later, a new proposal from MTC
for a USMS immigrant prison 70 miles away on the far south side of the
county was approved by the Otero County Commission with little protest.
The county liked the business—a half-dollar a day per immigrant in the
630-bed prison—so much that it signed on with MTC in 2008 to build an
ICE-fed, 1,100-bed detention center next to the existing prison.

Poverty partly explains the willingness to scrape a couple of
dollars off federal per diem payments and in the process incur massive
bond debt. The prison industry introduces the governments of desperate
communities to what some call "backdoor financing": project revenue
bonds in the tens of millions of dollars that suddenly make them feel
like economic players.

Since funding is provided by project revenue bonds rather than
general obligation bonds, the county faces no direct liability if the
speculative prison fails. "Money for nothing" is a common refrain when
county officers are asked about the advisability of prison deals. This
answer, however, is as naive as it sounds. Even though the bondholders
cannot hold the issuing government responsible if the speculative
prison fails, there are still real costs, as Reeves County is
experiencing. Its overall bond rating was downgraded in 2003 when the
prison expansion went unfilled, and now, as residents and local
officials predicted, the county must cover millions in repairs in the
wake of the prisoner protests.

The full cost of the public-private immigrant prisons that now
litter the Southwest and elsewhere is not yet known. Most counties and
municipalities are still 10-15 years away from paying off the bonds.
But poor rural governments worried that they may have been snookered
into the prison business have some options. Last year Haskell County,
Texas sold its Rolling Plains Regional Jail & Detention Center for
immigrants to the Inland Real Estate Group, a Chicago-based holding
company specializing in shopping malls and government properties.

Beyond the false hopes and corporate greed that build immigrant
prisons, their expansion, like that of other prisons that have
mushroomed across the rural United States, seems fueled by something
both sinister and uniquely American. The growing divide between
citizens and immigrants is only partially responsible for what has
befallen this new class of inmates. A wider sensibility about prisoners
is also at work. The men and women held behind the perimeter fences are
never seen, never discussed. The prison is treated as a waste dump,
similarly placed on the community's edge, where property values are low
and there are no neighbors. The prisoners themselves are society's
refuse, its discards, outcasts, and outsiders who have lost their
membership rights in the human community.

• • •

The United States' high incarceration rate—fives times greater than
the average rate in the rest of the world—is evidence, says Virginia
Democratic Senator Jim Webb, that we are "doing something dramatically
wrong in our criminal justice system." Senator Webb apparently sees no
contradiction in advocating an end to mass incarceration while
supporting legislation calling for increased immigration enforcement and the doubling of immigrant-detention beds.

Since the 1970s crime control has become a central theme in U.S.
politics and society. In the words of Berkeley Law Professor Jonathan
Simon, we are "governing through crime"—isolation and exclusion in an
expansive penal system is the dominant response to tough social
problems. Although the immigrant crackdown raises its own special
concerns, it largely mirrors and merges with the broader wars on drugs
and crime in terms of increasing costs, expanding law enforcement, high
incarceration rates, and dismal cost-benefit ratios. Immigration, a
contentious social issue lacking any easy policy solution, has
similarly been addressed through increased enforcement and
incarceration.

Given that get-tough models are the basis for our current approach
to immigration, it comes as little surprise that, like the war on
crime, the immigrant crackdown has flooded the federal courts with
nonviolent offenders, besieged poor communities, and dramatically
increased the U.S. prison population, while doing little to solve the
problem itself.

Immigrants detained for prosecution often do time in several privately operated prisons before being deported. Photo: Tom Barry.

Enforcement practices like Operation Streamline (and its many
cousins: Operation Jump Start, Operation Return-to-Sender, Operation
Reservation Guaranteed) and such absurdities as the border wall are not
the partisan initiatives of restrictionist forces in Congress. The
post-9/11 commitments by DHS to "protect America against dangerous
people and goods" and to "restore respect for immigration laws" by
making immigration enforcement and border patrol "consistent" and
"comprehensive" are central to the immigration positions of both major
political parties. Indeed, it has been Democrats, such as U.S.
Representative David Price of North Carolina, who have led the efforts
to extend Operation Streamline and pursue criminal aliens. Visiting Del
Rio, Price, who chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House
Appropriations Committee, gushed, "It's just a great model we need to
put to use everywhere."

But what works for Washington faces opposition in the trenches.
Many of those living on the border are less enthusiastic about a
strategy that turns immigrants seeking work into criminal aliens.
Courts are clogged, the Marshals Service is severely taxed, and some in
the Border Patrol are angered by the idea of sending workers to prison.

"This [criminalization] strategy pretty much has it backward," T. J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council told The Washington Post.
"It's going after desperate people who are crossing the border in
search of a better way of life, instead of going after employers who
are hiring people who have no right to work in this country."

In the same article, Heather Williams, first assistant to the
federal public defender of Arizona, complained about "misdirection of
resources," pointing out that the criminal crackdown on immigrants
diverts attention from real crimes.

Williams also questions the fairness of the program. "[If U.S.
citizens] were placed in any other country on the planet, and had to
resolve a case in a day that could result in being deported and having
a criminal record, we would be outraged, and so would our government,"
she said.

Federal prosecutions for immigration violations have steadily climbed. In June 2009, immigration accounted for 55% of prosecutions.
Sixty-one percent of prosecutions referred to the Justice Department
that month originated at DHS. The judicial districts with the highest
number of prosecutions in June were all on the border: Southern
California, New Mexico, West Texas, South Texas, and Arizona.

Thus far, immigration prosecutions in 2009 outpace those of 2008 by 14%. Prosecutions are up 139% compared to five years ago, 459% compared to 1999, and 973% compared to 1989.

The Obama administration has done nothing to stop this flood of prosecutions or contest the misperception
that immigrants are disproportionately responsible for crime. Instead
it has embraced Secure Communities, a new criminal aliens program;
extended federal-local cooperation in immigration enforcement through
the notorious 287(g) program, which allows DHS to delegate
immigrant-detention authority to local law enforcement; and responded
to alarmist calls about purported spillover violence from drug wars in
Mexico by deploying more U.S. marshals, ICE agents, and federal
prosecutors to the border.

Rather than rejecting the immigration enforcement regime installed
during the Bush administration, Obama has finessed the existing system,
which remains in full effect. Since 2003 the combined budgets of CBP
and ICE have more than doubled, rising from $7.4 billion to $14.9
billion in 2009, with $17.2 billion requested for 2010. Companies such
as CCA and GEO—and their subcontractors, including PNA—will see
continuing profit, as federal immigrant-detention, imprisonment, and
correctional services contracts account for 40% of their revenues.

• • •

Concern for immigrant rights and the deplorable, largely
unregulated conditions at public-private immigrant prisons may lead to
better oversight. This past summer ICE announced
a "major overhaul" of the detention system, including the creation of
an Office of Detention Planning and Policy. However, while committing
the agency to increased oversight of the nearly 400 facilities where
immigrants are held for processing and deportation, ICE Director John
Morton said that the numbers of detainees would not decrease and that
the agency had no plans to end its relationships with its many partners
in state and local government and with prison contractors. Morton
refused to support legally binding and enforceable minimum standards
for immigrant-detention centers, sorely disappointing immigrant-rights
and prison-reform advocates.

Hudspeth County, with a per capita GDP of $9,549, took on a $23.5 million debt in order to build the West Texas Detention Facility. Photo: Tom Barry.

Nor did recent announcements
from DHS include any plan to review the ICE practices that drive the
demand for immigrant prison beds. There is every indication that DHS
will continue to criminalize immigration through ever-more expansive
local-federal cooperation in immigration enforcement and by prosecuting
immigrants twice for crimes, once in criminal court and again in
immigration court. These practices have not only fueled the growth of
the ICE detention system, they have also sparked a dramatic expansion
of USMS and BOP detention regimes, over which DHS exercises no direct
authority. The failure of DHS and the White House to address the full
range of players involved in immigrant detention indicates that the
promised overhaul of the patchwork system will be no such thing.

The Obama administration has deftly deflected ethical arguments
against mass detention with liberal rule-of-law logic. DHS, it argues,
is simply upholding the rule of law by consistently and wholeheartedly
enforcing immigration statutes and securing the border. Rather than
echoing or shadowing the ideological restrictionism of the right, as
the Bush administration did, the Obama administration argues that
enforcement-first immigration policy will establish the political
foundation for immigration reform. But there is no sign yet that the
administration or the Democratic leadership are willing to lead the way
toward durable immigration reform that would address both the future
structure of immigration and the failures of the existing immigration
system.

Such a reform should be based on measurements of how immigration
flows affect existing wages. Armed with these benchmarks, we can
establish how much new immigration is sustainable. The goal is both to
ensure that new immigration will not undermine wages or working
conditions in the U.S. labor force, and, at the same time, to allow
American society and the economy to benefit from regulated flows of
unskilled and skilled labor. Reforms would need to account for
unauthorized immigrants who for many years were tolerated or even
welcomed in the United States. These immigrants and their families have
integrated into this country, and should now be accorded a path to
citizenship.

As the immigrant crackdown continues, hundreds of thousands of
immigrants like Jesus Manuel Galindo will be caught in the
profit-driven public-private prison complex. In the end though, the
human cost of the system is unlikely to bring it down. It may only be
when citizens and politicians start questioning the financial cost of
incarcerating immigrants that these public-private prisons will go bust.

Meanwhile, the 26 inmates identified by GEO as having been involved
in the riot following Galindo's death will spend an additional year in
detention. After the initial April 2009 count against them failed to
elicit guilty pleas—there was little hard evidence—the U.S. Attorney's
Office added another count to the indictment under an obscure statute
requiring a mandatory 10-year sentence for the use of fire in the
commission of a federal crime. Under threat, all plead guilty to the
first charge. More than 100 inmates will be indicted for the second
riot.

Reeves County recently approved another $15.5 million in project
revenue bonds to pay for prison repairs and upgrades that will not be
covered by insurance. If the county does not make the costly
improvements, it may lose its BOP contract to imprison criminal aliens.
County Attorney Alvarez knows what is at stake. "Without that prison,"
she told the Commissioners Court, "basically, Reeves County is going
under."

Tom Barry is a senior foreign policy analyst with the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC. He blogs at: http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/.

This article was first published in the Boston Review (http://bostonreview.net).

To reprint this article, please contact americas@ciponline.org.

 

For More Information

ICE Detention Reforms Hide Abusive Practices
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6506

Poor Pecos, Poor Prisoners—Criminal Justice for Immigrants in Texas' Reeves County
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6503

"Community Security" Mission Creep at Homeland Security
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6251