In America, locking people up is profitable. That’s why it’s no accident that this is the most incarcerated nation on Earth. But it’s not just the federal government that makes a quick buck off of putting bodies in detention center beds and forcing them into providing cheap labor. Since 2000, the number of people in private, for-profit prisons has nearly doubled—with the privately held immigrant population increasing by 442 percent since 2002.
One of the ways private immigrant detention facilities make money (in addition to their lucrative contracts with the federal government) is by charging detainees exorbitant prices for items such as food, deodorant, and toothpaste. In order to afford these basic necessities, detainees are forced to turn to prison work, only to find that the money they earn doesn’t stretch very far at all. A recent Reuters article profiles immigrants in detention at the Adelanto Detention Facility in California, who end up working several days just to buy food to supplement the meager rations of food they are given daily.
It turns out that the food for sale in the facility’s commissary is priced well above what is charged in stores—$3.25 for a can of tuna, $11.02 for a 4 oz. tube of toothpaste, $7.12 for a 2.5 oz. can of denture cream, and so on. In contrast, detainees make a salary of $1 a day. So they are forced to choose between food and basic hygiene items. This, according to immigrants and activists, is a strategy on the part of for-profit companies to make more money while also getting cheap labor out of the detainee population.
But immigration attorneys say the pricey commissary goods are part of a broader strategy by private prisons to harness cheap inmate labor to lower operating costs and boost profits.
Immigrants and activists say facilities such as Adelanto, owned by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Geo Group Inc (GEO.N), the nation's largest for-profit corrections company, deliberately skimp on essentials, even food, to coerce detainees to labor for pennies an hour to supplement meager rations.
Let’s also remember who these detainees are. They are not the murderers and rapists that Donald Trump wants you think they are. Many of them are asylum seekers who have been taken into custody at ports of entry and are waiting to be seen by an immigration judge to plead their case. We know that there are also families and children in immigrant detention centers—even though the administration has been lying to us about how many are there. But even if these detainees were rapists and criminals, it is unconscionable to justify essentially starving them and forcing them to work while also charging two and three times the market rate for basic items.
While these companies deny any wrongdoing and insist that they feed detainees nutritional meals, inspections of these facilities have proved quite the opposite. Back in November, 11 senators sent letters to two private companies (Geo Group and CoreCivic) demanding answers about detainee mistreatment. In particular, they cited findings in a 2017 report by the U.S. Office of the Inspector General documenting all sorts of problems at private immigrant detention facilities. “The inspector general found spoiled, moldy and expired food, and cited detainees' complaints that hygiene products were ‘not provided promptly or at all,’ the report said.” In one complaint, a detainee said that he was told by guards to “use his fingers” when he requested toilet paper.
Under Donald Trump and his policies toward undocumented immigrants, these companies have made a fortune. In 2017, the revenue for Geo Group and CoreCivic totaled close to $4 billion. And their stocks are up 30 percent since Trump came into office. This explains why both companies contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars toward his inauguration. They couldn’t have a better ally in this administration: a man who hates immigrants so much that he’s trying with all his might to get them all deported and filling detention center beds to capacity.
There is a plethora of reasons to detest Donald Trump and want him out of the White House ASAP. In fact, there are really too many to count. But we certainly can’t forget how much he hates immigrants and how determined he is to make their lives as miserable as possible, while allowing his friends to get rich off their misery at the same time. We have a long way to go to reform both our immigration system and our criminal justice system. And this is a problem of both Democrats and Republicans alike. But we most assuredly have zero chance of reform with Trump in office. Everyday he puts the most vulnerable people at risk, to the point of starvation and depravation. He won’t simply be content forcing out all the nation’s brown and black immigrants. He wants to humiliate them, too.