Kevin, a Canadian 9 year old boy of Iranian descent, is sleeping in a privately run for profit jail cell at the Hutto detention Center in Taylor, Texas next to an open toilet. Kevin has asthma and the deplorable conditions and the fear and horror of being caught in Bush's Kafkaesque "terrorist" spider web happened when his family's flight back to Canada made an emergency landing in Costa Rica.
http://www.democracynow.org/...
I won't excerpt from the Democracy Now transcript because that is easy to access here and speaks for itself:
http://www.democracynow.org/...
Amy Goodman interviews Kevin and his father, Majid being held in the jail run by Corrections Corporation of America in Taylor, Texas.
Their nightmarish experience asks, once again, what have we become in this country before our very eyes?
This is one more of the for profit privatization schemes that have mushroomed under BushCo to be added to the horrors faced by wounded veterans at Walter Reed and other instances of corruption and outsourcing so appalling, so irresponsbile that one has to wonder whether there is such a thing as public policy anymore.
Here's the response to public criticism about the Hutto facility from the CHM of the company that runs it, William Andrews:
WILLIAM ANDREWS: I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that these facilities that are being reported in the paper of ICE are in any way substandard. In fact, they are above standard, and the reports come from special interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. And, you know, we welcome anybody to visit our facilities. And the family facility, particularly, at T. Don Hutto is almost like a home.
I don't think that when he's at home and has an asthma attack at night that Kevin is prevented from seeing his parents as he describes in this interview. I don't think he sleeps by an open toilet or is kept frightened all the time or lives in a concrete cell.
And lest we make the mistake of saying this happens only under Bush II, the truth of the matter is that irresponsible deregulation and privatization has been on a slow creep for decades under both Republicans and Democrats.
It's important that we carefully scrutinize the candidates for president in 2008 to see that they fully understand why public policy is "public". And that it's wrong to twist the direction of public funds into serving well-connected private interests.