The Art of Jailing

The Art of Jailing

Mark Dow , An excerpt from: American Gulag

Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons

In late spring 1995 immigration detainees in Elizabeth, New Jersey, engaged in a situation, an uprising, a melee, a riot, or a disturbance, depending on your terminology. They broke a lot of glass and destroyed furniture. The contract guards, none of them harmed, fled to the parking lot and called for local law enforcement backup. The most surprising part of this milestone in INS detention history is the Service’s own postmortem of it.

The three-hundred-bed facility housing primarily asylum seekers was owned and operated for the INS by the Esmor Corporation. INS Commissioner Doris Meissner directed the Headquarters Detention and Deportation Division to review and investigate the June incident. The result was a seventy-two-page report1 that reads very much like a report from Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. It details complaints that immigrants’ advocates could recite in their sleep: meaningless prisoner grievance procedures, arbitrary use of disciplinary segregation, verbal harassment, physical abuse. The report also noted the theft of detainee property (a category often overlooked by advocacy groups), the practice of waking detainees in the middle of the night "on the pretext" of security checks, and complaints by female detainees "that they had been issued male underwear on which large question marks had been made in the area of the crotch."

One distinguishing feature of the INS report is the concern with public relations: "Some of the decisions made by Esmor had a serious negative impact upon relations between the INS and the general public since, in the public perception, INS is inextricably linked to the operations of the Elizabeth facility." In fact, the INS’s Michael Rozos, formally assistant administrator of Miami’s Krome detention center, was the officer-in-charge at the Esmor facility when it erupted. What happened at Esmor could hardly have come as a surprise. Elizabeth Llorente’s excellent reporting on the detention center for the Bergen Record had practically predicted it. But in a bureaucracy, especially one in which the potential victims have no political or economic leverage, prediction is less important than damage control after the fact. According to George Taylor, Atlanta INS chief of detention, headquarters officials exploited the buffer of private prison companies to shield themselves from accountability. He added: "There’s no real governing body to drop the hammer when the hammer needs to be dropped."

After the Elizabeth debacle, the Long Island-based Esmor Corporation became the Sarasota-based Correctional Services Corporation. CSC operated a non-INS juvenile detention center in Tallulah, Louisiana, that was taken over by the state after repeated allegations of prisoner abuse. CSC was also forced to give up operation of its Youth Development Center in Pahokee, Florida, after a judge compared it to a "‘Third World country that is controlled by . . . some type of evil power.’" In the Pacific Northwest, CSC was having more success, and in 2002 the company received a new contract with the INS for a detention center in Tacoma to relieve overcrowding in the CSC/INS facility in Seattle. The new prison would be converted from an old meatpacking plant.

Back in New Jersey, INS officials had decided for the sake of efficiency that Esmor itself should sell the rights to and equipment in the detention center, which it did, to the Corrections Corporation of America. CCA, which took over the Elizabeth contract, is "still running it to the satisfaction of the INS"—hardly reassuring to anyone who knows a little about INS or CCA operations. CCA itself warned investors about the "risk" of "public scrutiny." In one suit against CCA, Gaston Fairey represented Salah Dafali, a Palestinian, and Oluwole Aboyade, a Nigerian, both of whom were allegedly assaulted and then transferred after contacting the media about conditions at the newly satisfactory CCA/INS Elizabeth prison. The suit alleges that "CCA operated the Elizabeth facility under a policy or practice that authorized CCA staff to use abusive practices to control and discipline the refugees detained at the Elizabeth facility."