Jailhouse Crock

It has all the trappings of a late night, futuristic action movie: A prison facility tucked away somewhere in Mexico, thousands of inmates, and of course, the prison’s private operators, which run the place in a legal and international netherworld. For Arizona officials, however, that scenario is more than just a bad cable TV movie. If some members of the state legislature have their way, it could all become quite real.

Facing severe and costly prison overcrowding and a growing population of undocumented immigrant prisoners, state lawmakers are considering controversial legislation which would set the stage for a prison located in Mexico, built and operated by a private corrections company, to house Mexican nationals arrested in Arizona.

Specifically, the bill calls for the establishment of a “foreign private prison commission” to hire a contractor and oversee the building and administration of a private prison, which would be under the purview of the state despite its location across the border. The bill also stipulates that the entire process would not begin until the existing U.S. prison-transfer treaty with Mexico is changed; the bill sets a deadline of 2010 for the legal path to be cleared.

Supporters of the measure say it would save Arizona taxpayers up to $100 million a year — money which pays for the approximately 4,000 Mexican nationals currently in Arizona prisons — because it’s cheaper to build and operate a prison in Mexico than in the U.S. “We’re getting stuck with a high volume of illegal felons and having to pay for it,” says Republican State Rep. Russell Jones, the bill’s sponsor. “If the federal government is not going to reimburse us, then they should at least put us in a position where we can mitigate some of the costs to Arizona taxpayers.”

Jones also believes the bill will ultimately create a healthier situation for Mexican nationals because, he says, a prison in Mexico would be more sensitive to the language and cultural needs of Mexican inmates, and it would be easier for their families to visit. Currently, Mexican nationals are segregated from the general population in many Arizona correctional facilities because of a variety of factors, including the potential for violence.

Prison reform advocates and immigrant rights groups, however, counter that Jones’ bill is a dangerous legal and jurisdictional nightmare and that the state has enough trouble overseeing prisons within its borders, let alone a private facility in another country. They also worry it could further stoke anti-immigrant tensions in a state which recently voted for Proposition 200, a new law which denies basic government services to undocumented immigrants and punishes state employees who don’t report them to the authorities.

“This is about the state legislature wanting to send people to another country to save money,” says Caroline Isaacs, criminal justice coordinator for the Tucson chapter of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). “If you want to deal with prison overcrowding and costs, we need to take a look at our sentencing policies and modify those.”

Arizona’s Republican-dominated legislature has a “tough on crime” reputation which some say has created draconian sentencing policies, like the state’s mandate that criminals serve out 85 percent of their sentences, regardless of the charge or of their progress in rehabilitation.

As a result, says the AFSC, Arizona’s prison population has exploded over the past 25 years — from 4,360 in 1980, to 35,000. The group also says Arizona incarcerates Latinos at a considerably higher rate than other border states. Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) numbers show that Mexican nationals make up nearly 12 percent of its prison population, more than any other state except California and New York, which both incarcerate approximately the same percentage of foreign nationals.