Private prisons

Last year, a former federal prison near Folkston, Georgia was emptied after President Biden signed an executive order phasing out the use of private prisons. So why is business now booming at the same facility for GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison firms? Because the administration has pulled a sneaky sleight-of-hand: Rather than fully halting the incarceration of people in such facilities, it has allowed them to simply be converted into immigration detention spaces.

This is an appalling reversal from the administration’s earlier promises. After all, Biden came into office with bold pledges to scale back the use of for-profit incarceration of all kinds. Within days of the president’s inauguration, he appeared to follow through on this promise by issuing an executive order purporting to end the use of private prisons to hold people in federal criminal custody.

However, Biden’s order left at least one major loophole: It was silent on the use of private contractors to detain immigrants in civil custody. There was reason to hope a similar order barring privatized immigration detention might follow, as Biden pledged on the campaign trail to “end for-profit detention centers,” as part of his immigration platform. And last April, he claimed that he would make good on this commitment within five days.

In the roughly 300 days that have passed since then, however, private detention has not ended – it has metastasized. In many ways, immigration detention is filling the gap in the federal incarcerated population left by Biden’s order. The expansion of the Folkston facility, for instance, would make it one of the largest such immigration detention facilities in the country.

The Biden administration has taken a few positive steps to address the particularly harmful forms of immigration detention, such as the confinement of asylum-seeking families. But for each step forward, there have been several steps back. In the case of family detention, for example, the sites where family units were confined haven’t closed down, but merely been repurposed. One of them – a facility in Berks County Pennsylvania, which for years held asylum-seeking mothers and children – has now reopened as a facility for detaining single adult women.

This is part of a pattern. If a facility is emptied for a time, but never shuttered, it is almost certain to eventually be refilled by another detained population. After Louisiana took positive steps to reduce the number of incarcerated people in its parish jails, for instance, many of these facilities simply switched over to detaining immigrants. The availability of such detention sites creates a powerful incentive to find ways to fill them, regardless of the stated rationale.

Excerpted: ‘Private Detention Isn’t Ending Under Biden – It’s Just Changing Form’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org