Yeah, a prison for women and children. According to Glenn Nichols, city manager of Benson, last year two men came to him to propose building a private prison to house illegal immigrants. You see, unbeknownst to Nichols, illegal immigrants were about to become big business in Arizona.
This was before all the noise caused by Arizona passing the "driving while Hispanic" law. Somehow these two guys knew that there was going to be a big demand for imprisoning women and children.
According to NPR's research, private prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America had a hand in writing Arizona's immigration law. The law was drafted last December in Washington by ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). This organization consists of conservative legislators, including Sen. Russell Pearce of Arizona, who sponsored the immigration law, and has members like Reynolds Tobacco, ExxonMobil, NRA and Corrections Corporation of America.
ALEC called the law the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act." This was the same name as the law signed by Jan Brewer that has caused such a stir. It appears that private companies are pushing this whole anti-immigrant thing just to make a buck. And they are disgustingly coy about it.
From the NPR story:
Private prison corporations -- and to be fair, prison guard unions -- have been pushing for harsher punishments for decades, to keep their prisons filled. The draconian drug laws we have on the books fill our prisons with non-violent drug offenders who are quickly turned into hardened criminals by their stints in prison. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and coincidentally, we have 264 private prisons.In May, The Geo Group [another private prison corporation] had a conference call with investors. When asked about the bill, company executives made light of it, asking, "Did they have some legislation on immigration?"
After company officials laughed, the company's president, Wayne Calabrese, cut in.
"This is Wayne," he said. "I can only believe the opportunities at the federal level are going to continue apace as a result of what's happening. Those people coming across the border and getting caught are going to have to be detained and that for me, at least I think, there's going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do."
Opportunities that prison companies helped create.
Of course Pearce and CCA deny the company had any hand in this legislation. But thirty of the 36 sponsors of the Arizona law got money from private prison companies. Two of Jan Brewer's advisors are former prison company lobbyists.
And the whole thing is kind of weird because most people think that when you catch illegal immigrants you just send them back to where they came from and you're done with them. But no, there are billions of dollars to be made while warehousing men, women and children. Billions of dollars that you and I are paying to hunt down guys who just want to make 5 bucks an hour picking tomatoes, which coincidentally keeps you from paying 10 bucks a pound for tomatoes.
You can bicker about how inefficient government-run prisons are. But in the end, it just seems wrong for companies to profit from other people's misery. Because we all know that if there's a profit motive someone is going to take advantage of it. And don't think it hasn't already happened, it has: former Wilkes-Barre, PA judge Mark Ciavarella pleaded guilty in 2009 for accepting kickbacks to send kids to a private for-profit juvenile correctional facility. Ciavarella was finally exposed when he sent a high-school girl to the correctional facility for three months for making a MySpace parody of an assistant principal.
I'm not suggesting that CCA's hand in drafting the legislation was illegal. But why are they trying to keep it secret? Why are they afraid of letting the rest of us know the truth? Why do so many conservatives who complain about government spending always want to funnel more and more government spending into companies like CCA, Blackwater -- excuse me, Xe Services, Halliburton, and Bechtel?
Just as there are places where the government shouldn't intrude, there are places private corporations should stay out of, prisons being one of those places. Inflicting punishment on human beings shouldn't be part of any corporation's bottom line.
Oh, and if you haven't seen Dark Star, it's a hoot: a low-budget science fiction spoof that hilariously shows the perils of imprisoning illegal aliens.