The For- Profit Immigration Imprisonment Racket

The dangerous intimacy between the immigration and criminal justice systems is fostered by executives with high stakes in the human consequences – people like Venturella, who, according to Grassroots Leadership, took a new job in July as Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at the GEO Group, the second highest grossing private prison company in the country.

Immigration detention, it turns out, is big business. Industry giants like GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) make a lucrative profit off of federal contracts to lock up undocumented immigrants waiting for their deportation hearings. Half of the roughly 400,000 people administratively imprisoned each year are held in private detention centers, and in 2012, the companies raked in $216 million and $208 million respectively from these agreements alone. Charged with minor crimes like shoplifting or traffic violations, detainees pose no threat to public safety yet can languish for months or even years in facilities that – due to cost-cutting measures – fail to protect them from abuse, provide adequate medical care, or ensure contact with family members, the Detention Watch Network reports. A 2011 investigation by Colorlines.com found that the children of parents swept into the detention system regularly end up in foster care.

The Obama administration’s record removal rates have forced many to re-enter the country without authorization in order to rejoin their families – a risk with dire repercussions owing to a 2005 program called Operation Streamline, which criminalized border crossing as a misdemeanor, or a felony for those with past deportations. These victimless offenses carry charges of up to six months or up to 20 years in federal prison (depending on the arrestee’s previous record), and the resulting overload pushed the Bureau of Prisons to depend more heavily on privately managed beds. In 2011, unauthorized entry and re-entry were the most prosecuted crimes in the federal judicial system, and the government contracted space with CCA and GEO Group for a combined revenue of nearly $1.4 billion.

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