Corporate Camps, Profit for Prisoners

I’ve been horrified for quite sometime at the privatization of prisons in this country. What I was unaware of is the privatization of immigration enforcement.

“In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal prisons, according to governmental figures.”

If our government is incapable of handling the influx of prisoners and illegal immigrants in our country, instead of handing the problem over to a company that has no interest beyond profit, perhaps it’s time to look at the very laws that dictate such action.

Maybe our ability to contain these people isn’t the problem. Instead we need to ask the question, why in the hell do we need to detain so many people? And now that violating people is a for profit business, it’s not hard to figure out the answer.

These corporations such as the GEO Group, G4S, and Serco have record profits annually and worldwide reach, not just in the US.

To create a business of imprisoning people is wrong. There’s just no way around it.

The above quote came from a New York Times article entitled Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit written by Nina Bernstein. Please click here to read the article.