The ACLU on Monday said that more than 90% of people held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July were locked up in for-profit facilities, despite promises and an executive order from President Joe Biden to phase out federal private prison contracts for immigrant detention.
“Three years into the Biden administration, the number of people held in ICE detention continues to grow, and private prison companies hold an increasingly tight grip on the mass immigration detention system,” ACLU National Prison Project senior staff attorney Eunice Cho wrote in an analysis.
“The federal government’s immigration detention system overwhelmingly relies on private prison corporations,” Cho added. “Private prison corporations, like the GEO Group, CoreCivic, LaSalle Corrections, and the Management Training Corporation have pocketed billions from ICE detention contracts in the past two decades.”
While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden declared that “the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.” Just days into his presidency in January 2021, he signed an executive order “on reforming our incarceration […]
It is a shameful trend, and a condemnation of us as a culture, that we permit the imprisonment of others for profit.
Prisons have been one of the best investments in the US for years.
You are very correct Sam! Shame on me for not picking up on that fact.
Glad you posted this! Several years ago, it was in the news and then it was dropped. Prisons are one of the biggest profit making schemes in America. And one has to wonder why Biden has done nothing. There are some stats that we, as a nation should be looking at. Questioning. It’s not a total secret that many of the brightest are in prison. As far as I know there’s been one extraordinary group interaction. Bard College in NY state launched a program to teach and engage male prisoners the art of debate. Then a televised debate between the prisoners and a team from Yale went online. Yale lost! There are so may ways the system could be altered. :But, a lot of stock portfolios would be lose $$ ‘America, America, wherefore art thou?’