What happened to immigrants held in the nation’s spreading network of detention facilities began getting on the radar toward the end of the last decade, when reports of overcrowding, shoddy health care and detainee deaths began surfacing as a series of lawsuits hit the federal courts.
Slower to make the news, but highly relevant, was the story of the profits being made by private prison companies. Once on the verge of bankruptcy, the private prison industry rebounded after 9/11 as the federal budget for detaining immigrants – people awaiting or fighting their deportation, or held while seeking asylum – skyrocketed, as did the number of detainees held.
Since then, blogs like The Business of Detention and Texas Prison Bid’ness have reported on the money side of locking up immigrants, while advocacy organizations like the Detention Watch Network and Cuéntame have mounted awareness campaigns, often focusing on abuses reported by detainees and other problems.
The detention story has now made it to PBS Frontline, which airs a special documentary tonight called “Lost in Detention.” Frontline worked with the American University School of Communication’s Investigative Reporting Workshop. From the workshop’s website, a little of the reporting backstory:
The Workshop requested data going back a decade about people held by the U.S. government for deportation, including detainee names, when and where individuals were booked in and booked out of detention, and what prompted their arrest. We asked for this information in several Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security, one of the nation’s largest, federal, law-enforcement agencies.
What arrived at our doorstep in 2009 was a mess of confusing and incomplete information that didn’t help us answer our original questions. After months of trying to pry data from the agency about those being detained, it was clear that the government didn’t always know where the detainees were held, how long they were detained, or how much they paid to house and feed them. In fact, our records showed that in some cases officials might not have known whether detainees were actually in custody or even if they were dead or alive.
It’s been two years since the Obama administration announced an overhaul of the detention system, including plans to build less jail-like facilities. But a recent report released by the international advocacy group Human Rights First found that many problems have persisted, and that most immigrant detainees, who are not being held for crimes, are still being housed in what are essentially prisons.
The PBS Frontline documentary is one of two airing tonight that address the private prison industry. While not focused on immigrant detention, a CNBC documentary tonight called “Billions Behind Bars: Inside America’s Prison Industry” will explore how private jailers profit.
