Category: Detention

At planet flamenco com, they have posted Teye and Belen’s appeal for a Christmas Eve vigil at Hutto jail (5-6 pm) along with lyrics from a song by The Foremen, “Send ‘Em Back”–back to Europe, that is.

http://www.planetflamenco.com/

The Official Foremen Website Well, Columbus found this nation
Had a native population
Who’d been living here since many years B.C.
Descended from a people who were noble, brave and daring
Who’d migrated ‘cross the Bering eating bits of frozen herring
And spread out across this continent from sea … to sea … so peaceful and so free …

Send ’em back
Send ’em back
Put ’em on a trek Columbo couldn’t track
Let ’em count the steps to China on a friggin’ abacus
Restrict immigration
And give this mighty nation
Back to us … squirrels

So says Glenda in the Land of Oz, a blogging graphic artist and social worker from Austin. In a May 19 entry, she speaks about a friend who works at Hutto:

“He described the incoming immigrant families holding screaming children in their arms. He described the guards taking their fingerprints, taking the fingerprints of the babies.

“He said it was disturbing to the most hardened prison workers to see poor families being held like prisoners, the children behind bars, crying, all of them crying.
He said they were all poor and frightened. He has been around criminals for many years. These are not criminals. They are poor and desperate.

“What I heard disturbed me too. I don’t know what else to say. The internal picture of fingerprinting babies offends me.” Here’s the link

A 2003 interview posted by Corrections Corporation of America with co-founders T. Don Hutto and Tom Beasly reveals that the company’s first contract involved detention for immigrants in Houston.

Hutto and Beasley tell the story about how they had won a contract to detain immigrants, but they didn’t have a facility, so, on New Year’s Eve 1983, they drove from motel to motel in the Houston area until they found one that would provide them the space to start their venture, “to crawl before we walked, so to speak,” says Hutto.

Then, when 87 “new aliens” were delivered, Hutto completed last-minute preparations with a Wal-Mart shopping trip, using his American Express credit card. With federal money coming in for immigrant detentions, CCA was in business.
Q. From where did the idea of private corrections originate?

Tom Beasley: The idea itself was cocktail conversation in 1980, at a presidential fundraiser at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee. The topic came up about corrections problems in Tennessee. A college said, “you’ll never solve that problem until you get the private sector involved.” And I thought, here we are in the home of Hospital Corporation of America, there are lots of the same kinds of dynamics involved and I started wrestling with the idea. After 6-8 months, I got Doctor Crants to come in with me and we agreed to put up $75,000 each, which neither of us had, and we got it started. We then went to see the commissioner of corrections at the time. I didn’t think he would receive this idea very well, but surprisingly he said it was an idea who’s time had come. I didn’t know exactly how to proceed. I asked the commissioner if he had any suggestions and he said he knew the very person. He called Don Hutto, who was the highest state corrections director in Virginia and had just been elected president of ACA. After explaining the idea, Don said he would be happy to be involved. There the three of us were — ready to go.

Q. What about you three made it work? What was the environment like among government agencies? Legislators? financial supporters?

Tom Beasley: We were fortunate in that the three of us had different skills sets. Don has referred to it as a three-legged-stool. Don ran the corrections side, Doc ran the financial side and raised money and I ran the marketing side. We took everything we knew to make it happen and to stay afloat. We went seven years without making a profit. We were producing at the ground level. We had facilities from the very beginning. It just took a long time to turn the corner with enough critical mass to begin to grow the company seriously.

Don Hutto: Politically our timing was really right. It was a time when corrections and prisons were taking an increasing about of state budgets. Historically, corrections has not been a very high legislative priority. But court actions, a harder look at sentencing and a strong push for reform caused an increase in state budgets. There was a lot of support for privitization when we began.

Tom Beasley: Judges were telling corrections systems they had to make changes. The expense of these changes fell on the states. Everybody wanted it resolved.

Don Hutto: We were primarily looking at the federal government to house undocumented aliens, to crawl before we walked so to speak. But we knew we could do much more. We could help take the pressure off the corrections systems. It was a fortuitous time for all of us.

Tom Beasley: Another thing that gave us a boost was when 60 Minutes called and wanted to do a piece on the Chattanooga Penal Farm, an adult male facility in Tennessee. It turned out to be a really positive piece. So, we got copies and marketed with it until 60 Minutes made us stop. It gave us instant credibility.

Q. How did you take the private corrections concept and turn it into a concrete business?

Don Hutto: We were working on getting our first contract with the INS. We worked with them on the idea then they submitted a request for proposal with maybe 60 days to respond. So we got busy and created the initial design of the facility. Tom found some property we could use. The INS did award us the contract but only gave us 90 days to build the facility. We knew there was no way to open in 90 days. In the mean time, we had to open a temporary facility to satisfy the contract.

Tom Beasley: Don and I went down to Houston on New Years Eve in 1983. We rented a car at the airport and drove around the major thoroughfares to find somewhere to put 200 illegal criminal aliens by February 1. Literally, we stopped in 10 motels then finally about 3 a.m. found one that might work. I asked if they would be interested in leasing or selling the hotel. After negotiating with the owner for several hours, he finally agreed.

Don Hutto: We had to do some renovations to the motel but we still managed to have everything finished a few days early. Just as we were beginning to think we were ahead, the INS called and had just picked up 87 new aliens and wanted us to take them that night. We didn’t have staff, personal items, anything. We took my American Express to Wal-Mart and bought personal items and some other items we needed. Around 10 p.m. that night, we starting booking the inmates and finished just before midnight. Tom Beasley: Our goal had been to get a contract in the first two years. We exceeded that goal and managed to get two in the first year and four or five by the second.

http://www.ccasource.com/story.cfm?id=23

The Southern Regional Council Journal, Southern Changes, has an article, “Cells for Sale,” by Harmon L. Wray, Jr. (Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6). Two paragraphs focus on the namesake of the Hutto jail:

“Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation’s executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association–the ACA under Hutto’s tenure has supported prison privatization. “Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA’s executive vice-president’s career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was “at its strongest,” according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto’s tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state’s prison system unconstitutional and found that officials “evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit.” “Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand….Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap…and administering electric shocks to ‘various sensitive parts of the inmate’s body.’ The trial court called the prisons ‘a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.’” When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was “a libelous article” and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.”

Link to archive

In response to an editorial in the Austin American-Statesman (pasted below under “Read More”), Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson fired off the following email.

It is his second email to the Statesman in two days. The first one tried to correct the erroneous claim that frames the editorial in the second sentence: the claim that immigrants jailed at Hutto belong to families who entered the USA illegally. Gibson’s clients, two Palestinian families, entered with visas and applied for asylum.

In the email below, Gibson works on another phrase, and we quote:

“Age of terrorism,” my ass. The incarceration of the Palestinian families at Hutto has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism, except that they came to the United States fleeing terrorism by the Israeli Occupation Forces in Palestine. It has absolutely nothing to do with “keeping tabs on illegal immigrants.” The Department of Homeland Stupidity at all times knew the correct address–had “tabs on”–the victims, because the scrupulously reported promptly every change in their addresses to the Department.
Nobody wants to admit that their leaders might do evil. Germans hearing of atrocities in the 1930s would say, “Der Furher does not know about it. He would put a stop to it if he did.”

But the fact is that, as the Germans learned and I hope we Americans are not too stupid to be learning, that governments do lie and terrorize their own populations for political purposes and to silence dissent.

There is no legitimate purpose whatsoever in keeping the Palestinian children or their parents in prison in Hutto or anywhere else. The roundup on November 3 when they were arrested at their homes was nothing more or less than a Kristalnact terror aimed at the American people, as the press release the DHS issued makes clear in calling these children “criminals and absconders”.

It is time the Statesman faced reality and stopped cooperating with the DHS’s anti-Muslim hate propaganda, of which the incarceration of children is only one recent, but particularly cynical example.

John Wheat Gibson, P.C.

Dallas, Texas

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/12/19/19taylor_edit.html

EDITORIAL
Putting children behind bars in Taylor

EDITORIAL BOARD
Tuesday, December 19, 2006

There has to be a better way. It cannot be right to imprison children guilty of nothing more than following their parents into the United States illegally.

The American-Statesman’s Juan Castillo recently reported on a private prison in Williamson County where families of illegal immigrants are held to await disposition of their cases. It is one of two Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in the United States holding non-Mexican unauthorized immigrants on noncriminal charges.

The facilities also are living testimony to a broken system for adjudicating immigration cases. There are 215 federal immigration judges serving in 53 immigration courts across the country. Last year, they handled more than 350,000 specific matters, including 270,000 individual cases.

The backlog is so strained that U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, the grandson of Mexican immigrants, noted: “The department and the federal courts are straining under the weight of an immigration litigation system that is broken. Under the current system, criminal aliens generally receive more opportunities for judicial review of their removal orders than noncriminal aliens.”

In short, illegal immigrants who commit crimes get speedier legal attention than these children, who have done nothing wrong other than follow their parents.

Nothing will change until reforms are initiated, and Congress has done little to fix a broken immigration policy and the machinery to enforce it. The result is the private prison facility in Taylor and a smaller one in Pennsylvania .

According to those familiar with the families in the private prison, children of those apprehended are dressed in prison jumpsuits and receive only one hour of schooling and one hour of recreation a day. The trade-off is that they get to remain with their families.

Hard information on the program and the private prison is difficult to come by. The company running the prison refers questions to the immigration office, and the immigration office has had little to say about the situation.

News of the 400 people — 200 of them children — being held in the T. Don Hutto unit in Taylor has sparked protests from several groups interested in immigrant issues. They are concerned about everything from care and feeding of those being held to the psychological effect of incarceration on children and families.

Federal authorities began detaining all unauthorized immigrants last summer. The reason for the detention was that so many who were charged with unauthorized entry into the United States never appeared for their court dates. They melted back into the population.

It is understandable in this age of terrorism that authorities want to keep tabs on illegal immigrants and ensure their appearances in courts. But there should be a way to see that they have their day in court without imprisoning their children.

Keeping families intact would appear to be a humane policy, as well. But the result of the new detention policy has been to jail children, and that is not acceptable. Those who have visited the detainees, some of whom are seeking political asylum, say the detention is damaging.

Little kids in prison jumpsuits and nametags presents a sad picture. Children are truly at the mercy of their parents, and incarceration cannot be good for their physical, mental or emotional health.

For reasons of security and the law, a close watch on the nation’s borders is warranted. But what isn’t acceptable is jailing mothers and children awaiting a hearing on their status.

There has to be a better way.