The brutal jails and prisons that US corporations have created in America and the services they render for profit often involves torture and abuse, and people are not just held without any protections, but corporations use the inmates as profit – acting with god like powers over human beings.
Over 1,139 of the listed people were arrested in the USA although none of them were linked in any way to terrorism. Nonetheless were the INS had them held indefinitely without charges in various locations, denied access to legal counsel and families for months. Some of those who finally did manage to secure counsel were transferred from jail to jail, without any notice to their attorneys or their families. In early 2003, Operation Compliance shifted its focus to netting Latin American detainees who likewise had no connection to the September 11 attacks.
This is beyond nightmare. You have heard of death by spreadsheet. Now you’re heard of corporate incarceration with help from the US immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A network of prison facilities in which detainees are held indefinitely without charges, denied access to attorneys and family, terrorized by dogs, and subjected to abuse tantamount to torture, as well as sexual humiliation. This description applies not just to Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base, but also to another "gulag" of jails and detention facilities strung across the United States in which tens of thousands of immigrant workers are being held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
While the "global war on terrorism" is used to justify unlawful detention and torture abroad, it has likewise served to sanction the brutal treatment of immigrants at home.
ICE, a branch of the Homeland Security Department, deported a record 198,000 detainees in 2004. On any given day last year, an average of 22,814 immigrants languished in jails across the country, nearly four times the number held in 1994. The ICE contracts out the detentions to county jails. Often housed alongside violent criminals, these detainees face verbal abuse, overcrowding, and denial of medical attention, as well as physical beatings, solitary confinement and the psychological torture of not knowing if they will ever be released.
So the abuse you hear about at then hands of US soldiers and CIA torturers are only part of the American torture network. Torture and abuse happens in immigration holding pens.
Many of the immigrants facing long-term detention have committed no crime at all. Madani Ba, a Mali immigrant denied political asylum, was recently released from Passaic County jail in Paterson, New Jersey, after having been detained for more than a year.
He left Mali in 1990 after a military coup installed a new regime...He arrived in the US legally with a three-month visa and applied for political asylum. The hearing did not come until 1998, when he was denied asylum and ordered deported...
While in jail, he was denied dental care and was unable to eat his food properly. He was also diabetic, but was deprived of his medication for as long as three months. His blood sugar was high and he complained that his feet were numb. When he went on a seven-day hunger strike, vowing to continue until he died, he was thrown into solitary confinement and had his glasses taken away so he could not see. By this point, he had been in jail for 11 months, far past the 6-month legal limit the government can hold detainees. In addition, he lost his job and could no longer send money to his wife and children in Mali.
Take the case of Bitbila Yonko, a Ivory Coast man held for more than two years at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Virginia. This man arrives, begs for asylum and lacks official identification, yet he has been denied political asylum and barred from leaving the jail. Meanwhile, Ernestine Fobbs, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement says "We do not know who he is.... We can’t let them out on the streets if we don’t know who they are."
Federal prisons such as the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, and Oakdale, Louisiana, as well as jails like New Jersey, the Passaic County Jail in Paterson, and the Hudson County Correctional are known for guards that beat and torture inmates. None of them have ever been disciplined.
A review of Prison security tapes revealed that this cruelty is a regular feature in these lockups.
Wael Kishk told the Daily News that guards beat him on the same day that he complained to a judge about his mistreatment. Kishk said he was stripped, thrown from his wheelchair on to the ground, and stomped on by a number of guards. "There were three of them—with their leader, four," he told the newspaper. "They took all my clothes off and turned me on my stomach. Then, the leader put his foot on the back of my neck and told me, ‘All of this is so you will stop playing games,’
Detainees claim they have been stripped and left in a freezer, sexually taunted before being released without charge. Hemnauth Mohabir, a native of Guyana... was turned over to immigration authorities because he now had a criminal record (pot) and tortured with dog bites and beatings.
Mentally ill people are raped and abused and one Schizophrenic was tied to a bed. Inmates have started hunger strikes to protest their treatment. Many have been beaten and hung by their wrists for complaining. 50-year-old Korean immigrant Heq Sung Soo, was detained and hanged himself over his abuse.
In 1997, the last year in which figures were reported, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the predecessor of ICE) paid local jails an average of $58.00 a day for each detainee they locked up. The Virginia Pilot put the figure at $75.00 a day for Hampton Roads facility, while the New York Times cited a figure of $81.11.
So human beings are carted in and out of prison at the whim of corporate finance people
For the federal government, farming out immigrants to county jails is a cost-cutting device, while for the counties, it is a profitable enterprise. A recent article in the New Jersey Star Ledger noted, "It looks like easy money. Hudson County raised $10.4 million last year. Middlesex picked up $5 million. And Bergen County got $4 million.
"A growing number of counties across the nation are renting space in their jails to the US government to house foreigners arrested for immigration violations. The ‘revenue population,’ as one official called the detainees, can help counties defray the cost of running jails and even lower property taxes."
Some localities were able to cut local taxes completely as a result of the revenues brought in by using their jails to detain immigrants. In its contracts with local jails, the ICE made no attempt to set standards ensuring the humane treatment of the detainees, leaving it to the county jailers to do as they pleased.
So Abu Gharaib and Gitmo are not the only places where Americans torture detainees. It happens in a gulag of prison cells across the country. In happens in plain sight often, and the corporations who run the prisons have been allowed to create brutal little profit centers right under our noses.
The worst part of this is the private prison system in the US where you are not just put at the mercy of the court, but you are at the mercy of a faceless corporation where men and women in suits get to decide how long you stay and where you are held.
http://www.wsws.org/...