Minorities sacrificed for profits in US jails

MEXICO CITY－Privately run prisons in the United States violate the rights of migrants and minorities in the quest for profits, a Mexican academic said.

Private prisons were founded in the 1980s to make up for bed shortages in federal and state institutions. The US government pays management companies for each inmate, so the more prisoners, the higher the earnings, Raul Benitez Manaut, a professor at the Center for Research on North America at Mexico's National Autonomous University, told Xinhua News Agency in an interview.

This moneymaking endeavor has been supported by what he calls the US "iron fist" policy on street crime, which for the past 30 years has "given the police incentives to send more people to prison for minor crimes, in collusion with prosecutors and judges".

Prison privatization in the US, on the rise over the past three decades, has adulterated the essence of the prison system by turning it into a business whose profitability relies on the number of inmates, said Benitez.

The US has the largest prison population, at more than 2 million, and the highest prison population rate, at 629 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research at the School of Law of Birkbeck of the University of London.

Low-income groups and ethnic minorities are the main victims of the police and judicial practices feeding private prisons, which can be defined as discriminatory practices that violate human rights, said Benitez.

Blacks and Latinos are incarcerated at about 5 times and 1.3 times, respectively, the rate of white people in the US, according to the US News and World Report in October 2021.

Undocumented migrants

The black population is larger than the white one in US prisons because many African Americans do not have the money to pay for a lawyer and avoid jail, said Benitez, adding that "judges normally favor the white population, and often punish the back and Latino population, so those are human rights violations".

Benitez also notes that the rise in undocumented migrants heading to the US has benefited the owners of private detention centers, as they receive money for each migrant held, and employ detainees as extremely cheap labor.

The criminalization of immigration has contributed to the high number of people behind bars in the US, and many migrants are held in detention centers operated by private companies, where their human rights are violated or limited, according to organizations and activists.

As of September 2021, 79 percent of people detained each day in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody were held in private detention facilities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two largest owners, managers and operators of private prisons in the US, with combined revenue in 2020 of more than $4 billion.

The companies are also large donors to political campaigns, such as that of former US president Donald Trump, and hire firms to lobby for their interests among lawmakers and in the upper echelons of US power.

Benitez said that government officials, from the local level up, and operators of private prisons benefit from the current system. With this in mind, the federal government "cannot and does not want to" eradicate prison privatization. "It's a vicious circle."

Xinhua