Private Security Companies and Illegal Immigration Enforcement: The Record is Not Good

But Then Why Would You Expect it to Be?



Rick Rycroft/Associated Press

The Woomera Detention Center, in Australia,

 was the scene of a detainee breakout in 2002.



A while back The Dismal Political Economist posted on Ohio’s out sourcing of prisons.  Ohio is in the process of selling off its prison to private, for profit companies.  As noted, this is a terrible idea.  It is a terrible idea from a humanitarian point of view and from an economics point of view. 

On the economics alone, the strategy fails because private prisons will use political clout to try and increase payments they receive from the state for incarceration, they need a profit which adds to costs from the state, the state receives a one time windfall which cannot be replicated and it injects private companies into the criminal legislation activity as they try to increase rather than decrease prison populations.

Unknown to most people, private firms in the United States and other countries are involved in holding centers for illegal immigrants. 

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

The ultimate cost and whether or not the costs are actually lower with private firms will not be known for many years until studies can be done.  But one recent study concluded that billions of dollars were wasted by governments using private contractors instead of doing the work themselves.

On the humanitarian front the reports are dismal. 

the Florida-based prison company GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid a commission’s findings that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian government audit reported that the contract had not delivered “value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds.

And in the U. S. we have this

At the company’s Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, immigrant inmates rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary confinement. GEO executives declined to comment. 

And so on.

The issue does not seem to be one of political philosophy, government officials of all stripes appear to have latched onto the idea of private prisons as a way for short term financial gain.  So this is just another action that future generations will look back and say “What were you people thinking?”