Dec 2010
Campaign targeting the President of the United States, The U.S. Senate, and The U.S. House of Representatives
Started by: Poet Jim Moreno
OVERVIEW
Francisco Castaneda is dead from medical neglect of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in their temporary prison in the Otay Mesa area of South San Diego County. Mr. Castaneda's family, with the help of the San Diego ACLU, won a lawsuit against CCA for his wrongful death.
CCA lost a second lawsuit for triple-celling human beings in two man cells. The third human being had to sleep on a mat by the toilet.
We don't need immigration policy that creates human rights abuses and death. We need immigration policy that promotes and expands human dignity and freedom; that doesn't build prisons.
Say no to Corrections Corporation's Private Prison in San Diego.
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| First Visible Sign of CCA Presence in Otay Mesa |
Imagine going into Family Court, Superior Court, Civil Court or Federal Court and you see the letters CCA underneath. You don't know that CCA means Corrections Corporation of America.
You don't know that in a major, influencing way a private prison that needs 90% of it's beds filled to cover costs and make a profit is part of your court system. You don't know that there have been $180 million dollars in law suits against this prison corporation including employees
selling drugs to inmates, problems with controlling violence, poor
to no medical care, and wrongful death litigation among others.
You don't know that two judges in Pennsylvania are serving prison
sentences for accepting $2.8 million dollars in bribes from a prison
corporation that gave the judges money for giving minors longer
sentences in their private prison.
Now imagine you don't have a car and your court has been moved
outside the San Diego City limits so far away that you might miss
your court date and receive a prison sentence because you didn't have
transportation and you weren't able to find the court. You also find
people reluctant to help you because you struggle with the language.
All this works in favor of the company that runs the prison. They
have to keep their prison 90 % full to cover costs and make a profit.
The company is Corrections Corporation of America. The court is
the Immigration Court. The charges are not criminal, they're civil
so you are not even a criminal and you are being forced to run a
legal gauntlet leading to a company making a profit from your poverty
and suffering simply by not having proper documentation.
The only thing missing from the Immigration Court/CCA sign on
this page is an insignia of a kangaroo. Corrections Corporation of America
is bad news with a bad history.
We don't want another prison in San Diego, especially a private one run
by a corporation with a checkered history. The potential for abuse is manifold.
Private prisons had such a bad record of prisoner abuse in the nineteenth
century in the United States they were outlawed by the turn of the century.
A report released in December of 2003 by Philip Mattera and Mafruza Khan of Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First in Washington, DC and Stephen Nathan of Prison Privatisation Report International in London made the following conclusion about privitization of prisons and Corrections Corporation of America:
As this report shows, in spite of these efforts to improve, CCA has not been a success even by its own standards. CCA continues to be plagued by many of the same kinds of operational deficiencies, scandals and mismanagement that characterized its performance during its early years. It is no
surprise that the company acknowledges that, “The operation of correctional and detention facilities
by private entities has not achieved complete acceptance by either governments or thepublic.
CCA’s record is a clear example of how the pursuit of profit stands in the way of carrying out a core
public function such as corrections. It is time for the public to know that independentinvestigators
have failed to find clear evidence that private prison management is superior in terms of quality,
recidivism rates or cost. CCA has succeeded in staying in business for twodecades, but it has not
succeeded in demonstrating that prison privatization is socially, economically or ethically acceptable.
Indeed, there have already been lawsuits against CCA in San Diego County, e.g., the litigation
for medical negligence to Francisco Castaneda, who had his penis amputated and died several months later when
pleas for cancer treatment were ignored by CCA and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). And
isn't what happened to Mr. Castaneda a metaphor for the history of racism (slavery, Jim Crow, Prison-Industrial
Complex - see Ruth Gilmore and her book Golden Gulag) in this country and the emasculation of men of color?
CCA also faced litigation from San Diego ACLU for triple-celling, a practice where two man cells are
packed with a third man who then sleeps on a mat by the toilet. A bad practice for ethics but good for profits.
Read about it at the ACLU website, www.aclusandiego.org . Type in a search for Corrections Corporations
of America. Bring some coffee; you'll be reading for a while about neglect and abuse that seems to be policy.
Follow the Seven Simple Steps in the above and stop this same old
plantation, new name exercise in exploiting people of color. As the
great grandson of an immigrant, as a nation of immigrants, a private
prison for immigrants is a step in the wrong direction and a slap in the
face to any immigrant descendant, including you and me.
Jim Moreno, January 2010
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