Daily Times

Detained in a California lockup with hundreds of other immigrants seeking asylum, Duglas Cruz faced a choice.

He could content himself with a jailhouse diet that he said left him perpetually hungry. Or he could labor in the prison’s kitchen to earn money to buy extra food at the commissary.

Cruz went to work. But his $1-a-day salary at the privately run Adelanto Detention Facility did not stretch far.

A can of commissary tuna sold for $3.25. That is more than four times the price at a Target store near the small desert town of Adelanto, about two hours northeast of Los Angeles. Cruz stuck with ramen noodles at 58 cents a package, double the Target price. A miniature deodorant stick, at $3.35 and more than three days’ wages, was an impossible luxury, he said.

“If I bought that there wouldn’t be enough money for food,” Cruz said.

Tuna and deodorant would seem minor worries for detainees such as Cruz. Now 25, he sought asylum after fleeing gangs trying to recruit him in his native Honduras, a place where saying “no” can mean execution.

But immigration attorneys say the pricey commissary goods are part of a broader strategy by private prisons to harness cheap inmate labor to lower operating costs and boost profits.

Immigrants and activists say facilities such as Adelanto, owned by Boca Raton, Fla.-based Geo Group Inc , the nation’s largest for-profit corrections company, deliberately skimp on essentials, even food, to coerce detainees to labor for pennies an hour to supplement meager rations.

Geo Group spokesperson Pablo Paez called those allegations “completely false.” He said detainees are given meals approved by dieticians, the labor program is strictly voluntary, and wage rates are federally mandated.

Immigration attorneys say the pricey commissary goods are part of a broader strategy by private prisons to harness cheap inmate labor to lower operating costs and boost profits

The company said Geo Group contracts with outside vendors to run its commissaries, whose prices “are in line with comparable local markets.” It also said Geo Group makes a “minimal commission” on commissary items, most of which goes into a “welfare fund” to purchase recreational equipment and other items for detainees.

Relatives can send money electronically to fund their loved ones’ commissary accounts, for fees that can reach as high as 10 percent of the amount deposited, some families report. But for many immigrant detainees, scrubbing toilets or mopping floors is the only way they say they can earn enough to stay clean and fed.

You “either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food,” detainee Wilhen Hill Barrientos, 67, said in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center against Nashville-based CoreCivic Inc, the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison operator. In the complaint, Barrientos said guards told him to “use his fingers” when he asked for toilet paper at the Stewart Detention Center, located in rural Lumpkin, Georgia.

Detainees are challenging what they say is an oppressive business model in which the companies deprive them of essentials to force them to work for sub-minimum wages, money that is soon recaptured in the firms’ own commissaries.

“These private prison companies are profiting off of what is essentially a company-store scenario,” said the SPLC’s Meredith Stewart, a lead attorney on the class action.

Immigrant rights groups have filed similar lawsuits against CoreCivic and Geo Group in California, Colorado, Texas and Washington.

Government watchdogs and lawmakers are taking notice too.

In November, 11 US senators, including 2020 presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, sent letters to Geo Group and CoreCivic lambasting the “perverse profit incentive at the core of the private prison business,” which has benefited from a crackdown on illegal immigrants under US President Donald Trump.

Published in Daily Times, January 19^th 2019.