Inadequate Medical Care in Immigrant Detention Facilities

Federal agencies  have quietly gone about the business of recasting the relationship between criminal justice and immigration enforcement. These changes have done about as much to bloat the federal prison population as has the War on Drugs; they have also helped make Latinos the largest facial or ethnic group sentenced in federal custody. [1]

Facilities to hold immigrants -- eleven of which are the only privately run prisons in the federal criminal justice system -- have a high incidence of inadequate medical care. Of the seventy-seven facilities that provided enough information to render a judgment,  researchers found that eighteen contained indications of inadequate medical care. In one of the privately run prisons, named Reeves, the Department of Justice inspector general, Michael Horowitz, released a study showing that Reeve's medical contractor at the time, Correctional Health Companies, had failed to meet contractual staffing obligations in  the medical unit for at least thirty-four of the thirty-seven months from 2010 to 2013. [2]

Regarding privately run prisons generally, Richard Kreitner, who regularly looks back at The Nation magazine's historical coverage, has rendered a judgment on privately run prisons. "For the state to abdicate its power of punishment to the lowest corporate bidder, will seal off prisons more completely from constitutional and popular controls." "The expansion of immigrant detention has enabled private corporations to reap increasing profits from both the failure of US immigration policy and the violence and misery in Central America that drives people across borders."

ADDENDUMS:
*A number of on-demand workers have filed lawsuits alleging that after all their expenses are considered, they weren't even earning minimum wage. Both Republican and Democratic policymakers fear that the erosion of the old social contract between employers and workers could place a large burden on state and local welfare care budgets if those new-economy jobs don't last. [3]

*"The restaurant industry is the second largest employer in the U.S., providing jobs for nearly 11 million Americans. It's also one of the fastest-growing industries; revenues have risen every year since 2010." "Tipped workers in full-service restaurants are twice as likely to receive government assistance as workers in other sectors of American industry, a financial burden that costs taxpayers some $9.5 billion every year." [4]

Footnotes
[1] Seth Freed Wessler, "Separate, Unequal, and, Deadly," The Nation, February 15, 2016.

[2] Ibid. 

[3]  Sana Jayarenan, "The Hidden Cost of Waiting Tables,"   


Katy Steinmetz, "The Way We Work," Time, January 18, 2016.