For more: The ODLS is located on ICE’s public website, http://www.ice.gov,

The list of changes were leaked in a memo to the Houston Chronicle this week as it begins to implement the changes in low-risk units. Some of the changes will take place in 30 days, while others will take longer.

Other changes to be implemented will include allowing detainees to wear regular clothes, offering movie nights, bingo, dance and cooking classes, fresh plants, and four hours of recreation. ICE says that there will be no additional costs as a result of these changes.

The nine CCA facilities include Florence Service Processing Center, Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility, Eloy Detention Center, Houston Contract Detention Center, Laredo Contract Detention Facility, North Georgia Detention Center, Otay Detention Center, Stewart Detention Center, and T. Don Hutto Detention Center.

It is unknown whether other facilities such as those owned be GEO Group will make changes or whether the nine CCA facilities will become the sole hub for low-risk detainees. Currently, ICE has agreements with almost 300 facilities to hold detainees. The CCA facilities are some of the largest facilities holding detainees today, which in the past has been scolded for inhumane conditions.

While ICE Union reps argue that these new changes raise safety questions, immigration advocate welcome the changes. This is a huge win for advocates, who have been pressuring the Obama administration for comprehensive immigration reform — especially since reform is likely to go untouched in Congress before the 2010 mid-term election.

Click to go to map.

ICE is proposing an overall FY 2011 budget of $5.8 billion, an increase of 2 percent over the FY 2010 budget.

Questioned why not not all 33,400 beds were being utilized, Morton said they could not afford the 33,400 beds, because the funding budgeted for the 33,400 were based on $99 a day vs. the $122 a day that ICE now has to pay. Only 29,192 beds are currently being used. Despite the increase in costs, Morton assured committee leaders that ICE was not diverting funds away from bed space and would be using all beds in the future.

The criticism in bed space comes after some reports suggest that ICE my be releasing suspected illegal immigrants from their custody due to a lack of space and funding. Earlier this year, the Houston Chronicle obtained information a Freedom of Information Act request suggesting just that. While ICE has rejected this notion, ICE’s Union has reported significant bed space and funding shortages.

“I really believe that it’s a nationwide problem,” Chris Crane, ICE Council 118’s vice president for Detention and Removal Operations told the Houston Chronicle. “I’m hesitant for the sake of employees to say where some of these locations are, but I have talked to some agents who said their districts have run out of funds for bed space and are ordering their officers to release as many prisoners as possible.”

Morton at the hearing also called the Secure Communities the wave of the future. Secure Communities
is a program that allows state and local police to check the fingerprints of an individual they book against ICE and FBI databases and is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2013.

According to Morton, as of December 2009, over 1.34 million finger prints submissions has resulted in
arrests of 146,000 criminal aliens, of which 23,000 have been removed. Late last year, the agency boasted that it had identified more than 11,000 aliens charged or convicted with level 1 crimes through Secure Communities, while 100,000 aliens were charged with or convicted of level 2 and level 3 crimes.
Meanwhile, the number of criminal aliens identified by the 287(g) program – which trains local police to enforce immigration laws – increased by 46 percent in 2009 compared to 2008.

Morton expects that 80 percent of the detention space will be used for the criminal alien population, which may distort cost proposals to create a more civil detention system, if more detention facilities will be used to house the criminal population.

However, questioned whether ICE was also maintaining arrests of non-criminals, Morton said that the removal of non-criminal aliens was at its highest in ICE history.

Download Morton’s written testimony to read more.

http://appropriations.house.gov/Witness_testimony/HS/John_Morton.3.18.10.pdf

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, posted an online notice this week stating that it intends to open bids on Dec. 15 for a contractor to own and operate a low-custody detention facility for men.

The facility would be one of the largest immigration lock-ups in the country. Continuing a policy pushed under the Bush administration, the Obama team has moved to deport more criminal aliens, which has also driven a need for more bed space.

None of the major private prison operators are listed among the interested vendors right now. Read the full post here.

The GEO Group – an international private prison operator that draws about 75 percent of its revenue from controlling a quarter of the U.S. private prison industry – said it believes that “this federal initiative to target, detain, and deport “criminal aliens” throughout the country will continue to drive the need for immigration detention beds over the next several years.”

A Third Quarter earnings report released on Monday shows The GEO Group is adding another 1,100 beds to its Aurora, Colorado, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center for a total of 1,532 beds. As part of its renewed contract with ICE for the continued management of our Northwest Detention Center, capacity there will be increased from 1,030 to 1,575 beds.

Today Corrections Corporation of America – which manages more than 50 percent of all prison beds under private contract in the United States – said in its Third Quarter earnings report that revenue from its federal customers increased 4.9 percent, “primarily driven by the commencement of our new management contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons at our newly constructed Adams County Correctional Center.” This facility in Natchez, Mississippi houses 2,567 “criminal alien offenders – low-security illegal immigrants who committed offenses in the United States and will be returned to their country of origin upon completion of their sentence.”

The company’s newly appointed CEO, Damon Hininger, told investors during a conference call that the company continues to focus on filling vacant capacity. He said he was pleased with an increase of 1,300 immigrant detainees in CCA’s U.S. Marshall’s facilities since January 2009. The company recently completed renovations of its 502-bed North Georgia Detention Center. It began receiving detainees from ICE in October and currently houses about 100 people.

Hininger said CCA has its eye on an ICE contract to build and operate a new 2,200-bed detention center in Los Angeles, and expects a procurement as early as December, though the company is not listed among the interested vendors on a government website listing the request for proposals for the contract.

Funding for expanded immigrant detention is provided in the FY2010 budget for the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a member agency. President Obama signed the budget into law on October 29. It includes $5.4 billion for ICE, about half a billion more than in FY2009. From this amount, $2.5 billion is allocated for detention and removal operations, and at least $200 million is provided for the Secure Communities program, which began in 2008 to screen for undocumented immigrants by taking the fingerprints of anyone booked into a local jail and checking for a match in ICE’s database.

Critics like Joan Friedland, Immigration Policy Director for the National Immigration Law Center, have noted that as of March 22, 2009, “19,495 individuals were identified as undocumented through the Secure Communities program. Of these, only 1,436 were identified as ‘Level 1 criminals.’ The rest were arrested for lesser crimes, which include minor traffic offenses like driving without a license.”

A second high-ranking official in a two-month-old federal office that oversees immigration detention policy and planning has left the government, sources say.

Cree Zischke, tasked with addressing detainee health care issues for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Detention Policy and Planning, departed just weeks after her boss, Dr. Dora Schriro, left ICE in late September to become commissioner of New York City’s jails.

“I am no longer with the ICE Office of Detention Planning and Policy (sic),” she wrote in an out-of-office auto-reply received on Oct. 14 by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Sources this week confirmed that Zischke is no longer with ICE, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, and has returned to the private sector. Calls seeking comment from Zischke were not returned.

Read the full report here.

“The government has recognized that it has a massive system with serious problems, and has identified steps to ameliorate the situation,” said Linton Joaquin, the National Immigration Law Center’s general counsel, one of several advocacy organizations to respond to the report with mixed reviews. “However, the steps they propose taking in the short and intermediate term are limited compared to the size of the problem.

Other advocates appreciated the review’s distinction that that “the majority of the population is characterized as low custody, or having a low propensity for violence,” and yet are housed in prison-like conditions. One of the review’s recommendations is to expand Alternatives to Detention programs so that nonviolent detainees can be housed in residential facilities or monitored with electronic ankle bracelets. Some reports indicate detainees could be housed in converted hotels – which would be a return to ICE’s roots in the 1980s.

The reviewers note that the Detention and Removal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “limited in-house expertise on this subject matter” and that “the establishment of the Office of Detention Policy and Planning is a critical first step,” which suggests the expansion of alternatives take a while.

Both reduction of the detainee population and legally enforceable standards were called for by the National Immigration Law Center in its July 2009 report, “A Broken System,” as essential to fixing the nation’s broken detention system, but ICE’s review makes no promises regarding these recommendations. A section of the report focuses on the shortage of detention space that is close to key arrest sites (click on the map at left to read this section of the report).

The nation’s two leading prison companies have remained quiet since the report’s release, and ICE did not say whether it had consulted CCA or Geo Group during its review. During recent conference calls with investors, CCA officials noted that in the Obama administration’s proposed 2010 budget “there was no significant changes to funding as it relates to our book of business.”

Indeed, ICE’s report made no indication that there will be a decline in immigrant detainees under the supervision of private companies that own and operate much of the detention system. According to the review, approximately 88% of the detainee population is held in 69 facilities. Fifty percent of the detained population is in 21 of these facilities – of which seven are Service Processing Centers owned by ICE and operated by the private sector; seven are dedicated Contract Detention Facilities owned and operated by the private sector; and seven are dedicated county jail facilities, with which ICE maintains intergovernmental agency service agreements.

The report calls for expert federal officials to be placed on-site to oversee detention operations at these facilities, to intercede as necessary, and to ensure that there are appropriate grievance and disciplinary processes.

“In some respects there may not have been much of a change,” said Damon Hininger, CCA’s President and Chief Operating Officer during a conference call on Thursday with investors.

Hininger said CCA had “just learned yesterday that ICE wants us to renegotiate” the Hutto contract and that a timetable for the negotiations had not been set for transitioning Hutto to hold female immigrants.  But he pointed to the Obama administration’s expansion of the Bush administration’s Secure Communities program as proof that demand for immigrant detention beds would continue.

Other highlights from the 2nd quarterly earnings report of the nation’s largest private prison provider:

• Revenues increased 5.7%, and average per diem rates are up 2.3%
• Inmate populations were larger than expected at U.S. Marshall’s facilities – likely from the ongoing Operation Streamline along parts of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona and Texas
• During the next quarter CCA expects the commencement of a new 20-year contract with ICE to detain immigrants in a 502-bed former county jail that it just finished renovating in Hall County, Georgia

Watch for a more detailed update next week from BusinessofDetention.com.

- Renee Feltz

The Tennessean reported June 26 that the Tennessee state appeals court will determine if Corrections Corporation of America, the largest U.S. private detention operator, is an equivalent to a government entity, and therefore should release public records to the same extent.

CCA says that “the release of such records will set a bad precedent with other private companies who contract with the state,” reported the newspaper. Currently, private prison operators do not have to release public records.

Alex Friedmann, Prison Legal News Associate Editor and vice president of advocacy group Private Corrections Institute, is on the other side of the lawsuit. As a teen, Friedmann served 10 years for armed robbery, six of them at the CCA-operated South Central Correctional Facility in Wayne County, Tennessee.

Back in 2007, Friedmann submitted a request to CCA for audits by state and local agencies, legal actions taken against the operator, and contracts between the operator and the state. The request was limited to only CCA’s Tennessee facilities.

He submitted the request under the Tennessee’s public records law, which says “that private companies that perform functionally equivalent public services must comply with public records requests to the same extent as government agencies,” according to a 2008 PLN press release.

When CCA refused, Friedmann filed a suit, and in 2008, the Davidson County Chancery Court Judge Claudia Bonnyman ruled against CCA, saying that the operator was a functional equivalent to a government entity, funded by taxpayer’s money.

“This important ruling strips away a layer of secrecy that CCA has misused to conceal embarrassing and negative information from the public,” said Friedmann in the same PLN press release.

In response to Friedmann’s claims, CCA posted in 2008 on its thecca360.com site, that Friedmann is “a not so reliable media source” and questioned the “journalistic integrity of newspapers that “apparently regard individuals such as Alex Friedmann as credible sources.”

With regards to the disclosure of contract information at the federal level through Freedom of Information requests to agencies like the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the redaction process is two-fold.The government first redacts information, and then it is sent to the operator who will request the redaction of certain information usually based on competitive business principles. This is the case in requesting per deim rates or the daily rate paid for a detainee at a facility. Currently, every per diem rate that the government pays to some 400 facilities it uses to house immigrant detainees is unknown.

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