The Unnecessary Expense of Immigrant Detention

[TexasTowelie]

The Dragan family. Read more from Angela Maria Dragan at http://www.gofundme.com/acf0i4 .

Over the past decade and a half, the federal government has created a cash cow for private prison companies by detaining record numbers of undocumented immigrants in for-profit lockups. In 2009, Congress even imposed a quota on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), obliging the agency to detain an average of 34,000 immigrants per night across all of its facilities. At an average cost of $164 per day per detainee, the math works out quite well for private prison companies such as GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, which post billions in annual revenue. Taxpayers should be infuriated. Proven, common-sense alternatives to detention, including monitoring and case management, are available at a savings of more than $1 billion a year.

To fulfill the so-called bed mandates, detention centers are often populated with low-level detainees who are neither threats to security nor flight risks. Texas in general, and ICE’s San Antonio field office in particular, house among the highest number of low-level detainees in the country.

Consider 29-year-old Andrei Dragan. Dragan has been incarcerated at the South Texas Detention Center (STDC) in Pearsall, about an hour southwest of San Antonio, since May 23. Dragan, who has lived in the U.S. legally off and on since he was 5, lost his permanent residency due to a drug offense in 2010.

But he doesn’t need to be locked up. He served his sentence and dutifully obeyed his terms of probation.

More at http://www.texasobserver.org/unnecessary-expense-immigrant-detention/ .