The for-profit model of private prison contractors has created artificial scarcity—and serious danger during the pandemic.
Inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in Texas’s Jefferson County Jail, René Escobedo González says he’s not getting enough food. ICE requires the privately run jail to serve detained immigrants three meals per day, but, in a clear effort to keep attendance low and costs down, breakfast is served at 3:30 am. Escobedo says that even if he does wake up, the meals are sparse, and often days old. Since ICE detained him in January, Escobedo has been feeling hunger pains, and he’s been forced to ask his family in Florida to constantly refill his commissary account so that he can buy ramen noodles, both for himself and for others in the detention center.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. In late March, still locked in ICE detention, Escobedo began asking his family for money so he could afford another necessity he would otherwise miss: soap.
“Soap we have to buy from the commissary,” Escobedo says. “They give us a tiny soap that is only good for one use.” He says that once a week, on Tuesday, the jail gives each person a ration of soap, but it lasts about a day. If people want more, they have to pay.
The coronavirus crisis has thrown the archipelago of ICE detention centers run by private prison companies into chaos. In an effort to cut costs, for-profit detention centers ration out goods — like soap — with the expectation that detained people will buy more with money from their commissary accounts if they run out. In many for-profit detention centers, detained people are given one bar of soap per week, for washing their hands and their bodies. In the midst of the pandemic, as detainees fear for their lives, that rationing system has collapsed. Today, washing one’s hands could mean saving one’s life or that of those around them, but Escobedo and others in ICE detention say that taking that basic step still comes at a price…
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