[Content warning: article and embedded videos include strong descriptions of violence, sexual assault, self-injury]
Thoroughly researched and disturbing, this Wired article reviews hundreds of 911 calls placed from immigration detention centers run by GEO Group and CoreCivic, our nation’s two largest private prison companies and providers of immigration detention. As the article makes clear, “immigration detention” is just prison by another name, but for people whose only “crime” was coming to the U.S. in search of stability and safety.
The two private prison companies talk a good game about fulfilling their legal obligations to provide adequate shelter and medical care, but the 911 calls reviewed by Wired tell a different story. Medical emergencies of various kinds, some allegedly caused by facility staff, are either actively downplayed or even dismissed, in some cases while the emergency is heard to play out in the background. Perhaps most disturbing is the high likelihood that 911 calls represent a small percentage of the actual emergencies and abuse that happen at these facilities.
These disturbing phone calls are supplemented by multiply-corroborated reports from detainees, their families, their legal representatives, and advocates who describe overcrowded facilities, lack of basic medical care, terrible (sometimes inedible) food, and more. Most of these reports come from several months ago, before the latest round of pressure from the DHS to push the number of detainees even higher.
Remember: the cruelty is the point.
(Taken from an email sent to me by Never Again Action. Emphasis original.)
I dont think prison is an appropriate term. Although the prison system in the US is arguably a gruesome torture industry, this has much more similarities with the german concentration camps. The chaotic, inhumane housing of masses of people in the worst of conditions with no regard to human rights and sometimes even active participation in torture and murder.
Btw concentration camps were (in the beginning) not where they primarily killed people. They detained them under very similar conditions and a lot of them died there a most gruesome death but they had “Vernichtungslager” as well which had the primary use of industrially killing men, women and children, burning them and or burying them (sometimes alive).
This is fascism. There are no two ways about it. We are watching the beginning of another reich. Capitalism is pulling out the knives.
