Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit
Rick Rycroft/Associated Press
The Woomera Detention Center, in Australia, was the scene of a detainee breakout in 2002.
The men showed up in a small town in
Australia’s
outback early last year, offering top dollar for all available
lodgings. Within days, their company, Serco, was flying in recruits from
as far away as London, and busing them from trailers to work 12-hour
shifts as guards in a remote camp where immigrants seeking asylum are
indefinitely detained.
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Andrew Quilty for The New York Times
Australia has relied on private security companies to
run immigrant detention centers in places like Perth.
It was just a small part of a pattern on three continents where a
handful of multinational security companies have been turning crackdowns
on
immigration into a growing global industry.
Especially in
Britain,
the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have
increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show
voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.
Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private
employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and
less expensively than the public sector could.
But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the
documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal.
Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation,
as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a
“detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.
“They’re very good at the glossy brochure,” said Kaye Bernard, general
secretary of the union of detention workers on the Australian territory
of Christmas Island, where riots erupted this year between asylum
seekers and guards. “On the ground, it’s almost laughable, the chaos and
the inability to function.”
Private prisons in the United States have long stirred controversy. But
while there have been conflicting studies about their costs and
benefits, no systematic comparisons exist for immigration detention, say
scholars like Matthew J. Gibney, a political scientist at the
University of Oxford who tracks immigration systems.
Still, Mr. Gibney and others say the pitfalls of outsourcing immigration
enforcement have become evident in the past 15 years. “When something
goes wrong — a death, an escape — the government can blame it on a kind
of market failure instead of an accountability failure,” he said.
In the United States — with almost 400,000 annual detentions in 2010, up
from 280,000 in 2005 — private companies now control nearly half of all
detention beds, compared with only 8 percent in state and federal
prisons, according to government figures. In Britain, 7 of 11 detention
centers and most short-term holding places for immigrants are run by
for-profit contractors.
No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with
more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory
detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three
publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in
the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted
foreigners.
The first, the Florida-based prison company
GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid
a commission’s findings
that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian
government audit reported that the contract had not delivered
“value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000
detention beds.
The second company,
G4S,
an Anglo-Danish security conglomerate with more than 600,000 employees
in 125 countries, was faulted for lethal neglect and abusive use of
solitary confinement in Australia. By the middle of the past decade,
after refugee children had sewed their lips together during
hunger strikes
in camps like Woomera and Curtin, and government commissions discovered
that Australian citizens and legal residents were being wrongly
detained and deported, protests pushed the Liberal Party government to
dismantle some aspects of the system.
But after promising to return the work to the public sector, a Labor government awarded a five-year, $370 million contract to
Serco
in 2009. The value of the contract has since soared beyond $756 million
as detention sites quadrupled, to 24, and the number of detainees
ballooned to 6,700 from 1,000.
Dangerous Problems
Over the past year, riots, fires and suicidal protests left millions of
dollars in damage at Serco-run centers from Christmas Island to
Villawood, outside Sydney, and self-harm by detainees rose twelvefold,
government documents show. In August, a
government inspection report
cited dangerous overcrowding, inadequate and ill-trained staff, no
crisis planning and no requirement that Serco add employees when
population exceeded capacity.
At the detention center Serco runs in Villawood, immigrants spoke of
long, open-ended detentions making them crazy. Alwy Fadhel, 33, an
Indonesian Christian who said he needed asylum from Islamic persecution,
had long black hair coming out in clumps after being held for more than
three years, in and out of solitary confinement.
“We talk to ourselves,” Mr. Fadhel said. “We talk to the mirror; we talk to the wall.”
Naomi Leong, a shy 9-year-old, was born in the detention camp. For more
than three years, at a cost of about $380,000, she and her mother were
held behind its barbed wire. Psychiatrists said Naomi was growing up
mute, banging her head against the walls while her mother, Virginia
Leong, a Malaysian citizen accused of trying to use a false passport,
sank into depression.
Naomi and her mother became a cause célèbre in protests against the
mandatory detention system, leading to their release in 2005 on rare
humanitarian visas. They are now citizens.
“I come here to give little bit of hope to the people,” Ms. Leong said
during a recent visit to Villawood, where posters display the governing
principles of Serco, beginning with “We foster an entrepreneurial
culture.”
Free-Market Solutions
Companies often say that losing a contract is the ultimate accountability.
“We are acutely aware of our responsibilities and are committed to the
humane, fair and decent treatment of all those in our care,” a Serco
spokesman said in an e-mail. “We will continue to work with our
customers around the world and seek to improve the services we provide
for them.”
But lost detention contracts are rare and easily replaced in this
fast-growing business. Serco’s $10 billion portfolio includes many other
businesses, from air traffic control and visa processing in the United
States, to nuclear weapons maintenance, video surveillance and
welfare-to-work programs in Britain, where it also operates several
prisons and two “immigration removal centers.”
“If one area or territory slows down, we can move where the growth is,”
Christopher Hyman, Serco’s chief executive, told investors last year,
after reporting a 35 percent increase in profits. This spring, Serco
reported a 13 percent profit rise.
Its rival G4S delivers cash to banks on most continents, runs
airport security
in 80 countries and has 1,500 employees in immigration enforcement in
Britain, the Netherlands and the United States, where its services
include escorting illegal border-crossers back to Mexico for the
Department of Homeland Security.
Nick Buckles, the chief executive of G4S, would not discuss the company.
But last year he told analysts how its “justice” business in the
Netherlands blossomed in one week after the 2002 assassination of a
politician with an anti-immigrant and law-and-order agenda.
“There’s nothing like a political crisis to stimulate a bit of change,” Mr. Buckles said.
In Britain last fall, the company came under criminal investigation in
the asphyxiation of an Angolan man who died as three G4S escorts held
him down on a British Airways flight. Soon afterward, British
immigration authorities announced that the company had lost its bid to
renew a $48 million deportation escort contract because it was underbid
by a competitor.
Even so, G4S has more than $1.1 billion in government contracts in
Britain, a spokesman said, only about $126 million from the immigration
authority. It quickly replaced the lost revenue with contracts to build,
lease and run more police jails and prisons.
In 2007, Western Australia’s Human Rights Commission found that G4S
drivers had ignored the cries of detainees locked in a scorching van,
leaving them so dehydrated that one drank his own urine. The company was
ordered to pay $500,000 for inhumane treatment, but three of the five
victims already had been deported. Immigration officials, relying on
company misinformation, had dismissed their complaints without
investigation, the commission found.
There was a public outcry when an Aboriginal man died in another G4S van
in similar circumstances the next year. A coroner ruled in 2009 that
G4S, the drivers and the government shared the blame. The company was
later awarded a $70 million, five-year prisoner transport contract in
another state, Victoria, without competition.
G4S pleaded guilty to negligence in the van death this year, and was
fined $285,000. Mr. Buckles, its chief executive, alluded to the case at
a meeting with analysts in March, reassuring them.
“There is only two or three major players, typically sometimes only two
people bidding,” Mr. Buckles said. “In time, we will become a winner in
that market because there’s a lot of outsourcing opportunities and not
many competitors.”
In August, when GEO, the Florida prison company, posted a 40 percent
rise in second-quarter profits, its executives in Boca Raton spoke of
new immigration business on both sides of the Atlantic.
John M. Hurley, a GEO executive for North American operations, cited
“the continued growth in the criminal alien population,” larger
facilities, and longer federal contracts, some up to 20 years.
At the company’s Reeves County Detention Center in Texas, immigrant
inmates rioted in 2009 and 2010 after several detainees died in solitary
confinement. GEO executives declined to comment. But speaking to
shareholders, they credited much of the quarter’s $10 million increase
in international revenue to the expansion of a detention center in
Britain, where immigration was a hot issue in the 2010 election.
A Policy Backfires
“Britain is no longer a soft touch,” Damian Green, the immigration
minister, said in August 2010 when he visited the center, near Heathrow
Airport, reopening wings that had burned in 2006 during detainee riots
under a different private operator.
The riots started the day the chief inspector of prisons released a
blistering report about abuses there, including excessive waits for
deportation. Months after Mr. Green’s appearance, an independent
monitoring board complained that at the expanded center — now Europe’s
largest, with 610 detainees — at least 35 men had been waiting more than
a year to be deported, including one locked up for three years and
seven months at a cost of at least $237,000.
The camp that Serco took over in the Australian outback, the Curtin
Immigration Detention Center, had also been shut down amid riots and
hunger strikes in 2002. But it was reopened last year to handle a surge
of asylum seekers arriving by boat even as the government imposed a
moratorium on processing their claims. Refurbished for 300 men, the camp
sits on an old air force base and held more than 1,500 detainees in
huts and tents behind an electrified fence. Serco guards likened the
compound to a free-range chicken farm.
On March 28, a 19-year-old Afghan from a group persecuted by the Taliban
hanged himself after 10 months’ detention —
the system’s fifth suicide
in seven months. A dozen guards, short of sleep and training, found
themselves battling hundreds of grieving, angry detainees for the
teenager’s body.
“We have lost control,” said Richard Harding, who served for a decade as
Western Australia’s chief prison inspector. He is no enemy of
privatization, and his praise for a Serco-run prison is posted on the
company’s Web site. But he said Curtin today was emblematic of “a flawed
arrangement that’s going to go wrong no matter who’s running it.”
“These big global companies, in relation to specific activities, are
more powerful than the governments they’re dealing with,” he added.
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