DETENTION, INCARCERATION, DEPORTATION THE WYATT DETENTION CENTER AND THE NATIONAL PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
PLACING THE WYATT IN CENTRAL FALLS The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility is located across from a park. A wide expanse of grass—often filled with kids playing soccer or used for school graduations—stops inches from the road. On the other side of the grass is a concrete building, towering ominously, severed from the street by a giant barbed wire fence. The Wyatt exists in a perilous in-between space: between a park and a river, between private and public, between the local and the federal. It is a testament to the fact that, in the United States, detention, incarceration, and deportation impact communities and national politics in a vicious cycle. Established in 1993, the Wyatt Detention Facility is publicly owned and privately operated: although owned and administered by the city of Central Falls, out-of-state corporations own shares in the Wyatt. It was one of the first prisons under private control in the United States. Central Falls, the city where the Wyatt is located, is small, with a population of about 19,500. In the 1990s, like many small cities, Central Falls struggled with poverty and unemployment. According to Tal Friedman, an organizer for Never Again Action RI, in the 1990s, the Central Falls City Council was forced into choosing between a “garbage dump and prison” for job creation. It chose the prison. This decision ties into a larger trend of the 20th century where prison was seen as a “new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry [which] would jump-start local redevelopment,” writes geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Furthermore, the history of mass incarceration is inextricably tied to the history of racism and the legacy of slavery—the overpolicing and criminalizing of communities of color, especially Black communities, and the use of prison labor as allowed by the 13th Amendment—make prisons racist instutions. At the Wyatt, profit and racial control go handin-hand. The Wyatt was supposed to bring jobs and prosperity to Central Falls, but in 2011, the city filed for bankruptcy. In January of 2019, in an attempt to gain some sort of profit, the Wyatt signed a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to incarcerate people who had been detained at the US border. This little prison, in a city of fewer than 20,000, became part of a project to control the racial demography of the nation. A year after this contract, on January 22nd, 2020, Rhode Island State Treasurer Seth Magaziner announced that the Rhode Island Pension Fund would divest from private prisons. This is a disjointed narrative because the Wyatt is not a conventional “private prison.” Still, divestment is deeply connected to the
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discourse surrounding the Wyatt through years of activism and community organizing. When Central Falls announced the new ICE contract in March of 2019, Alianza para Movilizar Nuestra Resistencia (AMOR) began a months-long battle: one that started with trying to stop the contract with ICE, grew to #ShutDownWyatt, and then became a mission to ban private prisons in Rhode Island.
policing migration. Friedman, of Never Again Action RI, explained that one of the reasons that the Wyatt returned to ICE contracting after a 2009 abuse case is that criminalizing immigration has become “a source of revenue for prisons across the country, continuing the dual-mechanism of racism and profit that fuels prison decision-making.” A Justice Department report from last August notes that in 1998, 63 percent of federal arrests were of US citizens. 20 years later, however, 64 percent were non-citizens, largely due to THE PRIVATE PRISON MANTRA: PROFIT, an increase in arrests for “immigration offenses.” In PROFIT, PROFIT other words, the War on Drugs expanded prisons, and the War on Immigrants maintains them. Both leave The carceral history of Central Falls mirrors a national wreckage and despair in their wake in the hopes of profstory of prison expansion that started in the 1980s—a iting from mass incarceration and using mass incarcerhistory which is inextricably tied with the rise of ation to maintain a system of racialized control. private prisons. In 1993, the landscape of private prisons looked far different than it does today. The first corporation to engage in the “business of prison,” THE WYATT’S FINANCIAL AND RACIAL now known as CoreCivic, started operations in 1984, ORDER as a result of rapid mass incarceration in the wake of the Reagan administration’s racist “War on Drugs.” The Wyatt embodies the profit-hungry nature of Private prisons make money by expanding incarcer- the carceral complex. In its time, it has shifted ation and cutting down on the costs of prison mainte- between many forms of profit-maximization, despite nance. It is important to keep in mind that the problem continuing to rack up debt. A brief summary of these is not just with private prisons or with immigration many twists and turns to grapple with the Wyatt’s detention. It’s not about pitting private prisons against financial woes are essential to understanding its public prisons, either. Both private and public prisons current positioning: $106.7 million was invested in mistreat incarcerated people. Still, it is valuable to see 2005 by private bondholders, including national corpohow private prisons play a vital role in the incarceration rations like UMB Financial, a Kentucky-based bank, and deportation machine, which prospers from profit and INVESCO, an investment management company. and racial control. Furthermore, the abuse in private An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prisons is distinctive: a 2016 report by the Justice contract to house detained immigrants in 2006 ended Department found that private prisons were violent in an investigation of rampant abuse and a rapid shift and prisoners were deeply mistreated, even more so to supplying rooms for Navy personnel under General than in government-owned prisons. Immigration Court-Martial Convening Authority. Whether you see detention centers, private and public, have come under it as a failed venture or a failing one, the Wyatt remains fire in the last few years as a result of allegations of for two reasons: a desire by investors to turn prison into violence, harassment, and mistreatment of incarcer- profit and a system of using prison as a form of racial ated people by correctional officers. control. The relationship between private prisons and Bondholders, who hold shares in the Wyatt from immigration detention is key. According to the the 2005 deal, continue to have power over the direcnonprofit The Sentencing Project, 73% of people in tion of the Wyatt. Once they had invested, they needed immigration detention were held in privately-owned the facility to make money—regardless of the human facilities in 2017. The United States border-to-prison cost. In 2006, the Wyatt began to contract with ICE to pipeline, where people are detained at the US border imprison people arrested for immigration offenses. In for and then forced into prisons all over the States, is 2008, this relationship ended when Hui Li “Jason” Ng, supported by a system of profit for private companies a computer engineer from Queens, NY, passed away which rely on locking people up for immigration viola- from undiagnosed liver cancer while detained inside tions. The growth in privatization goes hand-in-hand the Wyatt. An ICE investigation revealed that he had with “crimmigration,” the extensive criminalizing suffered gross abuse by correctional officers, including of migration—and reflects a larger shift in the pris- being refused a wheelchair and enduring constant on-industrial complex to fuel incarceration through harassment. After Ng’s death, 153 ICE prisoners were
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