Kudos to Menendez for visiting Elizabeth Detention Ctr after death there and in Middlesex Jail

by: kwilkinson

Tue Jul 29, 2008 at 05:06:41 PM EDT

I'm not surprised that people are blogging about not wanting to give medical care to detainees both here and in the MSM's comments pages.  It's hard to miss the visceral reaction people have to protecting those with the least power.  Nothing really new there.

Huntsu is not in that camp, but I would like to answer a statement from huntsu's comment:

I have no problem with the fact that these people have been imprisoned while they await their day in court.

Check out this month's Mother Jones discussion of prison's in general and immigrant detention (Why Texas Still Holds 'Em) in particular [bolding and italics mine]:

On average, ICE pays $95 a day per immigrant that it detains, yet research indicates that other, far cheaper, methods can work almost as well in making sure immigrants show up in court. Back in the late 1990s, the agency asked the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice to run a pilot project under which people facing deportation got intensive supervision and connections to social service agencies. More than 90 percent appeared for their hearings-partly, the institute said, thanks to better information about the process. Intensive supervision costs an average of $14 per detainee per day, according to congressional testimony by Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Homeland Security. Yet in fiscal 2007, ICE spent only about $44 million on alternative programs, compared with roughly $1.2 billion on detention...

Middlesex County gets $100/day per immigrant, an estimated $6.17 million for 2008, and Essex County signed a contract in the last 6 months with ICE for 250 beds in the new Essex County jail for $105/day.  Essex is also anticipating over $6 million for the federal contract.  Our Middlesex warden referred to this as almost all 'profit,' which relies on the fact that they aren't spending too much on medical care for the detainees.  Under Christie Todd Whitman, county jails (and the state dept of corrections) were allowed to go to private medical care providers for the jails and youth facilities.  In my opinion, we need to de-privatize this system. The state is in the process of doing just that for the state-run department of corrections.  

Unfortunately, our freeholders don't find all this as unconscionable as I do, so last Thursday they renewed the contract with the medical care provider, Center for Family Guidance, for 3 years for over $11 million (for the jail and youth facility), with no independent review of the death, or anything other than a statement at a public meeting saying they'd been briefed to their satisfaction on the quality of the medical care.

What is surprising is yesterday's report from the DOJ's Office of Inspector General on how the Ashcroft and Gonzales Atty General's offices blatantly and illegally recategorized immigration judges' jobs from career appointments that can't be political to making them essentially political appointees.  They appointed 40 judges from LA to NY/NJ to Florida who were party loyalists, some who knew very little about immigration law.  

This issue takes up as much of the report as the politicization in the hiring of the US attorneys, and what it means is, that immigrant detainees have a good chance of facing an immigration judge that was chosen for no more or less than his or her loyalty to Bush/Cheney, as vetted by Monica Goodling, or Jan Williams before her.

Beyond visiting the detention centers and county jails, Menendez and our other reps should be demanding:

alternatives to detention,
aggressive oversight of ICE,
a coherent immigration policy, and
recall of the judges installed under Ashcroft and Gonzales!