New suit seeks to bar private prison from forcing detained immigrants to work for $1 per day
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Even most lawyers will admit it’s rare that a legal complaint makes for captivating reading. The complaint that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed this week against CoreCivic, a private prison company, as part of a class action suit is the exceptNew suit seeks to bar private prison from forcing detained immigrants to work for $1 per day
Even most lawyers will admit it’s rare that a legal complaint makes for captivating reading. The complaint that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) filed this week against CoreCivic, a private prison company, as part of a class action suit is the exception. Unfortunately, it’s the worst kind of captivating—the kind you can’t put down because it’s just that shocking. Individuals detained at the Stewart Detention Center (“Stewart”) in Lumpkin, Georgia work because they have no other meaningful choice. Defendant CoreCivic, Inc., (“CoreCivic”), the billion-dollar private prison corporation that owns and operates Stewart, maintains a deprivation scheme intended to force detained immigrants to work for nearly free. CoreCivic deprives detained immigrants of basic necessities like food, toothpaste, toilet paper, and soap—and contact with loved ones—so that they have to work in order to purchase those items and costly phone cards at CoreCivic’s commissary. CoreCivic then threatens detained immigrants who refuse to work with serious harm, including the deprivation of privacy and safety in open living quarters, referral for criminal prosecution, and, ultimately, the sensory and psychological deprivation of their humanity resulting from solitary confinement. Under these circumstances, no labor is voluntary – it is forced. What type of work, you ask? CoreCivic is padding its already substantial profits by making detainees keep the facility running. CoreCivic’s deprivation scheme ensures that the individuals detained in Stewart provide the billion-dollar corporation with a ready supply of available labor needed to operate the facility. Detained immigrants mop, sweep, and wax floors; scrub toilets and showers; wash dishes; do laundry; clean medical facilities; and cook and prepare food and beverages daily for the nearly 2,000 individuals locked inside Stewart. For this labor, CoreCivic pays detained immigrants between $1 and $4 per day and occasionally slightly more for double shifts. When CoreCivic needs “volunteers” to work double shifts in the kitchen or to work more than five days per week, as it often does to run Stewart, it employs a policy of threatening detained immigrants until they comply. Under no circumstances does CoreCivic pay the detained immigrant workers anything close to the federal minimum wage. The plaintiffs’ stories are devastating. There’s Shoaib Ahmed, a Bangladeshi man who gave up his claim to asylum as a result of the living conditions at Stewart; Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a Guatemalan citizen still seeking asylum; and Margarito Velazquez Galicia, a Mexican citizen fighting deportation whose wife and children are U.S. citizens. Barrientos and Galicia earn just $1 to $4 most days—and $8 only when they work 12 or more hours in a day. Read more