Dark
profits in industry of migrant detention;
As
private security firms craft a global business, abuses in camps soar
NINA
BERNSTEIN , September 30, 2011 Friday. The International Herald Tribune
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.
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 science professor 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, 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 autumn, 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, the 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 Aborigine 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.''
