Thread: Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own

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December 27, 2008
Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.

Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.

After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.

In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.

If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.

Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.

Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.

But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.

In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.

Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.

Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.â€

More garbage from the New York Times

the jail held hundreds of people charged with.... no crime

They just don't get it. I wish someone could make them realize it IS a crime. But no matter how hard they try to act like its not a crime , it always will be.

Originally Posted by USA_born

the jail held hundreds of people charged with.... no crime

They just don't get it. I wish someone could make them realize it IS a crime. But no matter how hard they try to act like its not a crime , it always will be.

The poor dears. I feel so sorry for them, having to go to jail for breaking a law. That's just much too harsh.

This is why we need to deport illegals when they are first caught. if no one does anything about them they start to feel like they can get away with anything. By the time they are deported we are accused of splitting up familys and destroying communitys. They are breaking the law by being here and by working here, these lawbreakers need to be punnished. The same thing goes for the buisnesses that hire them. When there is no incentive for them to be here they will leave. We need to enforce our immigration laws just like any other law.

Originally Posted by disgustedamerican

This is why we need to deport illegals when they are first caught. if no one does anything about them they start to feel like they can get away with anything. By the time they are deported we are accused of splitting up familys and destroying communitys. They are breaking the law by being here and by working here, these lawbreakers need to be punnished. The same thing goes for the buisnesses that hire them. When there is no incentive for them to be here they will leave. We need to enforce our immigration laws just like any other law.

You took the words right out of my mouth. This is why we need to stop releasing them before deporting them, they think it is no big deal.

WELCOME TO ALIPAC disgustedamerican

I see you have been here a little while, but I don't think I have had the chance to say hello, we are glad you joined us.

Originally Posted by cayla99

Originally Posted by disgustedamerican

This is why we need to deport illegals when they are first caught. if no one does anything about them they start to feel like they can get away with anything. By the time they are deported we are accused of splitting up familys and destroying communitys. They are breaking the law by being here and by working here, these lawbreakers need to be punnished. The same thing goes for the buisnesses that hire them. When there is no incentive for them to be here they will leave. We need to enforce our immigration laws just like any other law.

You took the words right out of my mouth. This is why we need to stop releasing them before deporting them, they think it is no big deal.

WELCOME TO ALIPAC disgustedamerican

I see you have been here a little while, but I don't think I have had the chance to say hello, we are glad you joined us.

Looks like one town was doing it's job!

WELCOME TO ALIPAC disgustedamerican ....

Just keep enforcing the laws and stop the bleeding heart crap...these people know they are here illegally and they knew it while sneaking across the border or paying someone to smuggle them in!!

This is unconstitutional .....I'm offended!

Where's the violin?

Where were all these bleeding heats back in the 60's and 70's when so many AMERICAN kids were being thrown in jail for long periods of time just for smoking a bit of pot? I remember when NY passed the Rockefeller Laws, the harshest in the land at the time. Where was the outcry of families suffering separation? Of children losing parents? Well you get my drift.