updated: prison companies profiting from the crackdown on immigration -- an international problem

On September 28, as part of its series on immigration detention, the New York Times addressed the scandal of seemingly uncontrollable immigrant abuse by the multinational prison industry in an article entitled "Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit."

... 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.

As Bob Sloan (contributor to ALEC Exposed, which just won the Sidney Award for Excellence in Socially Conscious Journalism) noted three weeks ago, 50% of all imprisonment in the U.S federal system this year was immigrant detention!

More below the squiggle...