The U.S. criminal legal system is under increased scrutiny for perpetuating racial and economic injustices, with private prison operators profiting from mass incarceration and immigration detention, compromising human rights. Anthony Enriquez, VP of U.S. Advocacy & Litigation at RFK Human Rights, sheds light on the financial drivers behind the system’s expansion, emphasizing the crucial role the investment community must play in reform. Teaming up with ACLU, National Immigration Project, and Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, Anthony and RFK Human Rights’ team released a new report exposing systemic human rights abuses against immigrants detained in Louisiana.
One of the core pillars of RFK Human Rights is Justice, and working alongside grassroots partners in the US and around the world to confront systemic problems through litigation and advocacy aimed at structural change. Can you tell us a little more about this work at RFK and examples of the work you have led during your time with the organization?
The U.S. Advocacy and Litigation program uses movement lawyering to reduce the scope and power of mass incarceration in American society, a cause that’s been called the civil rights issue of our time. That means we work with both the criminal and immigration legal systems, where we fight for systemic change to policing, prisons, and detention centers that will stop racial discrimination, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
We advocate for police and prison policies that move beyond retribution and toward lasting reparation for harm. For example, we helped pass a ban on juvenile solitary confinement in Minnesota by convening United Nations experts with survivors of solitary confinement in a public forum where they could tell their stories with dignity. In a case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, we’re challenging impunity for the police killing of environmental protestor Manuel Paez Terán. One objective of the case is to give Manuel’s mother a chance to reclaim the public memory of her son after local police tarnished the family’s reputation in an attempt to justify state violence.
We also support local campaigns to close immigration detention centers, sites of widespread human rights abuses. Unlike criminal detention, immigration detention is supposed to be non-punitive. But we’re currently litigating cases where immigration detention center guards have pepper sprayed and body slammed detained people for peacefully hunger striking for better conditions of confinement. We recently released a report documenting systemic human rights abuses against people detained in nine Louisiana immigration detention centers, eight of them run by private prison companies.
A coalition of immigrants’ rights groups including Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, the ACLU, the ACLU of Louisiana, Immigration Services & Legal Advocacy, and the National Immigration Project recently released a new report documenting widespread abuse and inhumane treatment at nine immigration detention facilities across Louisiana. What are some of the key findings from this report?
Over the course of two years of research and 6,384 witness interviews, a handful of the abuses we learned about include:
- An Ethiopian asylum seeker was driven to contemplate suicide after he was denied interpretation in his indigenous language for months, leaving him isolated from human contact.
- A married couple fleeing persecution in Russia for protesting the Ukraine invasion, separated and sent to different Louisiana detention centers but suffering the same malnutrition from substandard diets, leaving her without a menstrual cycle and him with rapid weight loss of 40 pounds, a quarter of his weight.
- A group of 200 people on hunger strike in protest of unsanitary living conditions, were doused with pepper spray and locked for three hours in a housing unit without running water while their eyes and mouths burned.
- An unaccompanied child from Ghana was held in adult detention for months after officials used discredited pseudoscience to claim he had the bones of an 18-year-old.
- A previously healthy 42-year-old man suddenly died while detained, one of eight deaths in Louisiana detention centers over the last five years due to medical neglect.
Sadly, these stories are emblematic of systemic patterns of abuse in Louisiana immigration detention centers. Negligent medical care, chronic understaffing and inadequate supervision, and unsanitary and unsafe conditions of confinement plague all of the Louisiana detention centers.
The report paints a stark picture of the conditions within these immigration detention centers. Could you elaborate on the systemic issues that contribute to these abuses, and how they are perpetuated across multiple facilities?
The nine immigration jails of Louisiana, jointly managed and overseen by the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement Field Office (NOLA ICE), share common features.
- Eight of the nine NOLA ICE jails are converted criminal facilities with dark histories of mistreatment of incarcerated people who are alive in cultures of abuse today.
- Eight of the nine NOLA ICE jails are operated by private prison companies, providing a cost-cutting motive for subpar treatment of detained people.
- Eight of the NOLA ICE jails hold people for prolonged periods of detention ranging from several months to years, in violation of laws mandating the release of people who are neither dangerous nor a flight risk.
- All of the NOLA ICE jails are located in rural areas isolated from legal resources in order to restrict detained peoples’ access to due process.
- All of the NOLA ICE jails evade the federal government’s toothless oversight mechanisms despite years of findings of endemic abuse.
In addition to detailing the abuses, the report offers recommendations for change. What are some of the key policy or legislative reforms proposed, and how do you envision these changes being implemented to protect the rights of those detained?
There are some immediate steps the federal government can take to reduce the scale of immigration detention in Louisiana.
First, the executive branch can issue a directive prohibiting the detention of individuals particularly vulnerable to serious harm or abuse in immigration detention. This would include people with medical and mental health conditions and disabilities that the government is unable to adequately treat in detention, speakers of less common languages whose translation and interpretation needs the government cannot accommodate, and LGBTQ+ people, who are often locked in solitary confinement for their purported “protection” from sexual and physical abuse.
Second, the federal government can cancel or cease to renew contracts with private prison companies where there are documented systemic failures to adhere to minimum standards of care for detained people. The contracts for detention centers require private prison companies to adhere to these standards. So where they don’t, private prison operators are breaching their contracts.
In the long term, the federal government should get out of the business of immigration detention entirely. The immigration detention system is a sad example of corporate cronyism, enriching a handful of companies with lucrative government contracts to inflict misery on vulnerable people.
These abuses do not happen in isolation and the report highlights the financial incentives that drive the expansion of the carceral system. Can you discuss how private prison operators, including CoreCivic and the Geo Group, and their investors profit from incarceration, and what this means for the broader criminal legal system?
Over 90% of people in immigration detention are held in private prisons. In 2023, the Geo Group, one of the main players in Louisiana immigration detention, reported an annual revenue of $2.41 billion. Incentivized by profit, private prison companies influence immigration policy by spending millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying for the expansion of the detention-to-deportation pipeline.
Immigration detention is lucrative, especially when jails avoid providing basic services like suitable food and clothing. To ensure maximum profits, private prison companies are incentivized to cut costs by understaffing facilities, paying detained people subminimum wages for custodial and other labor services, and denying sufficient food, clothing, and medical care, among other abuses.
In 2021, the Biden Administration issued an Executive Order directing the Attorney General not to renew contracts with private criminal detention facilities because “privately operated criminal detention facilities do not maintain the same levels of safety and security for people in the Federal criminal justice system or for correctional staff” as non-private facilities. But the order left private immigration detention contracts untouched, allowing companies to convert the same criminal jails and prisons into immigration detention centers. Private prison lobbying worked.
The issue of mass incarceration has been increasingly linked to racial and economic injustices, a core focus of the Business and Human Rights team. In your experience, how has the investment community responded to calls for divestment from companies that profit from the prison industrial complex and perpetuate these disparities?
There has been notable movement away from private prisons in the investment community. There also remains room for further engagement.
Public pension funds have led the way, with several eliminating direct holdings in the private prison industry. These funds include the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, New York State Common Retirement System, Philadelphia Board of Pensions and Retirements, New Jersey Pension Fund, California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and the California Public Employees Retirement System, the largest public pension fund in the United States.
On private side financing, Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and Wells Fargo & Co. have all declared they will no longer finance operators of private prisons and detention centers.
At the same time, the prison industrial complex scales beyond the big private prison operators alone. It also includes smaller companies that price gouge incarcerated people and their families through virtual monopolies on commissaries, phone services, prison healthcare, and probation services. Private equity firms still invest heavily in these companies. And major asset managers still have billions invested in the prison industrial complex, much of that hidden in retirement and other mutual fund accounts offered to everyday investors as total market index funds. Asset management companies have thus far ignored calls to disentangle the private prison industrial complex from these funds, saying there’s insufficient public demand.
What actions can investors or organizations take if they discover they are unknowingly funding private prison operators such as the GEO Group? Are there tools or resources from partners you engage with that can help people make more ethical investment decisions?
Pension fund trustees and individual investors can review their portfolios for direct and indirect exposure to the prison industrial complex and commit to divestment. Innovative organizations working to dismantle the commercialization of incarceration, like Worth Rises and Prison Free Funds, have good online tools that identify the companies fueling mass incarceration and explain in detail the roles they play within that system.
Fund trustees and managers have a fiduciary duty to investors to strongly consider divestment from the prison industrial complex. As more news of human rights abuses in private prisons hits the headlines, private prison companies are increasingly vulnerable to souring public sentiment. This has led to political shifts that bring long-term financial risks. States like Illinois, Iowa, and New York have all passed legislation banning private prisons. And both the Obama and Biden administrations issued orders intended to phase out privatized federal criminal detention.
Investors in pension funds can also push trustees to develop investment policies that prohibit profiting off of companies that engage in human rights abuses. This includes private prison companies in the United States.
And all of us can push our representatives, especially on the state level, for legislation that mandates greater transparency from companies fueling the prison industrial complex and for bans on further profiteering from human misery.
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