teleSUR English | 8/25/2016
California moved one step closer Tuesday to ending all contracts with for-profit immigrant detention centers, in the biggest push back against the Homeland Security’s immigration enforcement agency to drop the private prison companies since the Department of Justice dropped its practice of contracting for federal prisons last week.
The state assembly passed the Dignity Not Detention Act Tuesday and will send it back to the Senate, which already approved the bill, before it lands on the desk of the governor. Rather than focusing on cost savings, like the DOJ, the bill advances a moral argument against profiting off of immigrant detention — a business model that has allowed the private prison industry to balloon in the past decade under the Bush and Obama administrations.
“The Dignity not Detention Act takes a stand against the mass incarceration of immigrants in detention facilities and against inhumane immigration detention conditions,” said state Senator Ricardo Lara, who sponsored the bill, in a statement. “Our state and local governments should not be complicit in this awful practice of profiting off of human suffering.”
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Naomi Cohen | journalist 