GEO company. The Lucrative Business of Bodies Where Slavery Still Flourishes.

The excerpt from Chapter LIX of Book UNDER RED NOTICE by Gregory Duralev.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYuAeULW1uU

...We were herded onto buses and driven north of Los Angeles to Adelanto, a facility run by GEO Group, one of the giants in the private-prison business. Designed specifically for immigration detainees, it nonetheless felt like a chameleon: individual cells instead of open dorms, metal tables in the common area, glass-fronted doors framed in steel. In my mind, it had clearly been built as a convertible, ready to pivot from “civil” immigration holding to full criminal incarceration the moment the immigrant supply dried up.

Conditions were marginally better than at Theo Lacy. The staff were civilians hired by GEO under contract with DHS, so the atmosphere carried at least the veneer of a civilian institution rather than a jail. Yet the legal research system, LexisNexis, was a relic, frozen in cases no later than 2018, even though we were already deep into 2019. Whether GEO was pinching pennies or the people responsible were simply negligent hardly mattered; the effect was the same. Access to justice arrived pre-sabotaged.

Persistent rumors circulated through the dorms, whispering from people to people: that GEO company were quietly greasing palms at DHS – if not directly White House officials – under the current administration, all to keep beds filled and contracts fat. The numbers supported the whispers. Under the new administration, average detention grew from roughly three months to six or fifteen months for many. The detainee population exploded from 17,000 to 50,000. At 2017 government itself estimates of $158 daily per detainee: seventeen thousand detainees earlier meant $2.7 million daily – nearly $1 billion yearly; fifty thousand detainees under a new administration meant $8 million daily – nearly $3 billion yearly – three times the taxpayer burden. Windfall profits for GEO.

Moreover, if these rumors were true, GEO’s international operations – Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom – make routing “gratitude payments” to officials’ offshore accounts for supplying detainees funded by U.S. taxpayers – essentially bribes – far simpler than if GEO were a purely domestic organization under U.S. oversight and banking scrutiny. Thus, the rumors, then, were not paranoia; they were plausible arithmetic and offered answers for why the current White House policy was to detain as many civilians as possible and hold them in detention as long as possible.

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Listening to all these rumors swirling through the dorms, I couldn’t help but think: “Hm... it seems the business of slavery in the United States has just found another form... Detention of people had become spectacularly lucrative, and to keep the revenue stream flowing, someone, somewhere, allegedly had to keep the right officials smiling."

In the end, the country drifted, quietly, almost politely, into a lattice of concentration camps for immigrants: ostensibly erected to guard the border, yet in truth a steady, deliberate hemorrhage of federal dollars, applauded by those who despised newcomers without ever pausing to notice that their own tax money very likely was being funneled straight into the pockets of a privileged handful around GEO Group and its government counterparts.

The dorms inside this immigration detention factory, designed to monetize human bodies, rose two stories high – nine to ten cells arranged along both sides of a rectangle with a common area featuring metal tables and metal fixed chairs – something I had seen in the kitchen area of Battleship Missouri in Honolulu on a tour when I’d travelled to Pearl Harbor. In the common area there were four TV screens at the top of the walls and two computers for preparing legal work. One door downstairs opened onto an area open to the sky, with pull-up bars, parallel bars, and a basketball hoop. Each cell held a thick glass door caged in a steel frame, two-tier bunks, and a small bathroom. Communal showers waited downstairs.

For me, the greatest mercy was the pair of computers bolted right inside the dorm – no need to beg escorts to the library. I could rise at six, and work at one of the computers by six-thirty until lights-out at eleven.

The GEO employees were, almost without exception, shockingly unprofessional. Chronic understaffing – likely because GEO paid too little to keep competent people. Some officers appeared and acted as though they had been constantly demeaned in their lives outside, carrying a sense of personal underestimation. These were the very officers who compensated for it by issuing arbitrary and sometimes unlawful orders, or by standing aside when intervention was needed. Compared with the Theo Lacy guards, who at least possessed even though rough but professionalism even when they used force against me, the Adelanto staff seemed diminished, smaller.

Also, despite the Thirteenth Amendment and Lincoln’s signature in 1865, a form of slavery still flourished in GEO’s corners: detainees paid one dollar a day for labor, a token wage that masked exploitation while slashing operational costs against a federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.

One female officer stood out for sheer unhinged and unreasonable behavior. This officer amplified the indignity of detention. She routinely kept us locked in cells long after the count cleared, delaying release to the common area by twenty minutes for no reason. She denied fresh toilet paper when rolls ran out – a petty humiliation designed to remind us of our place. She relished the small amount of power she had over us, and it was clearly evident in her demeanor. Her provocations mounted until the dorm simmered.

I had never tried to intervene in her attitude toward others, and she had never directed her hostility at me. I simply observed from the sidelines, day after day, as her arbitrary use of power chipped away at people’s dignity. But when I believed her conduct had finally crossed every acceptable bound, pushing beyond mere rudeness into deliberate degradation, I suggested to the detainees who volunteered to clean the dorm for a dollar that they should stop doing it. Since it was a federal detention facility, they were supposed to hire independent workers, not rely on detainees for cheap labor. Only a handful showed up. In retaliation, she locked us down until compliance returned. That was the moment I proposed our own small movement of impeachment.

So, at that time, as we watched the U.S. Congress attempt to impeach the President on the common room television, I drafted my own ‘impeachment’ – a letter to the administration stating that her persistent disrespect and humiliation had fostered such hostility that we could no longer guarantee her safety on shift. Then, I proposed that everyone sign this letter, and by the end of the day, almost 90 of 100 people had signed it; others were afraid of repercussions. Of course, no one intended violence; we were not fools, but the letter itself created liability. Should anything happen, GEO would bear the blame for ignoring documented warnings. Soon after that, she disappeared from our dorm and never returned...

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