(The Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi)
OXFORD, Miss. – Father Walter J. Ciszek’s only crime was to
minister to laborers in a remote Ural Mountains village, but it was 1941 and
the American-born priest soon found himself swept into the Soviet Gulag, where
he would spend the next two decades.
“I could not overcome the shock occasioned by the total loss
of freedom and the sense of complete control held by someone else over my every
action, my every liberty, my every need,” Ciszek would later write. “People
could disappear into those prisons and never be heard of again.”
The world’s largest gulag today is in the United States,
where a quarter of the world’s prison population is behind bars, and
Mississippi is at the heart of that gulag with the nation’s fifth highest
incarceration rate.
Although the state has reduced its prison population in
recent years, new arrivals from as far away as India and Nepal may reverse that
trend, and what’s more, many of these new arrivals have committed no crime.
The epicenter of this new trend appears to be the
for-profit, CoreCivic-owned Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in the Delta
town of Tutwiler. The U.S. Marshals Service this summer contracted to send 1,350
federal inmates to the 2,672-bed prison, and sources say hundreds of asylum
seekers are also being housed there.
Like Father Ciszek, asylum seekers have committed no crime.
They came to the United States believing the words on the pedestal of the
Statue of Liberty and seeking refuge from either gut-wrenching poverty or the
violence and corruption of drug cartels and dictatorships in their homeland.
“These are people who spent their last dime to get here,
probably being picked up God knows where,” says Lisa Graybill of the Southern
Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. “Asylum seekers don’t know what
rights they have.”
I contacted the prison, CoreCivic, and the U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and none of them is willing to break down the
numbers or provide specifics on what is going on inside the prison walls. Many
of the detainees or inmates may be undocumented migrants. At least some have
come from prisons in other states like South Carolina.
President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy on undocumented
migrants has been a boon to the private prison industry, in this writer’s mind
an abomination that turns the judicial system into a profit-seeking enterprise.
The month that the U.S. Marshals Service announced its plans
for the Tutwiler facility, CoreCivic’s stock rose 3.5 percent. One of the
nation’s largest private prison companies, CoreCivic, like the industry as a
whole, benefits not only from government largesse but also from the financial
backing of major banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
CoreCivic, by the way, was a financial contributor to
Trump’s inauguration.
Asylum seekers are supposed to be given a court hearing and
vetted in a process that shouldn’t take longer than a month. However, CoreCivic
and ICE won’t confirm or deny their presence, much less their length of stay,
their access to family and legal counsel, the scheduling of hearings.
If the past is prelude to the future, the situation must be
scary for anyone behind the walls of the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility.
“The Tutwiler facility has a sordid record,” says Bill
Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance.
Indeed, it was the scene of a violent riot in 2004 in which
inmates set fire to a portable toilet, clothing and mattresses. Another CoreCivic
facility, the Adams County Correctional Center, was the scene of an inmate riot
in 2012 with inmates taking guards hostage. One correctional officer died in
the incident.
So, you tired, poor, “huddled masses yearning to breathe
free” and who’ve just arrived at Tutwiler, welcome to Mississippi.
This column appears in
the current edition of the Jackson Free Press of Jackson, Mississippi.
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