PHOTO/RENNETT STOWE
ATLANTA, GA — Stewart Detention Center is a private, for-profit prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), located in Lumpkin, in rural South Georgia. Hundreds of immigrants are detained there awaiting deportation by ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of Homeland Security. In June a hunger strike protested the deplorable conditions. The strike lasted only one day as prison officials launched an attack that included pepper spraying the detainees and putting the facility on a 24-hour lock-down.
The deplorable conditions included food that is several days old; maggots in the food, and the kitchen is roach-infested. Yet it is this or nothing. The air conditioning is cut off at night and inmates suffer in the sweltering heat. The showers have no hot water if they work at all. A family member told the Atlanta Progressive News, “My husband has to beg for toilet paper. They are screamed at and treated like animals.”
Pedro Guzman, a former inmate, told the ACLU, “After 20 months away from home, you lose faith, you feel worthless, this place breaks you. The constant screaming and verbal abuse the guards inflict on the detainees is just made to break your soul and handicap you.”
ICE says the food meets federal standards, and state health inspectors have given Stewart a 96% rating. But that only states the obvious: it is acceptable for the State and the private corporations to brutally abuse those whom they deem to be worthless.
Here at Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, you see the ugly face of the drive for private profit. The detainees and the other prisoners throughout the American penal system are the throwaways, those who are no longer needed and are being excluded from society. So the exploitation rises to pathological proportions. No human being should be treated this way. As a result, CCA’s revenue has risen by over 60% in just the last decade; their stock prices have risen to $30 from less than $3. They made more than $301 million just last year.
The profits are extracted not just from the brutal cuts in resources, but in treating the detainees as a virtual slave-labor force. They are forced to work for $1 to $3 an hour at the same time they are being deprived of necessities.
The situation at Stewart is horrible, but we should not conclude that this is just an extreme example, or exceptional. It is a harbinger, an indicator of where this society is going if we do not put an end to a rapacious private property that is gobbling up every basic necessity of life, while at the same time more and more of us are losing our jobs or forced to work at below-poverty wages. It is private property, using the State as an instrument of force, that is standing in the way of the workers, the vast majority, who have to fight for survival, but are in reality fighting for a cooperative society that will distribute to all according to need. Private property and the State must be abolished if we are to go forward.
No more Lumpkins!
