American Gulag
Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons
Chapter One
The Art of Jailing
In late spring 1995 immigration detainees in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
engaged in a situation, an uprising, a melee, a riot, or a disturbance,
depending on your terminology. They broke a lot of glass and destroyed
furniture. The contract guards, none of them harmed, fled to the parking
lot and called for local law enforcement backup. The most surprising part
of this milestone in INS detention history is the Service's own postmortem
of it.
The three-hundred-bed facility housing primarily asylum seekers was owned
and operated for the INS by the Esmor Corporation. INS Commissioner Doris
Meissner directed the Headquarters Detention and Deportation Division to
review and investigate the June incident. The result was a
seventy-two-page report that reads very much like a report from Amnesty
International or Human Rights Watch. It details complaints that
immigrants' advocates could recite in their sleep: meaningless prisoner
grievance procedures, arbitrary use of disciplinary segregation, ... read full excerpt from American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons ebook
