Free the Children of Texas' Hutto Prison
The following comes from the Free the Children of Texas' Hutto Prison MySpace page: The children at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, 35 miles northeast of Austin, live in cells; they wear uniforms and receive inadequate medical and educational services, are often cold and hungry, separated from their parents as punishment, and until the recently filed ACLU case received only one hour of schooling per day and rarely played outside. They are guilty of no crimes, and endanger no one. Their parents, who are incarcerated here because they are seeking asylum after fleeing such circumstances as war, torture, political persecution and rape, or are accused of violating civil immigration laws, have committed no crimes. Many of the children are US Citizens.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the arm of Homeland Security that runs the two centers, relies on custody rules designed for inmates
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a for profit company running the majority of privatized prisons in the US, is paid 2.8 million dollars a month (7k per child per month or 84k per child per year) to keep these children behind bars.
It would cost less to put them up at the Austin Hilton with room service.
In contrast, putting a monitoring bracelet/anklet on a parent costs $660 per month.
In past years CCA has made political contributions to key Texas politicians, 100k to Tom Delay and 100k to Governor Perry. Overall, for profit prison companies contributed roughly 519k to state level political campaigns in one year alone. Lt Governor Dewhurt's cut was 53k, while House Speaker Craddick received 34.9k.
Why free the children when keeping them locked up makes so much money?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following is from a bulletin about the Hutto Prison:
There is a prison camp in Taylor, Texas named Hutto Residential Center. It opened in May of last year. It has hundreds of children from six months old and up with their moms imprisoned there -- in cells, 22 hours a day, prison uniforms, behind razor wire walls -- for profit by a private prison company called Correctional Corporation of America (CCA).
The imprisonment of innocent children flies in the face of everything that democracy, liberty, and justice is supposed to be about. It violates everything in the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The lease on the prison camp was to expire January 31, 2007. Yet, on January 30, despite the outpouring of local citizens’ protest and appeal, the Williamson County Commissioners unanimously voted to extend the lease for two years.
This is a project between Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) -- and private prisons. The private prison CCA gets $7000 a month PER CHILD that it has incarcerated. This is not only immoral, it is criminal. It is insanity.
Local activists have brought national and international attention on this facility, owned by the Corrections Corporation of American (CCA), which imprisons children and their families for profit under the same horrendous conditions as when it was a prison for adults.
Approximately 400 immigrants are incarcerated in Hutto, and at least half of the prisoners are children, according to Texans United for Families. Many of the immigrants--who are limited to countries other than Mexico--have made requests for asylum in the U.S. They await deportation hearings without any charges for months, and sometimes years.
On March 6, 2007 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on behalf of 10 children in the Taylor jail. The ACLU based its lawsuit on a 1997 settlement protecting immigrant minors that resulted from a class-action suit accusing immigration officials of abusing minors. In its current initiative, the ACLU accuses Hutto of violating every provision of the 1997 settlement, including not giving children the right to wear their own clothes or have privacy.
According to depositions filed with the ACLU lawsuit, the guards at Hutto threaten unruly children with separation from their mothers. But this is often an echo of the threats that drove these families to the U.S. in the first place, to seek asylum.
Raouitee Pamela Puran came from Guyana after she and her four-year-old daughter Wesleyann Emptage were threatened by the people who kidnapped and murdered her husband.
“Wesleyann has heard the guards threaten that children who act up will be separated from their parents,” Raouitee said in her deposition. “Almost everyone has heard this. Wesleyann is terrified that something like that could happen to her. She is afraid of the guards because she thinks they have the power to take me away from her.”
Sherona Verdieu, a 13-year-old from Haiti whose father was kidnapped and eventually killed when her mother could not pay a ransom, said she worried about crying--that this could be a cause for separating her from her mother.
Elsa Carbajal--a 24-year-old woman from Honduras who survived a brutal rape committed by the son of a police officer who continued to terrorize her afterward--said that her 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter “think that they have done something wrong to be imprisoned in this jail.”
Angelina, Elsa’s daughter, suffered significant weight loss while in Hutto. She told her mother that she was always cold, but according to Elsa, she was yelled at for trying to take a blanket, while the guards wear gloves and heavy clothing.
The cruelty of the guards and prison officials that emerges from reading the lawsuit is hard to fathom.
Families are awakened at 5:30 or 5:45 a.m., and must be through bathing by 6 a.m. They are given 20 minutes to eat. “If we haven’t finished,” Elsa says, “the officials say they aren’t interested--the time to eat has finished.”
If the children haven’t finished, they have to throw away the food. “In some cases,” she says, “they have grabbed the food and thrown it in the trash in front of the children, and they cry because they say they are hungry.”
After the 20-minute meal, the prisoners return to their cells “to do nothing,” Elsa says. “They don’t allow us to sleep, only to sit and wait for the hours, days, months to pass.” The prisoners aren’t allowed to have books sent to them, and a great deal of the day is spent in senseless head counts to make sure no one has escaped.
Nine-year-old Kevin Yourdkhani, the son of Iranian-born parents who have sought asylum in Canada for several years, ended up in Hutto after the plane he and his family were travelling on was forced to make an emergency landing in Puerto Rico, where U.S. officials questioned their passports.
In his deposition, Kevin complained about the ridiculous excuse for an education system at Hutto. “Students” in the class of 25 ranged in age from six to 12 years old. “All we do is color and draw pictures and watch Spanish movies,” Kevin said. Kevin also said that his bed was small and cold, and stuck next to a smelly washroom. His mother had to use the toilet in front of him.
Once, when Kevin’s dad came in to fix the bed, guards told him that if his father was in his room again, both parents would be put in separate jails, and Kevin would be sent to a foster home. “I cried and cried,” he said. “I felt if I will be separated, I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents, and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”
• At Hutto, cell door systems prevent parents from attending to children after "lights out." At the Berks shelter, children over 5 sleep separately from their parents.
• Until recently, Hutto children were given one hour of schooling a day, five days a week. That recently has been increased to four.
• Teachers at the Hutto center are not required to be licensed in Texas, and the state's family welfare agency exempted Hutto from child-care licensing requirements.
• Separation and threats of separation were used as disciplinary tools on adults and children.
The Department of Homeland Security opened the Hutto center after Congress criticized the agency's separation of migrant children from their parents.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.
NOTE TO AUTHORS: If you are the author or owner of an article or video that I have made available through THEINFOVAULT.NET and you do not wish to have your article or video posted on theinfovault, please contact me and I will remove the item.