Hans Von Spakovsky Summary

The return and removal of illegal immigrants from the United States is one of the most widely discussed topics. Since 2007the United States Customs and Border Protection (ICE) has returned or removed over 1.2 million illegal immigrants from the United States. ICE has expanded its Criminal Alien Program to included incarcerated criminal illegal aliens.  In 2007, ICE identified 164,296 convicted criminals who were incarcerated in Federal, state and local penitentiaries (These are people who came into the United States illegally and committed a crime.)

With the exponential increases in government expenditure on immigration enforcement since 2001, private industry accurately views immigration detention as a growth industry, and corporations have therefore devoted their resources to lobbying for those policies and programs that will increase their opportunities to do business with the federal government (DWN.org). Speculations that private prison corporations are more concerned with generating profit rather than the safety and security of detainees have emerged. Human rights violations have become more apparent through raids, deportations, and detentions against immigrants have been rampant with rationalization made in the name of homeland security since 9/11. The potential profitability of ownership and operation of detention centers are not the only means for generating profits, private industries operating within federal, state, and local facilities stand to generate substantial profit from subsidiary industries as well. Under the guise of protection of the general public and homeland security, these private prison systems create an image of being the solution to the “immigration problem,” when in reality most are only concerned

The United States is less the 5% of the world population but has almost 25% of the world’s prison population (Coates, 2015; Waldman, 2016). In the last 40 years, the number of American civilians imprisoned by the United States has increased 500%. (Mauer, 2011). However, this explosion in incarceration rates has not been evenly distributed throughout the American population (Waldman, 2016). While one in seventeen White men will be imprisoned in their lifetime, one in sixteen Latino men will face this fate and for Black men, the number is one in three (Mauer,2011). Neither the racial disparity in incarceration nor its scale was accidental (Coates, 2015). The mass incarceration of Black men in the United States was a direct result of the “War

The United States has the biggest imprisonment rate on the planet, and paying a high cost for it. Detainment strength finished in the mid-1970s when the jail populace expanded from 300,000 to 1.6million detainees, and the imprisonment rate from 100 for each 100,000 to more than 500 for every 100,000. Nonetheless, there is by all accounts little relationship between the wrongdoing rate and the imprisonment rate (Clear et al., 2013).

Although illegal immigrants only make up less than four percent of the total population in the United States, five percent of the population in both state and federal prisons is made up of those who are not United States citizens. Between 2010 and 2014, 121 illegal immigrants who were released from immigration custody were later charged with murder (Shoichet, 2015). Figures show that immigrants are three times more likely to be convicted of murder than the general population. Each year, approximately 900,000 legal and illegal immigrants are arrested, and 700,000 of these end up being released. Illegal immigrants account for 12 percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences, and 16

This paper will attempt to validate the abusive nature within ICE’s Immigration Detention Centers. Specifically, the abuse that women and children suffer by high risk detainees and ICE agents within the detention centers. Additionally, this paper will also challenge the infrastructure along the southwest border, specifically on overcrowded and antiquated detention centers. Furthermore, how the financial impact to detain, process and release or deportation of undocumented immigrants has become a burden on U.S. tax payers. Lastly, how the lack of concern for human rights has become a crisis at the U.S. and Mexican border.

This book is contains information on how detainees are treated in prisons created by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Some of the prisoners did have felonious conviction and were to be deported. Nevertheless, many of the individuals interrogated were immigrants looking for refuge and were being held in prisons as if they were also offenders. The obnoxious management described in this source anticipates demonstrating how non-citizens have been assumed to be lawbreakers.

Furthermore, Americans account for 25 percent of all prisoners, even though they make up only five percent of the worldwide population of prisoners and non-prisoners (Hawkins). Since many of them will return to jail, incarcerating large amounts of convicts does not appear to be useful. These increased incarceration rates have increased prisoners’ costs. Mark Cohen, expert on government enforcement, states that in 1998, “the cost for one career criminal was $1,500,000”. Just a decade later, that cost has significantly increased from about 2,600,000 to $5,300,000 (Cohen and Piquero). Since the total charge is a conservative estimate, it could be more or less than the actual. The dramatic increase should be alarming to everyone in the United States, and should lead people to question their government representatives on whether or not it is an appropriate amount of money to spend on criminals. For example, concerned citizens could write letters to their representatives to suggest the following plan: create programs that allow inmates to unite and speak about their problems with each other, along with a psychologist. In a recent news article, a former prisoner named Alacia Alamo speaks about the Alternatives to Violence Project (Benson). The workshop taught her how to communicate with others and enabled her to adapt a new attitude

“The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population and is also home to 25% of the world’s prisoners. A little country with 5% of the world’s population having 25% of the world’s prisoners? One out four human beings with their hands on bars, shackled in the world are locked up here in the land of the free. In 2016 the United States had 2.3 million prisoners. The United States has now the highest the rate of incarceration in the world” (Averick, Spence & Barish, Howard & DuVernay, Ava, 2016). “The nation’s criminal justice system is indeed broken. People of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos, are targeted by the police and face harsher prison sentences than whites” (Coker, D., 2003). The money our government spends on mass

In today’s mainstream prisons there has been a dramatic increase in the number of U.S. citizens who are being incarcerated every day. In the article State Incarcerations: Global Context, Chang (2013) reports “The U.S. incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents…our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world”. The 716 individuals who were incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails, about half this number among the population of those who are

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. (The Editorial Board)

The United States prisons have “more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 942 juvenile correctional facilities, and 3,283 local jails and 79 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons" (Wagner, Rabuy). The United States comprises 4.4 percent of the world population, but accounts for 22% of the world’s prison population. Referring to Jewkes, “young men of African American or African Caribbean descent have borne the brunt of racist and stereotypical news reports about crimes ranging from offices involving drugs, gang membership, guns, homicide, and sexual violence” (54). The high drug problem is part of the reason for Americas high levels of lethal crime. According to Lopez “unlike regimes like China, it makes use of less punitive punishments like the death penalty" (#).

There were 74,911 federal sentences in 2014. Out of the 74,911 sentences, 37% of them were illegal immigrants. Immigrants committed 16.8% of drug trafficking and 74.1% of drug possession. They also committed 20% of kidnapping and hostage taking, 12.3% of money laundering, and 12% of murder convictions (May).

The growing Prison Industrial Complex is an intricate web of profit-maximizing business endeavors at the expense of the livelihood of people of color in the continental United States and abroad. With immigration from Mexico and Latin America increasing each year and definitions of who is “legal” becoming more constricting as the Obama administration cracking down on illegal border crossing, undocumented immigrants are the fastest growing prison population.

America is perceived the world over as the “Promised Land” where everything is possible. This lucrative perception leads many immigrants to seek diverse ways to enter this vast land of promise, with the aim of living the American dream. Illegal immigrants are considered the medium behind some of criminal activities perpetuated in America. Their participation in such criminal activity is prevalent in most criminal prosecutions and convictions, in state and federal criminal justice departments. The American criminal justice system has bared the brunt of illegal criminal activities, alleged to have been committed