The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The detention center opened at 150th Avenue and 182nd Street in South Jamaica in 1997 to process asylum seekers who claimed there was a “credible fear” of returning to their homeland. It is named for the Wackenhut Corporation, a private provider of correctional facilities that used to operate the facility.

Detainees will now be sent to county jails in Batavia, New York and Elizabeth, New Jersey, where it costs $53 per night to house each person. It costs $225 per night at Wackenhut. USICE is moving to these facilities because Wackenhut does not allow them to hold people accused of crimes, and the Batavia and Elizabeth facilities will allow the government to hold all detainees in one place whether they are accused of crimes or not.
Activists with Human Rights First, a human rights watchdog group that is working to better the conditions of detainees in the United States, applauded the move because of Wackenhut’s low release rate. Heidi Altman, a program associate with the group, said that Wackenhut is also inappropriately jail-like despite the fact that detainees there are not charged with any crimes.
“There’s very little access to outdoor recreation. The only time they get to move around, they are in a closed room, with an open but grated ceiling.”
But she said that’s typical of many detention facilities, including the Elizabeth, New Jersey building that will serve as the new detention center for those seeking asylum at Kennedy Airport. “It’s hard to say that one of them is worse when all of them have such inhumane conditions.”
The total amount spent adds up quickly. There is room for 200 people at Wackenhut and the average wait to see a judge is six to eight months.
Unfortunately for those seeking asylum, seeing the judge is the first step in either being released or sent back to their home country. It was possible to spend years in Wackenhut pleading one’s case and still be deported. The conditions are notoriously bad and inmates are not allowed outside for the duration of their stay.
One immigrant’s harrowing story is recounted in Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan’s tapestry of Queens, “Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America.” They chronicled the journey of a man named Bovic, who left civil war in Zaire only to spend over two years at Wackenhut before being released.
Bovic spent $2,500 to flee Zaire and arrived in a cargo plane at Kennedy Airport, where he requested asylum. A judge ruled in October of 1997 that he would be able to apply for asylum, but during the next two years the government tried to deport him three times only to be thwarted by his otherwise chronically absent lawyer.
Bovic described the facility to the authors. “That first day, they took me ... to a fully-bedded dormitory with all men who are there in orange uniforms. I thought, surely this is a mistake. In a field of 40 beds, one of them is mine. To my right is the desk of the security officer. To the left, three toilets. No door to give you privacy. The showers, the toilets, the telephone booths, even the prayer station ... must be seen by the security official who sits with his eyes on you ...
“What else is in this Wackenhut universe? A Ping-Pong table. A TV with some chairs around. A small, maybe three-by-three square meter room that they call a library, but I have to find another word for that room because most books people needed were not found there.” He also describes the “worst-quality” food and concludes, “Of all that I have been through, my time at Wackenhut prison is the darkest period in my life.”
Bovic was eventually released but was unable to join his child and wife. She had moved in with another man in Canada, she said, because Bovic had been detained too long.