Northwest Detention Center

The private prison system in America has its origins in the early eighties with the establishment of Corrections Corporations of America, now CoreCivic, who were contracted to build the Houston Processing Center on behalf of Immigration and Naturalization Services, now known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) in 1983. This was followed by the establishment of Geo Group in 1987, which remains CoreCivic’s only private prison competitor.⁶

The key change to track in the development of the American private prison system is that they were originally created as a way to supplement the demand to house criminals through the late 2000s. When this criminal population shrank, these companies pivoted to repurpose their facilities to detain noncriminal immigrants for the civil immigration system.⁷ This diversified their portfolio to hold prisoners for ICE (noncriminals), U.S. Bureau of Prisons (criminals), U.S. Marshals Service (people awaiting trial) and non-federal authorities, who may include state, local and international customers.⁸

The creation of new facilities through Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSA) to appease all of these business partners “do not follow a competitive bidding process, nor do they require providers to submit past performance reviews, which is a deviation from federal procurement regulations and can increase the likelihood of substandard conditions.”⁹ This muddling of criminal and immigrant actions eventually spread outside of the prison walls with a provision of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act known as 287(g), wherein the Attorney General may authorize police to interrogate and arrest persons suspected of being in violation of federal immigration law.¹⁰ Despite longstanding public disapproval,¹¹ the perpetuation of the private prison system in America is a bi-partisan government effort, with Barack Obama having the highest annual rate of detained persons per year, according to ICE year end reports.¹², ¹³

The Northwest Detention Center, which GEO Group opened in 2004 as a 500 beds facility (now around 1,575 beds as of 2021)¹⁴ and generates 57 million in annual revenue at full occupancy.¹⁵ The Center is abutted by the Puyallup River to the south, the City Waterway to the North and intersected by the Northern Pacific Railway line. The sprawling, low level facility isn’t visible from most areas of downtown Tacoma, yet less than an hour’s walk away via the Murray Morgan Bridge.

The center has been observed violating both international human rights law and constitutional citizen protections. Inmates have engaged in multiple hunger strikes in response to repeated allegations of medical neglect, unsanitary conditions, wage theft, delayed immigration hearings and sexual assault.¹⁶ These allegations are commensurate with the types of grievances reported on a national scale by the American Immigration Council. Additionally, the frequency of these grievances being reported in private prisons is 1500% more frequent than in public institutions.¹⁷

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Though Thomas Carstens and Geo Group have no economic or genealogical ties to one another as corporations, their motivations for occupying this same space are similar. Both businesses knew that they wanted to exploit a resource, and wanted to be at just enough of a remove to be out of sight and out of mind to the residents of the urban center, while being close enough to benefit centrality of trade routes, tax breaks and proximity to unorganized labor. Both corporations utilized distance and perception, asking how far away can you be from a city’s residents to avoid accountability, while still close enough to impact them environmentally or psychologically on a daily basis?