Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Tuesday, August 21, 2007

TX Private Prisons - What's The Mystery?

Everybody on the outside loves a good mystery. This one comes to us from Del Rio, home of the Val Verde Correctional Facility, a private detention center run by the Florida-based Geo Group. It seems detainees at the 875-bed lockup have been getting sick and dying from what the San Antonio Express-News dubbed a “mysterious illness.” [Cue creepy Twilight Zone theme.] So far two inmates have died and two more have been hospitalized. More people, including guards, are rumored to have fallen ill. Three of the men were undocumented immigrants from Honduras and Mexico.

The men showed symptoms of erratic behavioral changes followed by incontinence and dehydration, reported the Express-News. Geo Group officials and the Texas Department of State Health Services haven’t figured out what befell the men, so they’ve called in the big guns from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate. The CDC team has not provided any answers publicly, but have promised a statement soon.

The criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast wonders if the Unsolved Mystery could be tuberculosis, a jailhouse scourge. State health officials haven’t ruled that possibility out. “I can’t tell you it isn’t tuberculosis,” Dr. Sandra Guerra-Cantu, an official with state health services told the Del Rio News Herald. “The presence of tuberculosis is almost expected in any correctional facility.”

That equivocation doesn’t sit well with Grits.

Because of its method of transmission, prisons and jails are a prime breeding ground for TB. But for exactly those reasons health officials should be scurrying to prevent it. If TB was the cause of not one but two inmate deaths in Del Rio, that’s a much bigger deal than Guerra-Cantu makes it out to be.

Incidentally, at another Geo-run detention camp in Tacoma, Washington 300 immigrant detainees recently became sick, possibly from food poisoning. But officials aren’t sure and are calling that incident a “mystery” as well.


Real Cost of Prison

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