On January 10, attorneys for Pax Christi USA filed an amicus brief with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in support of the state of New Jersey’s enactment of Assembly Bill (AB) 5207, which prohibits private and public facilities from entering into new detention contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and preventing the facilities from renewing their current contracts once they expire.
AB 5207 has been challenged by CoreCivic, the world’s largest private prison company, which has run the detention center in Elizabeth, NJ since 1996. It is the last remaining immigration detention center in the state. (Use this link to read a news report about the challenge to AB 5207, published in August 2023.)
Use this link to read the document filed in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
This filing is the most recent step in a decades-long effort by Pax Christi members in New Jersey to protest the practice of ICE detention and to raise awareness of the specific issues with private prisons and detention centers where the profit motive creates incentive for neglect and invites abuse.
The amicus brief argues that in banning ICE detention contracts the State of New Jersey is acting within its constitutionally authorized “police powers” to maintain the health and safety of people residing within its boundaries and specifically in banning the use of private prisons. The brief outlines several key arguments about private prisons, such as those administered by CoreCivic: 1) The federal government admits and has long known that private prisons are less safe than their government-run counterparts; 2) private prisons provide inadequate medical care due to their profit motives and the overall lack of accountability; and 3) private prisons lack transparency and are not accountable to the public.
“Pax Christi USA’s position is that New Jersey’s enactment of AB 5207 [in 2021] was a proper exercise of the State’s traditional police powers to protect the health and safety of those whom the federal government chooses to detain in New Jersey under its immigration authority,” said David Cinotti, attorney with Pashman, Stein, Walder, Hayden, the law firm providing pro bono assistance on this case.
The position that Pax Christi took in its brief is in keeping with the position of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops that has long questioned the ability of private prisons to care for people in their custody. In 2000, in a document entitled “Responsibility, Rehabilitation, and Restoration: A Catholic Perspective on Crime and Criminal Justice, the bishops wrote: “We bishops question whether private, for-profit corporations can effectively run prisons. The profit motive may lead to reduced efforts to change behaviors, treat substance abuse, and offer skills necessary for reintegration into the community.”
In 2003 the Catholic Bishops of the South followed up with a pastoral letter entitled Wardens from Wall Street: “Prisoners are persons, with inherent God-given human dignity. When prisoners become units from which profit is derived, there is a tendency to see them as commodities rather than as children of God. Our troubled times have taught us that, once people are dehumanized, they are more liable to be exploited, abused and violated and to becoming more violent themselves.”
More recently, in 2021, Newark’s Cardinal Joseph Tobin, in an interview with the Star Ledger, highlighted the danger of the dehumanization that occurs with people in ICE detention when he said. “When you take away somebody’s humanity, that gives you license to do heinous things to them.”