Arizona Looks Into Building Private Prison in Mexico

By JAMES BROOKE

PHOENIX Arizona prison officials have watched the population of Mexican
inmates skyrocket, from 58 in 1980 to 2,373 today.

At the same time, they have watched American factory owners move south of
the border to take advantage of Mexico's low wages.

So it seemed natural to Gov. Fife Symington, a Republican, to propose a
twist to the North American Free Trade Agreement: a plan to build a private
1,600inmate prison in Mexico to house the bulk of Arizona's Mexican
prisoners.

"It would mean big dollars to the operator and to the Mexican economy,"
said Terry L. Stewart, state corrections director. On April 10, Stewart
received two responses to a request for feasibility studies, one from a
prison company from Florida and the other from a group from Mexico.

The governor's chief of staff, Jay Heiler, has joined the sales pitch. "We
have a lot of rural communities around Arizona that compete for prison
projects," Heiler said. "So it is not as if we are trying to send some kind
of ugly industry south of the border."

This year, the cost of incarcerating the Mexicans is expected to hit $40
million, a bill that is largely paid by the 3.5 million residents of the
state.

A private prison in Mexico could halve that cost, estimated Michael
Garretson, chief operating officer of the Correctional Services Corporation
of Sarasota, Fla., the company that submitted a proposal. Labor accounts
for 70 percent of the cost of running a prison in the United States, he said.

"It's a great idea, a great concept," said Garretson, whose company runs a
400bed prison here and is building another, with 600 beds, in Florence.

To push the idea, Correctional Services, the Mexican group and Arizona
officials have held talks with officials from the state of Sonora, which
borders Arizona.

Although some state officials in Mexico are open to the idea, it faces a
formidable obstacle: it would require a bilateral treaty between the United
States and Mexico.

From Washington, a spokesman for the State Department cautioned that states
could not conduct their own foreign policies.

"Any kind of international agreement of that kind would have to be between
two national governments," the spokesman, a Latin America specialist, said
on condition of anonymity. "I don't know how two states could effect that
legally."

The Mexican counsel here, Luis Cabrera, said that without a treaty, there
would be jurisdictional problems. "Prisons in Mexico cannot be managed by
foreign authorities," Cabrera said.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Mexico City limited herself in a
telephone interview to saying: "There have not been any serious
discussions. Nothing has been decided."

Garretson said state officials were blunter when talking with him in
Sonora. "We got a lot of discussion of sovereignty, local control, even the
word imperialism," he said.

In contrast, Axel C.F. Holm, an American member of the Mexican group that
is studying the proposal, said of his contacts with Sonoran officials:
"They seem to be very open to the idea. We haven't met any real resistance."

"The Mexicans are interested in repatriation of their citizens," said Holm,
whose group, based in Sonora, is called la Comision Para Estudio de Prision
Particular, or the Committee for the Study of a Private Prison. "Our group
formed in Mexico because the prison is going to be located in Mexico."

Although the idea might have sounded outlandish 15 years ago, its currency
today stems from the growing population of foreigners in U.S. jails.
Foreigners account for 27 percent of the 109,000 prisoners in federal
jails, according to the Bureau of Prisons. Of the total, Mexicans account
for 10 percent, or 11,000.

On the state level, Mexicans account for 9.5 percent of the 145,000 inmates
in California and 10.5 percent of the 22,697 inmates in Arizona. Over the
last five years, the number of Mexicans jailed in Arizona has jumped 72
percent, double the 36 percent rate of increase for the state's prison
population as a whole.

New York and Florida, two other states with large populations of foreign
prisoners, have responded by speeding deportations. Early release is
conditioned on a prisoner's promising never to return to the United States.

"Our interest is getting foreign nationals, especially nonviolent
offenders, out of our system," said James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the
New York state Department of Correctional Services. "We would not be
interested in operating a state prison outside the borders of New York."

But California and Arizona, states that border Mexico, have been reluctant
to deport prisoners before their sentences are up. Instead, prison
authorities in both states have asked for federal help.

"We have been hammering away at the federal government to give us the money
to house them," a spokesman for the California Corrections Department, Tip
Kindel, said of the 14,000 Mexicans in state prisons there. "Or better yet,
take them off our hands and house them in federal prisons."

For two decades, the United States and Mexico have had an agreement for the
voluntary repatriation of prisoners.

"Unfortunately, the Mexicans haven't been raising their hands to go," said
Heiler, the governor's aide. With an Arizona prison in Mexico, he said, "it
wouldn't be a matter of their desire anymore."

In trying to sell the idea to the Mexican authorities, Arizona officials
paint the plan as a humanitarian gesture. There would be no international
border to block family visits. The prison language would be Spanish. The
cuisine would be Mexican.

Arizona's "request for information," mailed in February to 100 companies,
talks of providing a "more culturally compatible environment."

To skeptics, that conjures up images of Mexican prisons as places where
extortion, bribery, drug dealing and prostitution are rampant. Amnesty
International says guards in Mexico sometimes control prisoners with
beatings and electric shocks.

"People immediately jump to that view," Stewart said. "What they forget is
that it would operate according to American standards, just the way major
American corporations operate in Mexico."

The Arizona Republic, the state's largest newspaper, has cautiously
editorialized about the proposal, calling it "an interesting idea."

Many defense lawyers are hostile.

"It just smacks of opportunism," said Donna Leone Hamm, director of Middle
Prison Reform, a group in Tempe. "It's pretty frightening to think of the
United States government wanting to send people to prison in another
country just to save money. Where does that stop?"

Michael L. Piccarreta, a lawyer in Tucson and president of the state bar of
Arizona, dismissed the proposal as "a lousy idea."

"They should be revisiting the failed drug policies that end up
incarcerating large numbers of Mexicans for drug violations because we are
a border state," Piccarreta said from his office 40 miles north of the
border. "There is a country full of people, who, for $100, are willing to
take a backpack full of marijuana into our country."

Lawyers questioned how Mexicans transferred to an Arizona jail in Mexico
would have access to American lawyers, American law books and American
courts for appeals or lawsuits.

"What if inmates want to challenge conditions?" asked Andy Silverman, a
professor at the University of Arizona College of Law who specializes in
immigration law. "What if an inmate falls and breaks a leg? How does he sue?"

To handle this problem, Holm proposes that Mexico agree to transfer back to
Arizona Mexican prisoners who wish to pursue appeals or suits through the
American legal system.

State officials are optimistic that legal hurdles can be surmounted.

"We would still be liable for the lawsuits," said Stewart, who is preparing
to start a formal request for proposals from contractors. "It's so simple
and commonsensical that I don't know why anyone hasn't thought of this
before."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company