The T. Don Hutto Residential Facility lies just past the intersection of Welch and Howard streets in Taylor, Texas, half an hour from Austin, but the prison's very existence situates it at painfully important intersections in American society today. Hutto deliberately stands at the crossroads of the worst examples of misguided immigration policy, the mislabeled "war on terror," the punishment-oriented criminal justice system and the privatization of previously nationalized services. These four aspects of American political life coincide like never before in the secluded facility across from the railroad tracks in Taylor.
The Hutto detention center does not exist strictly to execute immigration policy, but it serves as a reminder to foreign families seeking political asylum that the sunlit road to the American dream often has a pit stop behind bars. The facility reminds two million other prison inmates, as well as the millions affected by the prison system, that our country's judicial philosophy intends primarily to punish, while rehabilitation and prevention come in far behind. The Corrections Corporation of America, who owns and operates the prison, along with 64 others nationwide, is the domestic equivalent of Halliburton or Kellogg, Brown and Root - a member of the club of misery profiteers.
What to do, then, with a detention facility that brazenly defies international law regarding child imprisonment to the extent that the U.S. government denied access to a United Nations human rights special reporter in May? To the facility that even defies a 1997 court settlement, Flores v. Meese, that requires Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to ensure humane treatment for minors in custody?
The easy answer, the visceral response to hearing about children in jail and to political asylum seekers is also the correct one:
Shut down Hutto.
But that easy answer comes with a price, a lingering, "Great. Now what?"
The Hutto prison, at this malevolent locus of contemporary American politics, is half stockade, half symptom - a symptom of a problem that reaches far beyond its walls. Freeing its detainees is only the first step. The second is a critical reexamination of the decisions that led to preemptive incarceration, and the third is to alter the political culture that engenders such punitive policies. Complaints about stereotypical illegal immigrants are false. The prison does not hold migrant farm workers, it holds asylum seekers. For this reason also, a panic about a potential terrorist attack is false as well - the prisoners left their countries to escape persecution and violence, not to export it.
Prisoners inside Hutto come from countries around the world that the United States has intervened in militarily, like Somalia, or economically, like Honduras. The U.S. government cannot feign ignorance about why emigrants attempt to escape repression from U.S.-friendly rulers or neoliberal trade policy in their home countries. This country's incomparable wealth and purported juridical freedom inspire immigrants to enter by any possible means. Yet understanding why people enter this country also requires understanding why people leave their own.
From above, the crimson brick of Hutto's reception area must look like a festering sore, surrounded by sickly, jaundiced grass, encased in the shining stitches of razor wire and 12-foot fences. The significance of Hutto bleeds on the employees of CCA, whose attempt to make an honest living happens to put them in a dishonest business. It bleeds on Williamson County, which receives more than $180,000 a year for keeping the prison on its property. Hutto certainly bleeds on its progenitor, the federal government. More than anyone, it bleeds daily on those imprisoned there.
But it also bleeds on us. And the T. Don Hutto Residential Facility will continue to do so until it is shut down. By closing the prison, we can begin to heal the wounds created within the detained families. Yet when we cure what caused Hutto to begin with, we'll ensure none of us will ever bleed again.
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