The Elizabeth Detention center and its owner, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), are part of a growing trend of incarceration being used as a solution to the "immigration problem." While being held, detainees are caught in a legal limbo, and are not protected by any government's civil liberties. They are kept in detention for the entire time their cases are being processed, which can be a matter of months or years. During that time they have no right to a lawyer and can access health care only in the case of imminent death.

The use of such institutions is growing rapidly as anti-immigrant measures are pursued across the country. "I've been doing this for 10 years," said Geri Mulligan, one half of a husband-wife duo that leads the effort. "In 1998 there were between six and seven thousand immigrants being kept in detention on any given day; today there are 27,000." "People ask me, does that make you feel discouraged? But no, it just makes me irate!" she said. The group took on its name in 1999, a year into their vigil. "We were always angry at our meetings," Mulligan remembers. "So we picked the name IRATE and found words that fit the acronym."

The Board of Supervisors unanimously denied Corrections Corporation of America's rezoning requests for a prison near Dolan Springs, but not before there were a few surprises.

Several residents spoke out against the prison during the meeting, saying that the prison would decrease the value of their property, increase their taxes and decrease the amount of water available to the community…

Corrections Corp. of America (CCA) spent almost $2.5 million in 2007 to lobby on legislation and regulations related to the private prison industry. The prison management company spent more than $1.1 million in the second half of 2007 to lobby the federal government, according to a disclosure form posted online Thursday by the Senate's public records office.

The company lobbied on the privatization of Bureau of Indian Affairs prisons and on the Public Safety Act, which would outlaw private prisons, as well as the Private Prison Information Act, which would force private prisons to make public the same information government jails must provide…

The issue surfaced late last year after Corrections Corporation of America requested a 5 percent increase in daily per-prisoner payments from the state for each year of the next decade. The company operates five private prisons in Colorado and has said it will have to clear inmates out of one of them if it does not receive more money. With Colorado's 23 publicly owned prisons filled almost to capacity - three of them with doublebunked beds in many cells - and with CCA housing 19.4 percent of Colorado inmates, legislators find themselves in a bind…

A secretary at a privately run Kentucky prison where Hawai'i women inmates are housed apparently smuggled a handgun into the facility Tuesday and shot herself in the warden's office, according to the investigator handling the case. The apparent suicide of Carla J. Meade, 43, represents a major security breach at the Otter Creek Correctional Center, and Kentucky state police detective Mike Goble said prison owner Corrections Corp. of America is investigating how Meade got the .22-caliber pistol through the facility's security screening system…

In an era of family-dividing deportations, the immigration arm of the U.S. government has arranged for Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America ("CCA") to house immigrant families together, but where and how the families are placed has been framed by some as a moral and human rights crisis…