Ice Ice Baby
Happy Tuesday!!
Yesterday was the BOCC meeting. Not a whole lot to talk about there, but one thing did get my interest.
It appears CoreCivic is wanting to enter into a contract to house ICE detainees at the Citrus County Detention Center that they manage. They need the county's permission to do this.
The board approved it 4-1 yesterday, with Finegan voting against it. She does not want CoreCivic to manage it.
Let's talk about it.
I do not want to get into the Federal politics of ICE and what they are doing. That does not really apply to what this is. This is taking ICE detainees into the empty beds at the Detention Center and getting reimbursed a bit from the Feds.
Since CoreCivic exists to generate a profit, I assume that there will be a pretty significant profit margin for them if they get this contract. The county will be paid roughly $360k if all 119 beds are used.
So take this for what it is... a revenue generating decision.
CoreCivic has the contract to operate the jail. They need permission from the county to do these external deals, similar to the US Marshall's service.
Yesterday's decision is the first part. They want to negogiate with ICE and get a contract of sorts set up. This will then go back to the BOCC for approval at a later date...
So to be clear, yesterday was just granting permission for CoreCivic to begin negotiations with ICE. This was not final approval for CoreCivic to start housing ICE detainees here in Citrus. That will come later... if approved.
However, a couple questions come to mind.
1) Why are we entering this contract if there is a chance that the Citrus County Sheriff's Office takes over the jail at some point. That was floated by Sheriff Vincent somewhat recently and the board is open to that discussion.
What do those numbers look like? Why are we not having those discussions now? If we are serious about CCSO taking it over, why are we going to enter pretty deep talks with ICE if we do not know what things will cost down the road? What happens to that contract if CCSO takes over?
2) Why are we trusting CoreCivic with this. We have fined them every month for YEARS for not hitting the basic employment numbers. They are not properly staffed, yet we are going to trust them to take care of more detainees on behalf of the Federal Government?
What about all the recent issues at the jail? There was an abuse type thing with an officer last week. There was the drug smuggling a few months ago that made national news. There have been overdose deaths within the past year or so.
Despite all these issues, we are going to trust them to add more detainees to the facility so they can make additional profits?
Help me make sense of that.
In any case, we will see what happens when this comes back. It will be a new board at that point, so maybe they will look at things a bit differently. We shall see!