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In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from "The Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like "If you aren't divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you." That October, Masomeh also escaped from Iran and joined Majid in Toronto, where they lived for ten years. Majid worked in a pizza place, Masomeh in a coffee shop. She dressed and acted the way she liked—she is blond and pretty and partial to bright clothes and makeup, which she could never wear in public in Iran—and for a long time the Yourdkhanis felt they were safe from politics and the past. Their son, Kevin, was born in Toronto, in 1997, a Canadian citizen. He grew into a happy, affectionate kid, tall and sturdy with a shock of dark hair. He liked math and social studies, developed asthma but dealt with it, and shared with his mom a taste for goofy comedies, such as the "Mr. Bean" movies. In December, 2005, however, the Yourdkhanis learned that the Canadian government had denied their application for political asylum, and Majid, Masomeh, and Kevin were deported to Iran.
Upon their return, the Yourdkhanis say, Masomeh was imprisoned for a month, and Majid for six, and during that time he was beaten and tortured. After Majid was released, the family paid a smuggler twenty thousand dollars to procure false documents and arrange a series of flights that would return them to Canada.
Then, on the last leg of the journey, the family ran into someone else's bad luck. On February 4, 2007, during a flight from Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, a passenger had a heart attack and died, and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico. American immigration officials there ascertained that the Yourdkhanis' travel documents were fake. The Yourdkhanis begged to be allowed to continue on to Canada, but they were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply for it in the United States. They did so, and, five days later, became part of one of the more peculiar, and contested, recent experiments in American immigration policy. They were locked inside a former medium-security prison in a desolate patch of rural Texas: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.
Hutto is one of two immigrant-detention facilities in America that house families—the other is in Berks County, Pennsylvania—and is the only one owned and run by a private prison company. The detention of immigrants is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in this country, and, with the support of the Bush Administration, it is becoming a lucrative business. At the end of 2006, some fourteen thousand people were in government custody for immigration-law violations, in a patchwork of detention arrangements, including space rented out by hundreds of local and state jails, and seven freestanding facilities run by private contractors. This number was up by seventy-nine per cent from the previous year, an increase that can be attributed, in large part, to the actions of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In 2005, Chertoff announced the end of "catch-and-release"—the long-standing practice of allowing immigrants caught without legal documents to remain free inside the country while they waited for an appearance in court. Since these illegal immigrants weren't monitored in any way, the rate of no-shows was predictably high, and the practice inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment.
Private companies began making inroads into the detention business in the nineteen-eighties, when the idea was in vogue that almost any private operation was inherently more efficient than a government one. The largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, or C.C.A., was founded in 1983. But poor management and a series of well-publicized troubles—including riots at and escapes from prisons run by C.C.A.—dampened the initial excitement. In the nineties, C.C.A.'s bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee, where the company is based, failed; state legislators had grown skeptical. By the end of 2000, C.C.A.'s stock had hit an all-time low. When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.
One complication was that hundreds of children were among the immigrant detainees. Typically, kids had been sent to shelters, which allowed them to attend school, while parents were held at closed facilities. Nobody thought that it was good policy to separate parents from children—not immigration officials, not immigrant advocates, not Congress. In 2005, a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressed concern about "reports that children apprehended by D.H.S."—the Department of Homeland Security—"even as young as nursing infants, are being separated from their parents and placed in shelters." The committee also declared that children should not be placed in government custody unless their welfare was in question, and added that the Department of Homeland Security should "release families or use alternatives to detention" whenever possible. The report recommended a new alternative to detention known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program—which allows people awaiting disposition of their immigration cases to be released into the community, provided that they are closely tracked by means such as electronic monitoring bracelets, curfews, and regular contact with a caseworker. The government has since established pilot programs in twelve cities, and reports that more than ninety per cent of the people enrolled in them show up for their court dates. The immigration agency could have made a priority of putting families, especially asylum seekers, into such programs. Instead, it chose to house families in Hutto, which is owned and run by C.C.A. Families would be kept together, but it would mean they were incarcerated together.
When the Yourdkhanis were sent to Hutto last winter, the facility had been open for nine months, but few Americans knew of its existence. Hutto is in Taylor, Texas, a town of seventeen thousand, forty miles northeast of Austin, with a lot of boarded-up businesses on its main streets. A National Guard recruiting station is on the eastern side of town; a place that offers concealed-weapons training is at the opposite end. Hutto has more than five hundred beds, though the population fluctuates, and the facility appears never to have been at full capacity; about half the detainees are children. At the time the Yourdkhanis got there, many of the four hundred or so detainees were from Latin-American countries (these did not include Mexico, because Mexicans caught without documents are automatically sent home), and some of those were people who had come to the United States for economic reasons; that is, they were the kind of undocumented immigrants that most people probably think of when they hear of immigrants being rounded up somewhere in Texas. But a substantial number of the families were asylum seekers—people from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Romania. Like the Yourdkhanis, they were people who said that they had been persecuted in their home countries, and many of them had passed the first test for achieving asylum in the United States—a so-called "credible fear" interview. None had criminal records.
The Yourdkhanis, upon arriving at Hutto, saw a white concrete complex with slit-shaped windows, surrounded by double fencing topped by rolls of razor wire. A shadeless exercise yard was ringed by floodlights. Across the street was a railroad track where freight trains frequently idled, cutting off the facility from the rest of Taylor. Families were placed in former inmate cells. Each cell had a twin bed or a bunk bed with a thin mattress, a small metal or porcelain sink, and an exposed toilet. Generally, mothers and very young children stayed together in one cell, fathers in a separate cell, and older children in another. Husbands and wives were not allowed to visit each other's cells. Masomeh told me, "For three days, Majid had a fever, and I wasn't allowed to go to in and ask, 'How are you?' " The cell doors were metal, and each had a window two inches wide; the floor and walls were bare, except for a shatterproof acrylic mirror. Doors were to remain open during the day, but they were wired with laser-detection alarms that were triggered when anyone came or went at night. A 2007 report by two advocacy groups—the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children—noted that if a child sleeping in a separate cell woke up at night and went looking for his parents the alarm would sound, and only C.C.A. staff members were allowed to respond.
The guards at Hutto conducted as many as seven head counts a day, during which all detainees, even toddlers, were supposed to remain in place, usually by their beds, for as long as it took to complete the count. In practice, this meant that detainees might be in their cells twelve hours a day. (When head counts were not taking place, detainees could assemble in the common area within their "pod" of cells, where there were couches and two televisions.) Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made "six or seven requests," and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl "smelled of urine."
No contact visits were allowed at Hutto—relatives had to sit behind Plexiglas partitions and talk through phones in the old prison visiting room. In any case, few relatives visited, since Hutto was so far from where most of them lived. Deka Warsame, a Somali woman, was detained at Hutto for four months, along with her three children. Her mother and a sister lived in Columbus, Ohio, but she told her lawyer that, even if her family could have come to Texas, she would have been ashamed to have them see her looking like a criminal, "trapped behind Plexiglas." If detainees had an attorney, as Warsame did, the attorney could talk to them without a partition. During such conferences, children were required to stay by their parents' side. The governing idea of Hutto was that detainees would constantly supervise their children—as a result, it wasn't deemed a child-care facility, and required no relevant licensing. But this also meant that children had to be in the same room even when, say, their parents recounted stories of torture, rape, or domestic abuse. Barbara Hines, a law professor who runs an immigration clinic at the University of Texas, in Austin, and who was one of the first legal representatives to see detainees at Hutto, began bringing crayons and markers with her, hoping to distract the kids.
Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.
Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines's law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. "I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed," he wrote. "When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, 'If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.' I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me."
Michelle Brané, an advocate with the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, managed to get a tour of Hutto in December, 2006. Describing the facility as "an incredibly punitive-feeling place," she said, "People there told us that children were being punished for normal kid stuff—running around, making noise, tantrums. I have a two- and four-year-old at home, and I kept thinking, How would I manage in here keeping them under control? The shocking thing is that the people running it didn't realize any of that. I think they thought it was a great place."
Majid Yourdkhani told me that he and his wife felt as though they had "disappeared into a black hole. We'd ask the officers, 'What's our future here? What's going to happen to us? What do we need to do?' We'd ask, and nobody could tell us." That feeling of having disappeared wasn't entirely irrational. Getting information about Hutto—especially from the people who run it—is hard. Private prison companies are not subject to the same legal requirements as public prisons to provide incident reports on assaults, escapes, deaths, or rapes. It's true that a company's contract stipulates that it must report such incidents to the government agency for which it is a vender, and people seeking information about what goes on inside a private prison can submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the government agency. But this can be an exercise in frustration, as Judith Greene, a researcher who is a critic of private prisons, found out. Several years ago, she and a colleague, Joshua Miller, were doing research on a new prison in California City, California, that was to be operated by C.C.A. for the federal Bureau of Prisons. According to Greene, before awarding the contract the bureau had signalled that the government would not delegate to a private company the legal authority to use force against inmates. Greene and Miller wondered how this would work in practice. In a Freedom of Information Act request, Greene asked for documents that might shed light on this question. Eventually, she recalls, she heard from the Bureau of Prisons that it was prepared to give her the information but had to get permission from C.C.A.; a second letter informed her that C.C.A. had said no, claiming that the information she sought about the use of force was a business secret. Greene told me, "Prisons in general are to a great extent secretive, isolated places, but if you're dealing with private prisons you've got an additional layer to penetrate in order to find out essential facts and figures. And government agencies seem to give a lot of the decision-making to the private companies when it comes to what to reveal." A bill now pending in Congress would, for the first time, make private prisons as accountable about their daily operations as public ones.
It's easier to gain access to the death-row section of most publicly run prisons than it is to get into Hutto, unless you are a detainee or an employee of C.C.A. Even Jorge Bustamante, a sociologist and a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants, was denied access to Hutto. From Geneva, he had applied to visit, as part of a tour that he was making of immigration-detention facilities in the U.S, and permission was granted. But when he arrived in America, last May, Bustamante was told that permission had been revoked. Bustamante remains angry about the incident, and says he will mention it in a report that he plans to submit to the General Assembly this month. For my part, I got no response to repeated requests to tour the facility, which were sent by phone and fax to Evelyn Hernandez, the administrator of Hutto. (She also refused multiple requests to speak on the phone, as did top officials at C.C.A.) Two weeks after I submitted questions in writing to C.C.A. officials, I did receive some answers. Steven Owen, a spokesman for the corporation, wrote that "C.C.A. always strives to provide humane, safe and secure housing to the populations entrusted to our care in accordance with applicable laws and the expectations of our customers. We are proud of the company's 25-year track record." No reporters have been admitted on any occasion since a single-day group media tour, in February, 2007. Currently, the only way to see the inside of Hutto is to watch an intermittently blurry video available on YouTube, evidently filmed by immigration officials and later posted by a blogger. It shows kids and adults in blue and green scrubs walking down fluorescent-lit halls and eating food from plastic trays. There are brief shots of a prison cell outfitted with a crib and of a man lying on a couch, his wrist encircled by a bright-blue I.D. bracelet. Another sequence shows kids outside their cells, learning the alphabet song. The footage has no sound.
Last March, the A.C.L.U., along with the immigration-law clinic at the University of Texas and the law firm LeBouef, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, brought suit against Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the immigration officials who oversee Hutto. The suit said that conditions at Hutto violated a 1997 legal settlement that grew out of a Supreme Court case known as Flores v. Reno, which centered on the detention of minors who had arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied by an adult. The settlement called for minors in immigration custody to be released to family members or appointed custodians whenever possible, and ordered that children in detention be placed in the "least restrictive" setting available. Kevin Yourdkhani was among the twenty-six children named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. case. In a statement for the U.S. District Court in Austin, his mother said of conditions at Hutto, "Majid and I cannot be good parents. We cannot provide Kevin with the basic things that he needs. . . . We cannot give him a pen to write with or any books to read. We cannot teach him about the outside world or let him run around, the way young boys should. We are totally helpless as parents and depend on the guards for everything." Her family, she said, "is falling apart in here."
The A.C.L.U. commissioned a psychiatrist to investigate conditions at Hutto, and, not surprisingly, the resulting report documented depression and fearfulness among children housed there, and predicted that, until the facility overhauled its "policies and procedures beyond recognition" and replaced its "current (correctional) staff," it would not be appropriate for children. More surprising, a psychiatric report commissioned by the government defendants also questioned the "authoritarian milieu fostered by this excessive number of security personnel," and criticized an atmosphere "capable of contributing to the development of unnecessary anxiety and stress for these children." The report's author, Richard Pesikoff, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, concluded that it was "essential" to make changes at Hutto, in order to protect the mental health of the children.
Kevin, it must be said, was lucky. The plaintiffs' lawyers soon figured out that the crayons and markers they had brought in to occupy the kids while they talked to their parents could also be politically useful. They were particularly so in the hands of articulate, indignant Kevin. One day, Kevin drew an American flag and wrote "Pleace help us" inside one of the stripes. He drew a picture of his common area, with sofas, tables, "police," and "camra." And he wrote a letter to Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, in a rainbow of colors: "Dear Mr. Priminster Harper, I don't like to stay in this jail. I'm only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I'm sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminster haper give visa for my family. This Place is not good for me. I want to get out of the cell." One of the University of Texas law students, Matthew Pizzo, placed Kevin's handiwork in his satchel, and Barbara Hines later mailed it to journalists in Canada. Newspapers and bloggers there started covering Kevin's story. Sometime around then, Hines recalls, she and her students were told by Hutto officials that they could no longer bring in crayons and markers.
After six weeks at Hutto, the Yourdkhanis were released, and the Canadian government offered them temporary resident permits. Students at Hines's immigration clinic found the family a new lawyer in Toronto. The Yourdkhanis are now awaiting the outcome of a "humanitarian and compassionate" application for permanent residence, and their lawyer expects the process to be resolved by the end of the year. Majid is working at a restaurant; Masomeh is at home for the time being. In November, when I visited the Yourdkhanis in their high-rise apartment in Toronto, Kevin was excited about a new aquarium that his parents had bought for him. He had taken the bus home after school, grabbed an ice-cream bar out of the freezer, and was sprawled on the couch in shorts and a Darth Vader T-shirt, answering his parents' questions about a field trip that his class had taken that day. He told me that he tried not to think about Hutto, but said, "It was horrible in there. People should be free, especially kids." He said that he had given some thought to what he would do if anybody tried to take him away from Canada now. "I'd glue my foot to the ground," he said. "And they'd have to cut me out of the ground. They'd have to take the cement with me!"
Immigration officials have said that, before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, the average length of detention at Hutto was about fifty days. For some families, however, the stays were much longer. Liliam Restrepo, a thirty-six-year-old Colombian woman, was detained at Hutto, along with her ten- and twelve-year-old daughters, Paola and Andrea, for nearly a year. In Colombia, she was an activist with the Partido Liberal Colombiano, and says that she had to leave because of threats from paramilitaries. She now lives in a cramped one-bedroom walkup in South Boston, where she cleans houses for a living, and is awaiting an appeal on her asylum claim. She told me that children come out of Hutto with "a mind-set, a feeling they can't forget. It's bad for adults, but it's worse for children. My kids play these games—they still do—where they are arresting people. My one daughter, she is afraid now of the police. She doesn't want to walk by the police station at the end of our street. They have been trying to adapt to the life of freedom here, but it is difficult, because they unconsciously still feel they are detained. They can't stop thinking and talking about prison." Restrepo, a slim woman with long dark hair, was wearing a neatly pressed Corona Extra T-shirt and tiny gold hoop earrings. At her small, rickety kitchen table, she sat with her hands folded in her lap. The linoleum was cracked and worn, but somebody had tacked on the wall a calendar from a Chinese restaurant and an incongruous print of a couple of plummy-looking golfers on a lush green set of links. Life was clearly tough for Restrepo, but she was still glad to be out of Hutto. So were her daughters. Andrea recalled having to take a group shower with other kids, and being embarrassed; guards, she said, shouted at kids for running or making noise. What she missed most, she said, was "just being able to breathe real air." The facility has an indoor gym, but when the Restrepos were at Hutto there were days at a stretch when kids were not allowed outside.
Salwan Komo, an Iraqi refugee who belongs to the Chaldean Christian minority, was confined in Hutto for more than five months, along with his wife, Neven, and their baby daughter, Miryam. Komo had a sister living legally in Detroit, and his wife had an aunt and a brother who were living in San Diego. In Iraq, Chaldean Christians have been subject to persecution and killings by Muslim extremists. The Komos had stopped going to church there and feared for their lives; most of the family had fled to Syria, where it had become increasingly expensive for Iraqi refugees to live and employment was nearly impossible to find. The Komos had tried, they said, to come to America the right way. They had presented themselves to the guards at the Mexican border in Southern California, and said that they were seeking asylum. Neven put it this way: "We came to the door, we—how do you say?—asked to come into your house." If they had paid a smuggler and snuck into America, she noted, they probably would have avoided detention in Hutto.
In December, I met with the Komos in the immaculate little apartment where they now live, in El Cajon, near San Diego. It was a neighborhood of modest ranch houses and Spanish-style courtyard apartments, bejewelled with Christmas lights. Outside, the wind played punching bag with the giant inflatable polar bears and the manger scenes on the neatly tended front lawns. Inside, eighteen-month-old Miryam, in pink sweatpants and pigtails, was dancing to the Arabic-language music videos on a flat-screen TV, brandishing a cookie in one hand and a toy cell phone in the other. Komo explained that the family had recently been granted asylum, and that he now had a good job installing air-conditioning and heating units. Unlike the Yourdkhanis, he didn't think Hutto should be shut down—the government might need to put people there for short stays. "But if you have family and they can sign for you, they should let you leave," he said. "You know, the baby was only a few months old. She was too small for a place like this. At five-thirty in the morning, they push open the door—boom, boom, boom. We told them, 'Don't knock like this, please.' During the day, she need to nap. It was noisy. My wife close the door, but then they come—they call the captain and they make problems for us. We say, 'Can we get some different food for her? She won't eat this.' They say, 'If you don't like the food here, go back to your country.' But we didn't come here for the food—we had food. We come here for the safety. I say, 'I'll bring you the money. But when I'm in the jail I can't do anything for my family.' For two weeks, maybe one month, it's O.K., but not for five months, nine days."
Matthew Pizzo, the University of Texas law student, made a ritual of taking families to Wal-Mart when they were released. He says that Neven cried when she saw all the goods you could buy there. Pizzo remembers minding a three-year-old Iraqi girl as she played in the toy aisle while her parents bought clothes and baby food. A father with his own little girl asked Pizzo, "How old is your daughter?" Before thinking how the answer would sound to a stranger, Pizzo explained, "Oh, I'm not her father—I'm her attorney."
Last August, the A.C.L.U. settled its suit against the government. The agreement entails a number of changes at Hutto, including eliminating the head-count system, providing pajamas for children, letting kids keep a limited number of toys in their room during the day, making a priority of hiring people with experience in child welfare, and installing curtains around the toilets. In the months before the lawsuit was settled, Hutto had already started making changes: it got rid of the razor wire; expanded the length of educational instruction, first to four, then to seven hours a day; and began allowing detainees to wear their own clothes. Yet it seems unlikely that these changes would have been made without pressure from the A.C.L.U. lawsuit and from advocates like Barbara Hines and her students. The settlement also aimed to get people out of detention faster and stipulated that families at Hutto have their cases reviewed every thirty days, to determine if they could be released on parole or on bond.
Vanita Gupta, a staff attorney for the A.C.L.U. and the lead counsel on the Hutto case, says that she didn't think the government would agree to close Hutto down, so the settlement was the next best option. "We are very proud of it," she says of the settlement. "We fought for every word, tooth and nail. But at the end of the day do I feel detention is appropriate for children? No. The settlement forced the government to make tremendous changes, but these are still prison walls."
The A.C.L.U. and the plaintiffs in the case—all of whom Hutto released after the suit was filed—could, perhaps, also count as a victory a written statement made by Julie Myers, the new assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the D.H.S., during her confirmation process last fall. Detaining families would continue to be an important part of the agency's operations, she wrote—indeed, the effort would likely be expanded—but "the physical structure of Hutto—a former prison—will not be used as the model for future facilities."
It's clear that Hutto is now a very different, and more humane, place than it was before the lawsuit. But, Gupta says, "it shouldn't have taken the A.C.L.U. to make the government realize that holding innocent children in a converted medium-security adult prison is a bad idea."
Why did the government turn to a former prison in the first place? It wasn't the most cost-effective option. C.C.A. charges the government nearly thirty-four million dollars a year to run the facility. And whereas close supervision of a released immigrant costs only about twelve dollars a day, incarcerating one costs about sixty-one, according to a 2000 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization based in New York. It is clear that the government knew almost from Hutto's inception that there were problems there. Last March, federal immigration officials found many "deficiencies" at Hutto, including inadequate sanitation and the lack of an immunization program for children—chicken pox had broken out. (Parents, the report noted, were afraid to tell Hutto officials when they found rashes on their children, because they thought it would prevent them from being released.) The inspectors said that C.C.A.'s "overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency," and concluded that the "overall review of the facility can accurately be rated as deficient." This evaluation was issued months after demonstrators from local immigrant-advocate groups had started holding vigils outside Hutto, in December, 2006, attracting coverage by local news outlets.
A separate internal memo, which was obtained by the A.C.L.U., expressed particular concern about the high turnover among employees at Hutto. The memo's author, whose name is redacted, complains about how hard it was to get straight answers from C.C.A. about staffing. ("Approximately five requests were made.") The memo goes on to report that, of the three hundred and thirty-eight employees who had been hired since Hutto opened, in May, 2006, two hundred and three had quit or been fired by March, 2007. That meant that "the average length of employment for the 170 critical positions of detention officer, program facilitator, correctional officer, and case manager is 3.01 months. C.C.A. is losing staff as quick as they can hire them." The memo blames low pay—C.C.A. pays new employees $10.22 an hour, versus the county standard of $14.36. (In general, private prison companies pay considerably less than public prisons.) The memo continues, "Unfortunately, the caliber of some employees at the T. Don Hutto facility is not as high as it should be considering the nature of business that is required in managing a family residential detention facility."
There is evidence that some immigration officials were skeptical about Hutto even before inspectors observed it in action. In August, several of the attorneys for the plaintiffs received a copy of a memo from someone who wanted to remain anonymous but who claimed to work in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in San Antonio. The memo, which the letter writer said had been composed by senior staff in the office before Hutto was reopened, concluded that it would be a poor choice for a family-detention center. For one thing, Hutto was a "hard" detention facility, with cells and bars and barbed wire. For another, the town of Taylor had "a minimal Hispanic population. This would make it difficult to obtain Spanish-speaking community members to provide religious, social, medical, educational services." The memo also observed, with striking cynicism, that Taylor was too close to Austin, which had nonprofit and community organizations that "have typically been very strong advocates for immigrants." (This observation proved prophetic—it was Austin immigrant advocates, such as the students in Barbara Hines's clinic, who exposed the problems at Hutto.)
U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks, a sixty-eight-year-old lifelong Texan, presided over the A.C.L.U. case. He is not a typical Austin liberal. He is the grandson and great-grandson of county sheriffs, and was appointed to the federal bench by George H. W. Bush. At the first hearing about Hutto, on March 20, 2007, he sounded irascible. More than once, he made the point that the immigrants housed at Hutto had intentionally broken U.S. laws by coming here without a visa. He admonished Gupta, the lead A.C.L.U. attorney, "Take the cotton out of your ears." Yet, as Judge Sparks listened to testimony, he grew increasingly critical of the government. When he learned that children were required to be in the room even when their parents were sharing brutal stories with lawyers, he snapped at the government's attorney, Victor Lawrence, saying that the rule "best not apply tomorrow." Lawrence assured him that improvements had been made at Hutto, and would continue to be made. Sparks responded, "Why did there have to be changes in the first place? I mean, this is detention. This isn't the penitentiary. Even in the penitentiary, the lawyers can see their clients one-on-one, and do not have to speak in front of children!" Lawrence said, "Your Honor, you know, part of this is the novelty of the facility itself. It's a family detention center." Sparks replied, "That's right. And the government didn't see fit to issue any regulations. The government hadn't seen fit to go back into the Flores settlement for modification."
The government argued that the 1997 Flores settlement applied only to unaccompanied minors coming illegally to the United States, and not to minors who entered the country with their parents. Even so, Judge Sparks implied, the government would have to establish clear rules for how to detain families safely and humanely. And although officials at Hutto might be making changes now, he noted, didn't Lawrence have a feeling it was merely because the defendants knew, on account of the lawsuit, that "the hammer was coming down?" He said that he was beginning to wonder who was in charge "out there, either C.C.A. or the government. It's very troubling to me."
Lawrence returned to the government's fundamental argument that the most important goal was to keep immigrant families together, and that Hutto had succeeded in that goal. As he put it, "It makes common sense to everybody in this courtroom that that's a good thing—as opposed to separating them."
Judge Sparks replied, "But it would not be a good idea for them to hog-tie them and hang them up in lockers while they did it." Admitting that he was talking more like a lawyer than a judge, he added, "The truth of the matter is there are ways to do it that are right and there are ways to do it that are wrong."
If you visit Taylor, Texas, it's not hard to see why people there might not want to give up on Hutto, and its two hundred or so jobs. On a drive into town, you pass a trailer park set amid spindly trees, and a fast-food chicken place that advertises "Livers and Gizzards Tuesday and Wednesday." Farther on, you see the Lone Star Pawn Shop, where a sign promises cautiously, "We can cash most payroll checks." Taylor has a couple of consignment shops, a few hair cutteries, several cotton gins, and two barbecue restaurants, Rudy Mikeska's and Louie Mueller's, that look as though they've been around a good long time. The sidewalks were mostly empty when I passed through on a sunny Monday morning, and on the side streets a number of the houses were ramshackle or derelict. A street leading to Hutto was cratered with potholes; the Landmark Inn and the liquor store were both abandoned.
The Hutto Correctional Facility opened in 1997, housing prisoners of the U.S. Marshals Service and overflow inmates from the county jail, as well as detainees displaced by hurricanes. Since the numbers were always fluctuating, C.C.A. was always struggling to find new customers, and in July, 2005, the company announced that it would have to close Hutto down. A last-minute reprieve came in December, in the form of an agreement with the federal government to detain non-criminal immigrants. The initial press release said nothing about children. At the time, Rick Zinsmeyer, a local resident, told the Taylor Daily Press, "The good part about it, and what Taylor gets out of it, is a lot more employees and more people coming into the town."
José Orta, who is retired from the Air Force and works maintaining the town's computer network, is one of a handful of people from Taylor who started protesting outside Hutto "once the word got around that they were holding children in there." It's been a lonely business. Orta told me, "I know people at my church who work at Hutto. When I try to talk to them about it, they just say, 'It's my job.' My sister had a friend who worked there. She was a single mom and her job before that had been cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage, $5.85 an hour. C.C.A. is paying, like, twice that. I said to her, 'What if it were you and your son in there?' That was literally something she'd never thought about. When she realized I was one of the vigil organizers, she stopped speaking to me or my sister."
A few Taylor residents spoke out against Orta's efforts. In a letter to the Daily Press, Michelle Hernandez wrote of Hutto detainees, "These individuals are eating three meals a day, even if it isn't food that suits their palate. They have a dry, comfortable place to sleep, television and PlayStations, Xbox or whatever type of video games they have. The kids are getting an education, books to read, toys to play with. So many of our U.S. war veterans are homeless and don't even get that. Who the hell is marching and complaining on their behalf?"
On the day I drove past Hutto, there was no one outside on the brown patchy grass, and no children on the play structure in the bare exercise yard. A stiff wind whipped the four flags at the entrance: one for Texas, one for the Department of Homeland Security, one for the United States, and one for the Corrections Corporation of America.
C.C.A. was founded in 1983 by a small group of politically well-connected entrepreneurs. One of them, Thomas Beasley, was the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. Another, Terrell Don Hutto—the prison's namesake—was once the director of the state prison system in Arkansas. He was also the defendant in a famous case that went before the Supreme Court, in 1978. In Hutto v. Finney, one of the first successful lawsuits by prisoners against a correctional system, the Court held that conditions in the Arkansas state prisons, which placed prisoners in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time, constituted cruel and unusual punishment.
Early investors in C.C.A. included Honey Alexander, the wife of Lamar Alexander, then the governor of Tennessee. Over the years, C.C.A. has continued to strengthen its political ties. The company's PAC gave more than three hundred thousand dollars during the 2006 election cycle, overwhelmingly to Republican congressional candidates, and has given more than a hundred thousand so far for the 2008 elections. The company's chairman, William Andrews, and its C.E.O., John Ferguson, have been generous donors to Republican senatorial and Presidential candidates. Philip Perry, who is the son-in-law of Dick Cheney, and who served as general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security between 2005 and 2007, lobbied for C.C.A. while he was at the law firm Latham & Watkins, to which he has returned. And C.C.A. spends a lot on lobbying. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2005, the year that Homeland Security awarded C.C.A. the Hutto contract, the company paid close to $3.4 million dollars to five different firms to lobby the federal government.
The company's first contract, in 1984, was with the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, for the building and oversight of an immigration holding center in Houston. C.C.A. soon began taking on contracts with counties, states, and the federal Bureau of Prisons. To win these entities over, private prison companies like C.C.A. argued that they could operate more cheaply and efficiently than the government could. It is certainly true that they can build prisons faster and cheaper, largely because they don't need to seek voter or legislator approval. The relatively low salaries make running prisons cheaper, too. In 1999, two criminologists, James Austin and Garry Coventry, of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, concluded that "privately operated facilities have a significantly lower staffing level and offer significantly lower salaries than public state correctional agencies." But Austin and Coventry also reported that private prisons had "a significantly higher rate of assaults on staff and inmates." Austin, who is now a criminal-justice consultant, told me that "he just didn't know" if that was still the case today—nobody had done a comparable follow-up study. (That could be because it's so hard to extract information from private prisons.) Austin noted, "In general, where there's higher staff turnover you're going to have rates of violence that are higher."
Occasionally, stories about the operations of private prisons reach the public, and many are discouraging. In Youngstown, Ohio, C.C.A. built and oversaw a facility that housed prisoners from the District of Columbia. In the late nineties, it gained notoriety for endemic violence. In its first year of operation, there were six inmate escapes, twenty stabbings (two of them were fatal), and numerous other assaults—figures that came to light only after a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the inmates. Among other problems at Youngstown, prisoners prone to violent behavior were housed with the general population—a situation that U.S. District Court Judge Sam Bell, who presided over the case, referred to as the "mixing of predators and their prey." Bell ordered all maximum-security inmates to be removed from Youngstown. C.C.A. admitted no wrongdoing, but in order to settle the suit it agreed to pay $1.6 million to prisoners and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal fees.
In 2004, inmates rioted and set fires at a private prison in Colorado run by C.C.A. A state investigation blamed mismanagement, and noted that C.C.A. had only thirty-three uniformed officers overseeing eleven hundred inmates when the riot erupted, and that the company paid its employees a third less than state prisons did.
Meanwhile, C.C.A. got into financial trouble by building prisons on spec—putting up facilities for which it did not yet have contracts—and by angering its stockholders with an ill-advised corporate restructuring. Over the course of 2000, C.C.A.'s stock price plummeted by ninety-three per cent. The company has since got back on much sounder financial footing. The hiring of John Ferguson, a former finance commissioner for the state of Tennessee, as C.E.O. helped. But the most important factor was the rise in immigrant detention. Since early 2002, the company's stock price has more than quadrupled, even though several of C.C.A.'s immigrant-detention centers have been plagued by their own problems—in 2005, a correctional officer at a San Diego facility was accused of raping a detainee.
During a conference call with investment analysts, in February, 2007, Ferguson was especially optimistic about the immigrant-detention trade. Noting that the elimination of the government's catch-and-release initiative was "helping" the bottom line, he said that the number of beds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was asking for had risen from twenty-one thousand to twenty-seven thousand in the previous two years. He also noted that President Bush's proposed 2008 budget called for doubling the size of the border patrol, to more than eighteen thousand agents, before he left office. "So we feel very strong about the demand that is developing," Ferguson said. (At one point, he noted that, in all its facilities, C.C.A. had "worked hard in a number of areas to reduce medical costs, including modifying a number of our contracts to reduce or eliminate our responsibility for medical expenses.")
In the same conference call, Tracy Rabold, an analyst for Banc of America Securities, offered "congratulations on yet another good quarter." But Rabold wanted to know if lawsuits were causing any "throttling back," noting that lawsuits were "kind of part of the business, but there seems to be at least a little more publicity around some of the housing conditions that are being reported on the immigration side. Without getting into the philosophical discussion with that, I'm just curious if that is having any impact on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's arrest policies or the volume that you guys have seen from them." Ferguson said that more time was needed to assess the impact on the prison business. But William Andrews, C.C.A.'s chairman, told the analysts, "I just don't want to leave anybody the impression that these facilities . . . are in any way substandard. In fact, they're above standard." The negative reports, he said, had come "from special-interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. We welcome anybody to visit our facilities, and the family facility, particularly at T. Don Hutto, is almost like a home."
Last May, a guard at Hutto was caught engaging in sexual activity with a female detainee in the cell that she shared with her young child. The guard was videotaped crawling out of the detainee's cell—trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid the camera—on two occasions, once at 11:36 P.M., seven minutes after entering, and once at 11:47 P.M., following a ten-minute visit. Employees watching the security camera alerted their supervisors. The man on the videotape was seen "adjusting his pants around the belt area" as he left, according to a report on the incident by federal investigators. (The report—or eighty of its four hundred pages, at least—was obtained by the Taylor Daily Press.) It is unclear if the activity was consensual, but any sexual contact between correctional officers and inmates in a federal prison is a crime. At the time of the incident, however, the law applied only to prisons under the authority of the Department of Justice, and not to immigrant-detention centers, which are under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. The guard was not prosecuted. (This past July, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, introduced legislation that closed the loophole.)
The guard case caused a stir, and the commissioners of Williamson County, where Hutto is situated, became briefly concerned about Hutto. Williamson County acts as the middleman in the agreement between the federal government and C.C.A., and it receives a dollar a day for each detainee at Hutto—as much as a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. At a meeting in October, 2007, commissioners expressed worry that they might be named in any future lawsuits directed at Hutto or, as one commissioner put it, drawn into "the liability loop." The county was considering withdrawing from the contract.
At the meeting, a large contingent of Hutto employees showed up, dressed in their new, friendlier uniforms—maroon polos and khakis. They sat together in the audience, clapping and murmuring "Amen" as Evelyn Hernandez, the facility's administrator, gave an emotional speech about Hutto. She declared that she and her employees "provide a safe, secure, loving environment" for the families detained there. Hernandez spoke feelingly of the importance of keeping families together. She herself had a four-year-old, and "could not imagine ever having that child taken away from me, under any circumstances." She had moved to Texas from Idaho to take her job, she said, and she could have left her daughter with family in Idaho until she got settled. "But that child has to be with me," she said.
A lawyer for C.C.A., when it was his turn at the microphone, assured the commissioners that "it is extremely difficult for someone to successfully sue a county in Texas in this arena." The county really had no liability—after all, it didn't own the property or employ the people working there. Just in case, C.C.A. would indemnify the county, up to a quarter of a million dollars, for any future legal fees. The commissioners kept the contract.
Although the meeting had centered on matters of liability, it also exposed a deeper confusion. When we place families in a facility like Hutto, are we punishing them for coming to America? Or are we just keeping them somewhere safe, so that they don't get separated or disappear while we figure out what to do with them? Or, rather, is our policy to try somehow to combine the practical and the punitive? After all, if the goal was simply to keep track of immigrants, in most cases an electronic monitoring bracelet would suffice. And if the goal was simply to keep families together, we could surely house them in something other than a former prison, in a place where employees are trained in child welfare and kids can get fresh air. The decision to house families in a former prison was, perhaps, not so arbitrary after all. At the meeting that day, Cynthia Long, one of the county commissioners, a woman in a businesslike red blazer and glasses, spoke about keeping families together. But she also said something that probably represented the gut feeling of a lot of people who are angry about illegal immigration. Long said, "The thing we forget is the adults who are being detained have broken the law." Unfortunately, she went on, children sometimes "have to suffer with the sins of our parents"—"to suffer, if you can call it that, because of their parents' choices." ♦


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Archive for the 'Star Trek' Category
Mission to Horatius
Mission to Horatius
Star Trek
Star Trek
SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S ITEM OUT OF PRINT FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS! THE LOST STAR TREK® NOVEL Captain Kirk investigates a primitive planet suffering raids from its high-tech neighbors.
Background information
- This novel was the first original story written in the Star Trek universe.
- This book was written as a young adult tie-in to the series.
- Though the book first saw publication through Whitman Publishing, Pocket Books obtained the rights to create a 30th Anniversary reprint in 1996.
From the book jacket
- While exploring a new star system, NGC 434, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise find themselves in an adventure, from one planet to another.
- They enlist the help of Grang, a local from NGC 434 to guide them through the system, all while attempting to find the runaway mouse "Mickey" on the Enterprise.

subset: commoncrawl


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Carpet Sales/Installation
From ConsumerWiki
Businesses that sell but do not install carpet must have a local city or county business license. Installers must be licensed by the California Department of Consumer Affairs, Contractors State Licensing Board (CSLB). These businesses must have a local city or county business license.
Contractors State Licensing Board
9821 Business Park Drive
Sacramento, CA 95827
(800) 321-2752
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) records complaints for manufacturers and carpet sales people.
Directory of State Agencies Directory of Federal Agencies Return to DCA Home Page


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Dr. Haskell asked Bill Kohl, senior epidemiologist, Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention, to provide a historical overview of physical activity
recommendations. He also noted that Dr. Kohl will be leading a CDC group
organizing the literature review for the Committee.
Dr. Kohl opened his remarks acknowledging the importance of "knowing where
you've been to know where you are going" and that his presentation would
summarize the previous 50-years.
Starting in the 1950's a rapidly evolving science base emerged around the
hypothesis of physical activity and benefits to health. Additionally, increased
literature in exercise science surfaced. In the late 1960's to 1970's many
individuals started promoting various health-oriented fitness programs; however,
some confusion began to spring up over what types of physical activity was
really the best? At the same time the medical community expressed concern over
the safety of exercise. While a lot of work and thought happened during this 20
year period there was not a lot of direction or focus.
In 1975 the first form of a recommendation focused on a particular health
outcome was produced by the American Heart Association and included the
"Exercise Testing and Training of Healthy Adults" and "Exercise Testing and
Training of Individuals with Heart Disease or at a High Risk for its
Development" documents. At the same time the American College of Sports Medicine
produced its "Graded Exercise Testing and Exercise Prescription" documents.
These documents represented a growing movement towards very clinically focused
recommendations based on specific health outcomes.
As these recommendations were published and updated they were consistently
rooted in an "athletic" paradigm and stressed vigorous exercise. Recommendations
almost always focused on type of activity, intensity, duration and frequency.
Vigorous activity meant activity involving 60% - 90% of maximum oxygen intake –
VO2 max. All of this revolved around the athletic approach to physical activity
where increases in aerobic capacity are most rapidly achieved by increasing the
intensity of the endurance exercise. In 1990 the athletic approach of
vigorous activity was challenged by a more inclusive population-based approach.
This approach gave credence to the benefits of moderate-intensity activity to
health. Acknowledging this approach the American College of Sports Medicine
produced the following position statement:
"Since 1978 an important distinction has been made between physical activity as
it relates to health versus fitness. It has been pointed out that the quantity
and quality of exercise needed to attain health-related benefits may differ from
that recommended for fitness benefits. It is now clear that lower levels of
physical activity than recommended by this position statement may reduce the
risk of certain chronic degenerative diseases and yet may not be of sufficient
quantity or quality to improve VO2 max."
"Since 1978 an important distinction has been made between physical activity as
it relates to health versus fitness. It has been pointed out that the quantity
and quality of exercise needed to attain health-related benefits may differ from
that recommended for fitness benefits. It is now clear that lower levels of
physical activity than recommended by this position statement may reduce the
risk of certain chronic degenerative diseases and yet may not be of sufficient
quantity or quality to improve VO2 max."
Through the 1990's more studies emerged about accumulated moderate-intensity
activity. At this time data recognized only a small portion of the population
met the vigorous standard of physical activity and that a portion of the
population was sedentary or totally inactive, leading to the realization of a
possible public health gain for moving people out of the inactive state. In
1995, CDC in conjunction with ACSM released a recommendation that every adult
American should accumulate at least 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity
physical activity and, most preferably, all days each week.
As recommendations emerged, problems arose regarding the recommended dose of
activity to different population groups. There was also difficulty in
classifying different population groups, for example, what is an adult, older
adult, youth, infant, etc. Along these lines, is moderate activity for a youth
the same for an older adult? Many different recommendations were produced but
many of them did not say the same thing so how can these recommendations be
harmonized? It became clear one size does not fit all.
Finally, Dr. Kohl summarized the appearance of physical activity guideline
recommendations in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Starting in 1990
one sentence acknowledged the role of physical activity for energy balance.
Later editions included a dose recommendation until finally the current edition
does break out specific doses for some different age groups. Most importantly,
the Dietary Guidelines acknowledged the need for different recommendations for
different population groups.
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South University, Richmond (View Other Campuses)
Established in 1899, South University is a private, nonprofit institution with a long history of driving student success.
Join the driven students of South University.
Learn about the financial aid resources available to you and how to apply.
South University offers scholarships to qualified applicants. Find out more about the qualification and application process.
South University accepts both previous college credit as well as credit for your experience. Find out more about our transfer of credit policies.
Return to South University and extend your career aspirations.


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If you are receiving veterans benefits, the Veterans Certifying officer is located in the Veterans Center (Daytona Beach Campus, Building 130, Room 124). The Veterans Coordinator and Certifying Official can be reached at (386) 506-3065.
"Yesterday's Warriors, Today's Scholars, and Tomorrow's Leaders"
Welcome Student VeteranWe are proud to have you as a student at Daytona State College, and greatly appreciate your service to our nation. We are pleased you have decided to make Daytona State a part of your life. We know leaving the military and starting a new life as a student can be extremely challenging. We would like to assist you in achieving your educational goals and to get the most out of your college education.
In order to facilitate your success we want to be sure you know what resources and
information are available that meet your unique needs as a veteran and a student.
Below is a list of services that you will need during your time at Daytona State.
Feel free to contact anyone in the departments; however many of the areas below have
identified a contact that can specifically assist veterans with questions.
Click here for New Veteran Student Checklist and Continuing Veteran Student Checklist
Did You Know?
- Daytona State designated a Military Friendly School Veteran-owned company, Victory Media lists honors colleges, universities and trade schools that are doing the most to embrace America's service members and veterans as students.
- Daytona State has become an official Yellow Ribbon school offering the Yellow Ribbon books scholarship for qualifying Veterans.
- Celebrating our veterans' education benefit – 70 Years of the GI Bill
This year marks the 70th Anniversary of the passage of the Service members Readjustment Act, signed on June 22, 1944, and popularly known as the GI Bill.
- We are now offering Tutoring in the Veterans Center.
Please click here to see the flyer for days and times.
The college has implemented a process to insure that all veterans receive registration priority each semester regardless of the number of credits attempted.
- Do you have a Purple Heart or Other Superior Combat Decoration?
Click here for important information.
- House Bill 7015 created the Congressman C.W. Bill Young Veteran Tuition Waiver Program, authorizing an out-of-state fee waiver for honorably discharged veterans of the United States (U.S.) Armed Forces, U.S. Reserve Forces or the National Guard who physically reside in Florida. Click here for further information.
Falcon Veteran Society
All Veterans will strive for academic excellence and succeed to graduation. No matter the service we welcome you to the Daytona State College Falcon Veterans Society Club. We are a chapter of the Student Veterans of America (SVA). A college degree seems to be an elusive goal for men and women returning from military service. SVA makes that goal a reality. Daytona State's Falcon Veterans Society has a mission to provide veterans with resources, support, and advocacy needed to succeed in higher education. We are like any other club at the college, but our ranks have much more than citizens. They include heroes. Come join the Falcon Veterans so you can take part in activities and have the chance to help other veterans in need.
For more information contact:
Maria Rosales
School Certifying Official
Veteran Services


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The Czech Republic is being criticized for still testing gay male asylum seekers by monitoring blood flow to their penises while they watch straight porn. Arousal gets you sent back to wherever you're being persecuted. Unsurprisingly, this is deeply problematic.
The BBC reports that an EU agency, the Fundamental Rights Agency, is criticizing the practice, saying it might violate the European Convention on Human Rights "since this procedure touches upon a most intimate part of an individual's private life."
The Czech Republic's response is not exactly reassuring: They say less than 10 people have been subjected to the test and that they all consented.
It turns out that the Czech Republic pioneered penile phallometry. In the 1950s, Kurt Freund developed the device to test whether conscripted men were actually gay or whether they were lying to get out of service. (Nobody tell John McCain about that.) The device was later used to assess sex offenders. Several U.S. courts have found it to be an unreliable tool.


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Portable and Fixed Mount Mixers Available for General Industrial Needs
The New Nettco i-Series Portable and Fixed Mount Mixers satisfy a wide range of mixing and mounting requirements utilizing a distinctive modular assembly design. Multiple mounting configurations include clamp style, open tank or sealed designs for maximum flexibility. This unique mixer design can be quickly converted from one mounting arrangement to another in as little as two minutes. The i-Series Mixer is designed for OEM Systems Suppliers and end users in general industries.
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- Direct drive and gear options for this global use mixer provides full range of shaft speeds.
- Multiple impeller options available.
- Easy to use selection table for general blending.
- Welded construction
- Global-ready


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What began as a grumpy blotch of storm clouds over the Caribbean has become Hurricane Alex, the first of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season.
The National Hurricane Center in Miami has posted hurricane warnings for a swath of the western Gulf coast from La Cruz, Mexico to near Texas's Baffin Bay. Tropical storm warnings extend farther along the Texas coast to Port O'Conner.
Forecasters say they anticipate a three- to five-foot storm surge north of where the eye makes landfall. The surge is expected to be capable of driving several miles inland before dissipating. Rainfall amounts are expected to range from six to 12 inches, with some isolated locations recording 20 inches of rain before the storm passes.
IN PICTURES: Huge hurricanes in the past two decades
The storm struck Belize June 24 as tropical storm Alex, then weakened as it passed over Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and into the western Gulf of Mexico. Heavy rains fell on the Yucatan Peninsula, as well as on Guatemala and El Salvador.
In addition to people in the warning area, Alex has grabbed the attention of officials running efforts to control and clean up oil from the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, now beginning its 11th week. The storm itself does not directly threaten these efforts. But by some estimates, waves it generates could top 12 feet at the recovery site. Rough seas and high winds halted oil skimming efforts in the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday. Heavy seas could also break up patches of oil on the surface, and could drive oil higher onto beaches and deeper into wetlands unprotected by barrier islands.
"We have not seen any oil being pushed much further inland," said US Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who heads the clean-up effort, during a briefing on Monday. "We have seen the oil change direction. It was generally heading east to the panhandle of Florida. Because of wave conditions and current we now see oil start entering Mississippi sound and areas around Chandelier and Breton Sound. We're very concerned about that. We're moving forces there as we speak."
The biggest concern comes from the prospect of a more-direct hit from a storm. Its surge "would, obviously, exacerbate the oil, move it further into marshes, and would cause problems for us," Admiral Allen said. "So we're going to face that potential throughout the hurricane season should we have any kind of heavy weather."
The Atlantic hurricane season's peak comes during the months of August, September, and October. Alex is the first June Atlantic hurricane since 1995, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Alex also marks the first Atlantic storm against which forecasters are giving county and city officials longer lead times for watches and warnings, notes Chris Landsea, the science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center.
Until now, the National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane watch when a storm was 36 hours away and a warning when the storm was 24 hours out. Now watches are posted with 48 hours of lead time and warnings with 36 hours' lead time.
"Our definition of hurricane watches and warnings had not changed in three decades," he says. "But when you look at our predictions of where the hurricane is going to be, we've had a tremendous improvement in our skill."
Twenty years ago, a two-day track forecast had a 200-mile range of error, he says. Today, it's 100 miles. At the same time, the number of people living along vulnerable coastlines has mushroomed, a trend that keeps local emergency mangers awake at night thinking about evacuating people from popular but fragile barrier islands or other locations with limited evacuation routes.
In meetings with emergency managers, it became clear that watches and warnings under the old scheme were coming too late to be truly useful. to those officials who base their evacuation decisions on them, Dr. Landsea says.
"We didn't want them to become irrelevant," he says.
As the hurricane center gives its new approach its first application to Atlantic hurricanes, researchers are hoping to give forecasters even longer leads by allowing them to identify which "tropical waves" – seemingly haphazard assemblages of storms that can eventually evolve into tropical cyclones – are most likely to form tropical depressions, which can go on to form tropical storms and hurricanes.
The project is dubbed PREDICT – a month-and-a-half-long effort to take the measure of tropical waves as they form off the west coast of Africa.
The project, headed by Michael Montgomery, an atmospheric scientist at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., begins in mid August.
The difference between the tropical waves that fizzle and those that grow into more-serious storm systems seems to lay in what goes on in the heart of the wave. Waves that seem to form a circle-the-wagons closed circulation at their centers seem to be the storms that most often blossom into tropical depressions, the immediate precursor to tropical storms and hurricanes. That closed circulation appears to stave off storm-stiffling dry air that can come in from outside the system. That circulation also appears to concentrate the warm, moist tropical air on which tropical cyclones feed toward the heart of the storm system.
The challenge, Dr. Davis says, is to make sure that's the mechanism, then try to identify the drivers behind it. If researchers are successful, it may eventually be possible to begin providing tropical cyclone forecasts perhaps as far as seven days in advance.
The project also has a short-term payback, Landsea adds. The research aircraft flying through the tropical waves to gather measurements will give scientists and forecasters at the hurricane center a rare look at conditions inside these waves. The waves tend to form too far at sea for hurricane-hunter aircraft to reach on a routine basis.
IN PICTURES: Huge hurricanes in the past two decades


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Creative, fun, and inventive, our new textile collection is born of the spirit and energy of our art and design studio, Hableland. With prints inspired by our world travels, antique store finds, runway fashion, our garden, and painting by hand, this is our place to express our passions and inspirations.
Swatches are available.


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Ballet Bun Flower Garland - BUNFUN™ Flower Wreath Garland for your Ballet Bun - Collection of Two Pink and Blue
Ballet Bun Flower Garland - BUNFUN™ Flower Wreath Garland for your Ballet Bun - Collection of Two Pink and Blue
💗BunFun™ Set of Two - Pink and Blue - BunFun™ 💗
💗Flower and Ribbon Garland for your Ballet Bun!
All our BunFun™ are handmade for you. Each BunFun™ has approximately 22 inches of ribbon and seven plus individual ribbon flowers. We source our materials from all over the world. The BunFun™ are exclusive designs of Dancer.NYC.
Great for ballet class, auditions, performances, recitals, competitions, dress-up or even everyday! Complete your look and standout!
💗Ribbon Colors are listed below
Design your own colors!
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💗Sets of 20 are sold at wholesale prices.
Some BunFun™ are in stock and ready to ship immediately.
The BunFun™ is a trademarked product of Dancer.NYC and Little Dancer.NYC. All our BunFun™ are handmade. No two BunFun™ will be exactly the same.
G Don May 16, 2018
Happy Birthday BUNFUN™ Flower Wreath Garland for your Ballet Bun - One
Perfect for my daughter's ballet class on her birthday. Super fast shipping!
Heidi Geiston Jan 2, 2018
Ballet Bun - Harry Potter Inspired BunFun™ Ballet Bun Flower Wreath
Great quality! She knew they were Griff right away.
Amanda Dobsonon Jan 1, 2018
BUNFUN™ Flower Wreath Garland for your Ballet Bun - Set of Three
Laurie Casaleon Nov 29, 2017
BUNFUN™ Flower Wreath Garland for your Ballet Bun - One
OUR STORY - In 2014, Dancer.NYC opened with our first product, the BunFun™. Inspired by a young dancer, training at the School of American Ballet and cast in New York City Ballet's "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker", my daughter wanted to bring a holiday treat to all the girls in the production. They were loved by the dancers and immediately became a favorite dance accessory for both ballet class and auditions. Today, the BunFun™ is worn by accomplished pre-professional and professional dancers worldwide and are sold at many of this country's most prestigious ballet schools, dance boutiques and ballet stores. The BunFun™ is a trademarked product of Dancer.NYC.
Following the success of the BunFun™, the next challenge was to develop a line of custom designed leotards. As the mother of a pre-professional dancer and a former dancer myself, I was always attracted to elegant classical leotards. The leotards I purchased were usually manufactured abroad, had limited size and color availability and were very expensive. Motivated to find a solution and increase our product offerings, in 2015, Dancer.NYC introduced a line of custom designed leotards.
We love hearing our customers say that our leotards are the "most beautiful", "most comfortable" and "most unique" leotards they have ever worn. Finished with lace, mesh or stretch velvet details, our leotards will last for years without fading, shrinking or stretching. Complementing our leotards is the Repertoire Skirt which is available in lace, mesh, stretch velvet or lycra. Again, mix and match fabrics - no problem. Just like our custom leotards, the repertoire skirt is available in a vast array of colors and color combinations. Great for the studio, the stage, competition teams and performance.
Chilly on your way to class or during a break, so were my daughter and her friends. Our solution, the Jumpsuit; it is perfect. Keep your muscles warm in the stretch cotton warm-up before or after class or even while you travel to class, rehearsal or performance. A proven favorite in black, you can also create your own color combinations. School spirit wear – this has become a favorite!
We now also offer dance wear and accessories from select manufacturers worldwide. Our dance wear is available in both adult and child sizes and many of our products are Made in the USA. 🇺🇸
Customer demand for dance accessories encouraged us to expand further. Our dance bags range from small tote bags to backpacks and duffles. We sell fun and whimsical t-shirts that are ideal to wear both on your day off or on your way to the studio. And although our product line has expanded there remains one key component to all our products - they are made from the best materials available and are "Designed by Dancers for Dancers"!
Academy and School Uniform Dance Wear and Competition Dance Wear – As our company has expanded and our products are being worn in studios worldwide, our dance wear has been noticed by Artistic Directors and Ballet Masters who have asked us to design the dance wear for their students. In the studio or on stage, your dancers will stand out in our dance wear. Let us work with you to design your schools' unique dance wear –leotards, repertoire skirts and warm-ups. Quantity discounts are available as well as fund raising options for 501(c)3 corporations. Please contact us for more information.
Performance Costumes – In 2016 we met a Ballet Mistress who had a dream – a dream to choreograph a ballet for her students in a replica of a George Balanchine design. Working from an old photo, we sourced a company in Europe that handmade sixteen of these beautiful costumes in their original colors – raspberry, sky blue, mint green, lemon chiffon, peach and violet. We measured each dancer and sent the information to the designer. Each gorgeous costume arrived with not one alteration needed! Since then we have been designing and selling ballet costumes from the traditional platter tutu to the more contemporary Balanchine designs. Contact us with your ideas and we will make your dream a reality too!
Little Dancers - we love them too! We have designed a collection where you will find the cutest dance wear and accessories for little dancers, baby ballerinas and young pre-professional dancers - all rising stars of tomorrow.
When Dancer.NYC was founded, we set a mission to support the world of dance. Proceeds from Dancer.NYC support 501(c)3 not-for-profit dance schools and ballet companies.
💗Made by Dancer.NYC
💗"Designed by Dancers for Dancers"


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So basically I want to see what other people think.
In my opinion this whole thing is being blown way out of proportion. No matter how disrespectful this video was, it does not justify killing people and burning embassies.
Views: 1568
That would definitely be nice, but as I'm sure you know a government must by all means exercise policies that best serve their people. So I don't particularly see anything wrong in the way the U.S. is after oil in most of its interaction with the middle-east or oil-rich countries in general.
I disagree that there should be no return if one must do something positive, in fact this form of trade by definition does not constitute anything positive for the giver. Without return while giving you are doing nothing but losing, and that's just what it is by the laws of the physical world we live in.
Unless giving in any shape or form involves a profitable (e.g., a gain of an ally, exchange of technology, human resources, et al.) investment, then it's definitely a loss. If oil rich countries have nothing else to offer but grease (I don't believe so), well, I guess that's just too bad for them.
The only hope I could see for the MENA region is education(x100), deprecation of bronze-age ideologies, and embracing tolerance and celebration of differences.
Of course first world nations have a responsibility towards our species as they are the most advanced, so they can't just stand in complete insouciance and only care for securing their interests, and to be honest I think they are doing a terrific job. They are constantly advancing our understanding of the world, combating the most hideous forms of illness, and always on the front leading the world towards globalization. They might have dropped the ball a few times here and there, but overall we owe the United States almost most of the luxuries we enjoy today on second-to-second basis of our lives.
Moving away from fossil fuels, yes, but as fuel is only one use of petroleum. For now, almost all plastics are based on petroleum.
"I distrust those people who know so well what god wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."
-- Susan B. Anthony --
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
-- Blaise Pascal --
"Gods don't kill people. People with gods kill people."
-- David Viaene --
"So many Gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs."
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox --
There may be some people who are offended by the video. So what, some people are offended by anything. The simple truth is that there are lunatic factions that look for any excuse to blow things up and kill people. This video is just the latest excuse to vent their psychotic and hysterical savagery. I would guess that most of these psychos have never seen the video, not that it matters.
The reaction of people to the Mohammed video shows me why it is important to teach my children about atheism, it's importance & to illustrate the problems of religion.
The poeple protesting are a disgrace to mankind.
As for the video itself. It was poorly made, unentertaining and lacking of educational value. Perhaps though the over-reactions may help some moderates realise the problems with religion & religous belief.
I haven't seen the trailer, but it's my understanding that the offending dialogue was dubbed later replacing an entirely different and unoffensive script. The filmmaker is supposedly an Egyptian Coptic who has been afoul of the law in this country already. I don't know whether he is a citizen or not. The mobs were incited by clerics to avenge the insult to the Prophet and arrived by busloads--sounds a tad organized.
The fact that it is a lousy piece of film making is beside the point. It appears that it was done deliberately and meant to cause exactly what it did. But, where do we draw the line? That creepy preacher from Florida who burned the Quran is just as guilty.
I was heartened by the Libyan pro-American rally. Pictures were posted on Salon.com.
FINALLY! An anti-Islamic protest!
Anti-militia protests show frailty of Libyan state
BENGHAZI, Libya (AP) — Residents of Libya's second-largest city warned on Saturday of a "revolution" to get rid of armed militias and Islamic extremists after protests spurred in part by the killing of the U.S. ambassador left four dead in an unprecedented eruption of public frustration.
The protests aren't "anti-Islamic." They are opposed to the anti-American Islamic instigators. Libya is one country which is both Islamic and has a largely pro-American populace.
Does the phrase, "Islamic extremists," automatically mean, "anti-American Islamic instigators"? I certainly didn't read it that way --
No, but in the case of the attack on the American embassy, I think it's safe to conclude there was a reason those extremists chose that one and not the Argentine or Icelandic embassies. The protests were not against Islam, as your leading line indicated, but against the group presumed by many Libyans to have been behind or to have instigated the attack on the American embassy.
I agree with this: "I think it's safe to conclude there was a reason those extremists chose that one and not the Argentine or Icelandic embassies."
There is no evidence to support your second contention: "The protests were not against Islam,...but against the group presumed by many Libyans to have been behind or to have instigated the attack on the American embassy." It appears to be nothing more than an assumption on your part.
Did you somehow miss the phrase, "Islamic extremists," despite the fact that I've mentioned it twice?
I will discuss the phrase you're obsessed with having me discuss once you admit that "FINALLY! An anti-Islamic protest!" is 180 degrees off the truth.
As for having no evidence, apparently you haven't heard the reports on Public Radio.
Perhaps we are using different definitions of "Islamist." For me, it's a synonym for "Muslim."


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Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
A course for high school, college, and adult learners, including 13 half-hour video programs, a Web site with art images, accompanying text, and course guide.
Courtesy of The Fowler Museum, UCLA.
0. Overview
This overview program includes a sample of each of the 13 programs as well as information on the course's Web based resources. Go to this unit.
1. Converging Cultures
Throughout history, economic needs, material desires, and political ambitions have brought people from different cultures and communities into contact. Whether clashes or cooperative endeavors, these convergences have brought about the exchange of knowledge and Ideas. In the visual arts, they have led to creative juxtapositions, hybrid styles, and the reinterpretation of traditional signs and symbols. Artists featured include Takashi Murakami, Miguel Luciano and Guillermo Gomez-Peña. Go to this unit.
2. Dreams and Visions
Through art, we can perceive more than what we see with our eyes. From Aboriginal artists painting unseen forces to Surrealists exploring the recesses of the unconscious mind, individuals have found ways to give form to unknowable mysteries, personal fantasies, and inner visions. Artist Sandy Skoglund talks about the life of the imagination. Go to this unit.
3. History and Memory
People have documented history, and also have shaped it through art. Art commemorates achievements and failures, recording and creating communal and personal memories. At times painters and sculptors have appropriated artistic forms of the past to make statements in the present. Multimedia artist Shimon Attie shares work that concerns questions of memory, place, and identity. Go to this unit.
4. Ceremony and Society
Many of the objects and images displayed in museums were never intended to be viewed as static artworks. Different meanings emerge when these works are considered in their original contexts. Masks, costumes, vessels, and other objects were created and used to conduct ceremonies and rituals around the world. Three Traditional Bearers of the tuwaduq Nation create a site for a soul recovery ceremony in the Seattle Art Museum. Go to this unit.
5. Cosmology and Belief
In all cultures, people strive to understand their reason for being and their place in the universe. Although art cannot offer definitive answers to life's biggest questions, it often serves as a means through which to explore them. Art can be an instrument not only for expressing spiritual beliefs, but also for visualizing myths, organizing the cosmos, inspiring faith, and communing with the divine. Russian artist Vitaly Komar is featured. Go to this unit.
6. Death
Death is a universal experience. Throughout history, art has served to help people understand death, prepare for it, and cope with it. From the funerary arts of ancient Egypt to Mexican Day of the Dead festivities in modern times, art shapes and reflects attitudes toward death, as well as approaches to living. Italian-born artist Angelo Filomeno's works explore the intermingling of death and fantasy. Go to this unit.
7. Domestic Life
From tables and tapestries to bowls and baskets, art has always figured prominently in domestic life. Within living spaces, objects of aesthetic value have fulfilled practical functions, indulged individual fancies, and expressed shared values. Art turns houses into homes and enriches the activities of everyday life. Textile artist Faith Ringgold explores the line between high art and craft by combining painting, quilted fabric, and storytelling. Go to this unit.
8. Writing
Since the dawn of civilization the relationship between written words and pictures has been manipulated to communicate ideas. It has also inspuired coutless artists, whose works demonstrate how text and image can enhance, supplement, complicate, or even undermine each other's meanings. Calligrapher, printmaker and Macarthur "genius award" recipient, Xu Bing is featured. Go to this unit.
9. Portraits
Across cultures and throughout time, portraiture has played an important role in the way people have understood themselves and their relationships to others. Portraits serve a range of functions, from declaring power and status to making larger statements about society. Painter Kehinde Wiley paints portraits of African American men in the poses inspired by classic works of the old masters. Go to this unit.
10. The Natural World
From the earliest times, people have found sustenance, solace, challenge, and mystery in the natural world. In representations of animals, landscapes, and earthworks, art has been a means through which humans have negotiated their relationship to nature as well as to each other. We view drawings of the natural world mirrored by a metaphysical concept of the same image in the work of Kay Walkingstick. Go to this unit.
11. The Urban Experience
For thousands of years cities have been hubs of activity, centers of industry, and places from which new aesthetic trends originate, evolve, and spread. The creative visions of planners, painters, architects, and sculptors have shaped the development of cities around the world. In turn, the urban experience has inspired the creation of art work depicting aspects of city life. With the New York City waterfalls, artist Olafur Eliasson offers his urban audience a new kind of experience with nature. Go to this unit.
12. Conflict and Resistance
Throughout history, groups and individuals have sought not only to maintain control over their own lives, but also to assert their power over the lives of others. Visual art has played an important role in documenting such conflict and resistance. It also has served as a means for expressing personal views on politics, war, social inequities, and the human condition. Moroccan-born photographer Lalla Essaydi addresses the complex reality of Arab female identity from the perspective of personal experience. Go to this unit.
13. The Body
From painting to sculpture, body art to performance art, the body has figured prominently in the creative expression of nearly all cultures from the beginning of civilization. Through art, the body becomes a site for defining individual identity, constructing sex and gender ideals, negotiating power, and experimenting with the nature of representation itself. Multimedia performance artist Shigeyuki Kihara makes powerful statements about the depiction of Samoan people, shared memory, societal roles, and sexuality. Go to this unit.
© Annenberg Foundation 2017. All rights reserved. Legal Policy


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A Southern California man has been arrested after police say he whacked a taxi with a didgeridoo in an argument over the fare.
The 31-year-old man and a woman were picked up Sunday night in Chula Vista then fell asleep during a 20-minute ride to a home, according to the U-T San Diego.
Police Lt. Phil Collum says when they arrived, the man got into an argument with the cabbie over the fare.
Collum says he went into the house and came out with a didgeridoo -- a long, wooden instrument from Australia.
Collum says the man threatened the driver with it. The cabbie drove off but the man allegedly chased the cab and whacked it several times with the didgeridoo, denting it.
Arriving police arrested him on suspicion of vandalism.
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