THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

At least, the failure of the legitimate purpose of detention centers. If you believe, as the corporations running them do, that the people in detention centers are there solely for the maximum profits of those in charge then it may not be a failure, until the policies create a riot.

At least 300 inmates were transferred from a Texas prison on Monday after a riot broke out in the facility — which holds mostly immigrants detained for crossing into the United States illegally — leaving it "uninhabitable," according to authorities.

The prisoners were protesting inadequate medical services, which — along with cruel treatment and sexual abuse — has been a common complaint in private prisons housing undocumented immigrants, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other rights groups.

Icy conditions caused delays with the transfer of more than 2,000 others from the federal prison, local media reported.

The uprising, or “unrest” as prison officials called it, began early Friday at the Willacy County Correctional Center — operated by private prison company Management & Training Corp (MTC) on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Privately-held MTC's 10-year contract with the federal government is worth about half a billion dollars.

The facility is located about 40 miles from the Mexico border in Raymondville, Texas, and has been nicknamed Ritmo, or Raymondville's Guantanamo, for its "crammed and squalid" conditions.

Two-hundred inmates are packed into each Kevlar dome, the tent-like structures that serve as housing, with no privacy between beds or in the bathrooms where toilets and showers are open without partitions, the ACLU said in a 2014 report entitled "Warehoused and Forgotten."

Insects and spiders crawl through holes in the tents and bite detainees. Toilets frequently overflow, and the water was shut off for days in 2012 after it started to look yellowish-green, according to the report. Authorities gave inmates bottled water two days later.

Prisoners refused to come to breakfast or report for work on Friday in protest of what they said was inadequate medical service at the prison. Inmates broke out of housing structures and converged in the recreation yard, setting fire to several Kevlar domes.

The policies may have failed but the taxpayers will foot the bill for the necessary LEO's to end the trouble and there will be no worries about the contract being cancelled. The corporations involved have too many friends for that to happen.