LOS ANGELES — By the time Riya Khan saw her mother through the visitation glass at the CoreCivic facility in California City, she already knew something was catastrophically wrong. Her 64-year-old mother Masuma Khan was shaking. Her legs were swollen, and so bruised and painful she could barely stand. Riya was watching the words come out of her mom’s mouth, but Masuma’s shortness of breath made it so she could hardly speak.
From the day she was taken into custody, Masuma had been asking for her medications every single day. For high blood pressure. For asthma. For prediabetes, hypothyroidism, glaucoma, back pain. She had been there a week and had received none of them.
“She was having a medical emergency,” Riya told me during a live broadcast for NVN.
Her mother’s story anchors our new documentary, How Private Prisons Get Rich Off ICE.
“I’m sure that everyone knows that shortness of breath is always a medical emergency. So then tell me why not a single staff at that facility treated it as one.”
No one at CoreCivic had a good answer for that. What they did have was a commissary, stocked with crackers, chips, and junk food priced at three times retail. They also had a policy of keeping the facility at temperatures so cold that detainees were developing rashes. Sweaters were available, too.
Always for a price. When it comes to private prisons in America, people are the product and the cruelty isn’t accidental. It’s efficient.
