PRISONERS
OF PROFIT
was administratively closed, after
he became ill.
By the mid-1990s, Esmor had
expanded far beyond its New York
City origins, winning contracts
to manage a boot camp for young
boys and adults outside of Forth
Worth, Texas, and immigration
detention centers in New Jersey
and Washington state.
As the company grew and sought
more contracts, executives hired
knowledgeable government insiders. In New York, Esmor added
political associates linked to U.S.
Rep. Edolphus Towns, a Democrat
who represented the Brooklyn district where the company ran one of
its first federal halfway houses.
Fueling a push into the immigration detention business, Esmor
brought on Richard P. Staley, a
former acting director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s central office in Washington, D.C., and added to its board
Stuart M. Gerson, a former U.S.
attorney general. At the time, the
Justice Department oversaw both
the INS and the Bureau of Prisons
— two of Esmor’s biggest customers. The company also hired James
C. Poland, who had worked in the
Texas prison system, where Esmor
was angling for new contracts.
HUFFINGTON
11.03.13
All of these recruits positioned
the company for winnings. In
1994, Slattery and his partners
cashed in with an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange valued at $5.2 million.
Just a year after going public,
a riot broke out at Esmor’s immigration detention center near
Newark International Airport in
New Jersey, a holding tank for immigrants caught trying to enter
the country illegally. As an organized group of inmates began to
assault guards, staff abandoned
their posts and fled the jail. An
INS official on site ordered the
guards to go back in to quell the
riot, but they refused.
The detainees eventually took
over the facility, using pieces of
tables and chairs to break through
security glass and destroy much
of its interior. It took nearly five
hours for outside authorities to
regain control.
In a statement after the riot,
Slattery said Esmor was “deeply
disturbed and appalled by the apparent conduct” of some employees at the facility. But the company characterized the incident
as a “local problem not reflected
in any of its operations elsewhere
around the country.”
A subsequent INS investigation found that staff training by
Esmor had been abysmal. Guards