Government is turning more and more to for-profit corporations to house large numbers of migrants and asylum seekers, with many of the facilities having histories of being plagued by widespread allegations of abuse and scandal.

Western governments across the globe long ago turned to the practice of outsourcing prisons to privately held companies and, in more recent times, the trend has spread to immigration detention centers.

At the Dilley Center in Texas, it's estimated that as many as 2,000 mothers and their children are detained by ICE at any one time on the 50-acre facility. The center is owned by the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest privately owned prison and detention center operation in America.

But records reveal the company's trail of abuse and scandal at its various facilities looms just as large. In 2008, the Idaho Department of Corrections found that a local prison the company ran experienced four times as many prisoner-on-prisoner assaults as the state's seven other prisons combined.

ACLU Sues Corrections Corporation of America

In 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued CCA, arguing facilities were understaffed and it falsified billing records it turned in to the state. Roughly a year later, the Dawson State Jail for nonviolent offenders the company ran was labeled the "worst state jail in Texas" after seven inmates died over a nine year period.

In 2014, an ACLU report concluded detention centers run by the government as opposed to private companies can make a world of difference for detainees when it comes to such basic issues as human rights and more humane treatment.

Specifically, the probe found state-run institutions in the U.S. were less crowded and offered far easier access to educational programs and quality medical care.

In what has become a multimillion-dollar global industry that shows little signs of slowing anytime soon, the complaints voiced about how such operations are ran have become eerily similar.

Just two years ago, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron awarded security firm Serco a $100 million contract for running Yarl's Wood immigrant detention center, which since then has been so over-fraught with substandard conditions one doctor declared the center was "reminiscent of Guantánamo Bay."

Meanwhile, advocates of private immigration detention centers continue to argue such operations result in huge savings for taxpayers. But recent reports even call that contention into question.

U.S. Spends More on Immigration Detentions Than a Decade Ago

Reports are the U.S. government spends more on immigrant detention today than it did a decade ago when the number of border crossings was higher.

All the while, the issue of accountability seems to have slipped further and further away from being a part of the equation.

Meanwhile, CAA and other similar operations have endlessly lobbied the government to keep more people behind bars than deporting them and as of 2014 Congress required that at least 34,000 people be housed daily in detention centers.

All the while, the job of tracking what comes to many of the detainees housed in these facilities has become harder to track. With many of them now privately owned, more and more the government maintains little or no oversight over them, leaving journalist with less access to records and the like.

Oxford University political scientist Matthew J. Gibney is convinced that might not be a coincidence.

"When something goes wrong - a death, an escape - the government can blame it on a kind of market failure instead of an accountability failure."

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