[LINK] "Why Are Nigerians Flocking to Work in Texas Prisons?"

[rfmcdonald]

Maurice Chammah at Vice describes the processes which have led so many Nigerian immigrants to the United States to move to Texas, where they work in local prisons.

John Okperuvwe flew from Lagos, Nigeria, to Boston in September 2008 after winning a visa through a lottery run by the US State Department. He spent three days in Boston with a friend, and then moved to Los Angeles, where he knew a pastor from back home. He worked as a security guard at the Staples Center and the city's main train depot, and took a second job transporting blood between doctors and laboratories. His wife and children—they now have two boys and two girls—eventually joined him, and they squeezed into a single room in the pastor's house. In terms of job opportunities, Okperuvwe says, "California was as dry as Africa."

In early 2010, Okperuvwe found a friend from his college days in Lagos on Facebook. He sent a message, and they started chatting. The friend was working in a Texas prison and making good money.

Okperuvwe prayed. He felt he had little to lose, and that March, he found a cheap apartment in Houston and took the entrance exam for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (known locally as TDCJ). He passed easily. In September, TDCJ offered him a job in Huntsville, a town of 30,000, about an hour from Houston, which houses many of the state's prisons and the agency's headquarters.

As soon as he arrived, Okperuvwe discovered that there were lots of Nigerians and other West Africans already living in Huntsville, all working for TDCJ. Some, like him, had brought their families and others were single men living in department dorms. Many, like him, already had college degrees from back home that wouldn't transfer so they were studying at Sam Houston State University, the local college, during the day and working at night.

Okperuvwe had discovered a phenomenon that had already become apparent to prisoners, their family members, and correctional officers: since around 2008, a wave of African immigrants have taken jobs as prison guards in Texas. The exact numbers are unknown—the Texas prison agency does not keep track of the birthplaces of its employees—but prisoners and correctional officers anecdotally ballpark it in the hundreds. Many come from Nigeria, but others hail from Cameroon, Liberia, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. In 2009, the newsletter Prison Legal News reported that at the Ramsey Unit, near Houston, entire shifts were "largely composed of Nigerians."