In June 2006 only 35 percent of phone calls out of the detention system were successful, and that figure never reached higher than 74 percent. "Detainees are completely isolated within the system," Mark Dow, author of "American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons," told United Press International in a phone interview. "Even their help line is clearly a joke."

"What a lot of people don't understand about these detainees is that usually they don't speak English and are held in isolated areas," Dow said. "The telephone is a lifeline. Imagine being in a foreign country where it turns out your papers aren't in order and you don't speak the language and you're put in a little town in the middle of nowhere with convicted criminals and you're told if you have a problem you can call your consulate and your phone doesn't work. It's hell; it's a nightmare."

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. federal agency that runs the prisons, cannot be blamed for the problem.

"The detention standards are considerably better than most other centers," he told United Press International in a phone interview.

"Given the high rate of immigration violations, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a pretty good performance rate. I think employers and other groups don't appreciate how costly it is to manage illegal immigration," Stein said.

But according to Dow, the phone lines are badly maintained for a reason. "It can no longer be considered an accident," he said. "The ICE detention system sort of developed ad hoc. It's been clear for a decade that the system isolates prisoners and tries to take away their legal rights."

Even though the phone lines often do not work, inmates are being charged outrageous fees to use them. According to Dow, the pro bono system has been privatized, and because of their monopoly within the prisons, the phone companies charge two or three times more per call than they do on the regular market. They then share this profit with the county that runs the prison.

To counter this, a civil-rights group started bringing phone cards to a prison in Elizabeth, N.J., but the cards were soon confiscated and banned by the prison. Detainees were told that they could only buy phone cards from the prison, which are far more expensive.

The main problem is that the ICE detention system is not likely to get any better, experts cautioned. "As long as there isn't any real outside monitoring that has the power of enforcement behind it, ICE really has no motivation to improve the detention system. If it was going to do that it would have done it a long time ago. The system is deeply flawed," Dow said.

Stein, on the other hand, said he believes the problem lay elsewhere. "(The ICE agency) is part of a hidden cost to manage the interior (of the United States)," he said. "If we did a better job of border patrol and fewer people would try to immigrate illegally, we'd have much less stress on the detention system."

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