Building prisons will keep the construction industry alive when the housing bubble deflates, keep the prison overseers employed without jailing meth-heads (so they can get the treatment they need, of course) and still provide cheap labor (prisoners are explicitly excluded from the amendment banning slavery).
The Immigrant Gold Rush
By Forrest Wilder, Texas Observer
Posted on May 22, 2006, Printed on May 22, 2006
For the savvy investor looking for a growth industry, South Texas offers a sure thing. The business calculus is simple: More immigrants than ever are being apprehended. That means the federal government needs more detention centers and more people to run them. No matter how the national debate on immigration plays out in Congress, the corporations that have moved into the business of building and operating detention centers are likely to see a steady stream of revenue for years to come.
The United States Marshals Service, for example, is now soliciting bids from private companies to build, own, and operate a 2,800-bed detention facility near Laredo. The "superjail," as it has come to be called, will serve the federal criminal court in downtown Laredo, which is loaded up with immigration-related cases in what the Marshals Service calls an "emergency [detention] situation." The $100-million superjail is expected to be one of the largest private detention centers in the nation, and will join a growing chain of county and local jails and private detention facilities all over Texas that coordinate with federal agencies to hold immigrants -- some destined for trials or hearings, others for deportation.
From downtown San Antonio to the banks of the Rio Grande in South Texas, for-profit companies run seven detention facilities for the Marshals Service and for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE (formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service) holds noncitizen detainees waiting for a hearing in the civil immigration courts, or facing immediate deportation. The Marshals Service is responsible for housing both citizens and noncitizens awaiting trial or sentencing in federal criminal court.
"It's the immigrant gold rush in South Texas," says Bob Libal, co-director of Grassroots Leadership, an Austin-based nonprofit that monitors the private prison industry. "In Texas, almost all of the current prison expansion is occurring to house immigrant detainees, and that's primarily located in South Texas along the border." There are at least 7,000 newly built or proposed ICE and Marshals Service beds in Texas for immigrant detainees, according to Corrections Professional, an industry journal. In the early 1980s, ICE (then INS) operated zero beds in Texas; the Marshals Service, no more than 3,000 in the entire country.
