Slave labor and all. I gotta run down to da Keller. Be back in a few.
OK, Tante found 'em.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.php The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, *2002*
It was a shaky spring for the correctional workers of Hastings, Nebraska (pop. 24,064), as the stagnation in the nation's prison population and the increasingly high costs of incarceration jostled the sleepy town, some two hours' drive from Lincoln. On April 9, the 84 employees of the Hastings Correctional Center were told that the 186-bed facility would be closing at the end of June. State funds were scraping bottom, and the $2.5 million annual price tag for the prison was too big a burden to carry. "We really didn't know what we would do," says Jim Morgan, who had been working at HCC for 15 years and lives to this day in the house where he was born. "There aren't a lot of job opportunities out here, and most of us have homes and kids and couldn't even think about moving somewhere else." For two months, the workers scrambled, filling out applications at nearby meatpacking and cardboard-container plants and anticipating long hours in the unemployment office.
Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.
"It's a win-win," says Morgan. The INS is desperate for more beds for its ever expanding detainee population. And the state of Nebraska, collecting $65 per detainee per day from the INS, rakes in more than $1 million a year over and above the cost of running the place.
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Now this next one got put in the box before Tante had figgered out what saving links meant.
Empty Promises
riverfronttimes.com | originally published: February 20, 2002
Missouri has been pouring millions into prisons that aren't being used. But stay tuned: If politicians have their way, there will be plenty of inmates to go around.
BY BRUCE RUSHTON
Locals say the lights always burn at Missouri's largest prison, a sprawling 210-acre complex on the outskirts of Bonne Terre. Scores of orange bulbs, mounted on tall poles, fire up the winter sky and can be seen for miles.
With enough power to turn night into day, the lights make the new Eastern Reception and Diagnostic Center as obvious a landmark as the towering 32-acre mound of lead-mine tailings left behind by the St. Joe lead company. The 2 million-ton dirt heap and a huge underground cavity are the old lead company's legacy to Bonne Terre. Today the abandoned mine, dubbed Billion Gallon Lake, is the world's largest freshwater diving resort, attracting notice from scuba magazines and National Geographic.
Resort or no, Bonne Terre is far from a vacation playland. The town can't afford a new pump for an artificial lake that went dry this winter -- nature lovers had to stare at a muddy hole for weeks until rain filled it. The public schools are the biggest employer. There's a cluster of fast-food restaurants, gas stations and video stores at the highway interchange, but several downtown storefronts are boarded up. Bonne Terre officials thought they'd found the solution to the town's money problems when the state decided to build a $168 million penitentiary that would bring more than 800 jobs. Then there'd be plenty of money for paving potholes and sprucing up the park, they figured.
They figured wrong.
Six months after construction was completed, the prison in Bonne Terre sits empty, a sobering lesson on the fiscal consequences of prison construction that has cost Missouri taxpayers nearly a half-billion dollars since 1994. During the past dozen years, the state's corrections budget has more than doubled, benefiting concrete-pouring contractors and politicians such as the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, who led the push for new prisons while billing himself as a crime-fighter. With the prison-building spree near an end, the state now says it doesn't have enough money to open the Bonne Terre lockup, designed to house the state's most dangerous inmates.
It is a VERY.LONG.PIECE. Mebbe one of da chilluns be chivalrous and find out if it has gone down the memory hole...
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