New Orleans      Watching “The Mayor of Kingstown” on Netflix is an eerie experience of art seeming to be different from life in a darker, more violent sense, but maybe in fact this series is a warning about life duplicating art.  We’re only two seasons down as we follow the tale of how a bunch of prisons around the supposedly mythical town of Kingstown, Michigan come to dominate the town’s economy and employment as inside the yard is a mirror image of outside on the streets.

I thought of this as I read about how the splurge of expenditures by the Department of Homeland Security of detention centers and immigration enforcement has tilted the economies of some small towns and states in the US in a long piece in N+1 by Jack Norton called the “Disappearance Machine.”  Everything about the horror of current US policy around immigrants, detention centers (which are being referred to in some quarters as “concentration” camps), and deportations is repugnant, so none of that is news.  Norton does a good job at something that might be even more frightening and “Kingstown” like in the economic dependency some communities are embracing to take advantage of the Trumpian surge of money into DHS and these despicable programs.

With $170-billion from the Bad Budget Bill, all of us read about the scandalous purchase – and gift to private equity and other big real estate companies – when Kristy Noem bought unused warehouse space at premium prices for detention centers.  Current leadership is trying to offload $700 million worth.  That’s only part of the story, as Norton reports,

This is one of the models ICE has always used — renting local jail space via a sort of carceral structural adjustment program for counties that are in debt and rely on per diem payments from ICE and the US Marshals. At the same time, in many states, ICE has been expanding 287(g) agreements, which effectively deputize local law officers to act as immigration enforcement. Over the past year, the number of these agreements has drastically increased. ICE has been, in Gramscian terms, “renovating and making ‘critical’ an already existing” nexus of infrastructure and political relationships.

Glades County, Florida, is the real-life Kingstown, Michigan.  Glades has a ratio of almost 5000 prisoners for every 100,000 people.

In 2007, Glades County opened a huge county jail that doubled as a federal detention center for ICE, at a cost of $33 million. County leaders financed this by creating a nonprofit shell corporation, the Glades Correctional Development Corporation (GCDC), which could take out loans for construction costs. To raise money for infrastructure, state and local governments will usually sell bonds to investors…Revenue bonds …are backed by future projected revenue, from, say, the tolls or user fees that a given facility or project can charge. The bonds GCDC issued were revenue bonds, justified by the future income it planned to bring in by renting detention space to ICE.

The elected leadership of Glades County has bet its future on the boom and bust of immigration policy, but either way, the bonds have to be paid, and that handcuffs the county and its future to draconian policies.  As Norton notes, they have to hope “…for more people to get locked up in ICE detention…so that the county and its shell corporation could make payments to their investors.”

Literally, the bottom line for many communities, their local jails, and even their police departments on these 287g agreements to implement immigration enforcement are now locked into the carceral program that Trump and his gang have put on steroids.  A new administration and new policies will still either have to bail out some of these local governmental bodies or maintain the current programs.  None of this was ever sustainable, but it will take a lot to stop these atrocities, which are an affront to justice at the altar of money and markets, which speak louder and more powerfully than other voices.