Immigration enforcement is supplying a long-standing economic market for prisoners

Filed 51m ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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A sociologist tracing the history of rural incarceration finds today's ICE detention boom mirrors 19th-century West Virginia, which imported federal and D.C. prisoners for revenue between 1876 and 1908, tripling its incarceration rate. West Virginia currently detains immigrants for $90 per day per person, even as federal judges have ordered releases over due process violations and the state jail system briefly suspended taking new detainees. ICE detention numbers grew 58% — more than 25,000 people — between 2025 and 2026.

Facilities in Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota illustrate the pattern nationally: a closed Minnesota prison that shut in 2010 for lack of demand is reopening as an ICE facility promising 450 jobs, while Indiana rents understaffed beds to ICE for $291 per detainee per day. Officials and lawmakers openly describe these facilities as economic lifelines for towns hollowed out by federal funding cuts elsewhere.

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Calling a detention facility an economic development project is a neat trick, since it means the same government cutting the social services that impoverished these towns gets to look like their savior for locking people up instead. The 'jobs program' framing does a lot of work to avoid saying what the jobs actually are.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Glee Club Polka · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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