Punishment, Cruel and Unusual
Big news from Big Sky Country:
Economic development officials in Hardin are looking at the soon-to-close detention facility in Guantanamo Bay as a possible fix for the jail sitting empty in Hardin.
President Barack Obama signed an executive order Jan. 22 to close the Guantanamo detention facilities in Cuba where hundreds of enemy combatants have been held since 2002. The closure is to occur in a year, during which time remaining detainees must be returned to their home countries or detained elsewhere.
Meanwhile, a 460-bed detention facility sits empty in Hardin. Built by Two Rivers Authority, the city’s economic development arm, the facility was meant to bring economic development to Hardin by creating more than 100 high-paying jobs.
So moving guys from the Cuban beaches to the Montana badlands is supposed to make people like us more? What part of that do you get?
Why Montana? Muslims have always been more into fly fishing than surfing ever since Annette briefly toyed with the idea of a two-piece bathing suit back in 1965 which resulted in the Bikini Bongo Fatwah Fest in the Summer of ’66. The Shah and Khomeini wore the same Speedo and things between them were never the same again.
The See America! tour, exclusively for Overseas Contingency Operations detainees, has begun! Talk to your local American servicemember today for travel arrangements!
Tip: We’ll be concluding with free scholarships to Yale, a famous American university, so we suggest you turn off the subtitles when you watch DVDs in the detention center’s recreation facilities. As they (sort of) say in America, bomb voyage!
They built an unneeded prison to “create high paying jobs?” More like: to create work for a friendly contractor. Seriously, there wasn’t something more useful than an extra prison they could have built?
Nathan,
That prison will eventually get filled. It’s just the reality of the prison industry. Here in Arizona, we have inmates from Arizona in Oklahoma and used to have some in Indiana and will soon have them in a prison in Colorado. Does that make sense? No, but ask politicians or politically-appointed clemency/probation/parole boards to risk letting large amounts of people go? Ha! Not since Willie Horton they won’t, especially if they’re “tough on crime” and love to add years and years to sentences.
My guess is that this prison has already heard from Alaska, Hawaii (which has inmates in Arizona prisons,) and California, but is seeing what the Feds will offer per inmate. Having a prison facility is a better investment than municipal bonds or a water park or campground, especially in our zero-tolerance nation.
The prison in which I work just tore down a 400-bed facility and is quickly constructing a 1200-bed warehouse to replace it (and yes, warehouse is an accurate term using the prison’s new “direct supervision” model which makes prison much more like a Dilbert cartoon cubicle hell than the traditional cell with bars one. Don’t ask what the staff think about what happens if there’s a riot.) Meanwhile, the state is proposing dropping up to 20% of our budget starting in July. I’m not complaining, but instead think that many of the cuts are possible (even my 10% pay cut isn’t so bad since I have a Saturday busman’s holiday stint at the public library.) What’s going to be interesting is the fact that the Department of Corrections response involves some early releases for thousands of inmates. Usually that’s a surefire way to get more money, but right now we have a State Legislature that will call their bet. When (not if) someone released early does something particularily heinous, will our legislators change their “would rather teabag a beartrap than raise taxes” attitude? I’m betting against it.
Also Nathan, prisons get communities more citizens that the local community doesn’t have to do much for. The inmates get counted on the census (even the illegal alien inmates, something you don’t hear Lou Dobbs crying about unless they’re working on the outside,) which generally increases rural and more conservative districts and lead to more Federal and often State funding for those areas. And those jobs are pretty secure: the starting pay in Arizona for a job that doesn’t require more than a GED is over $36K with benefits and a pretty good retirement system (at least it’s better than no retirement system, still it’s a twenty year pension.) Yeah, the contractor got paid, but I still expect a win for the community unless the contractor used temporary roads to reach the site and then blew up the bridges and mined all the roads on the way out, which probably wasn’t in their contract so they didn’t.