Virginia’s Gulag Archipelago keeps growing.
Back a decade or so ago, Republican Gov. George Allen got attention for his proposals to expand the state’s prison system. That was then.
Today, the hot idea is to create “detention centers” for those hordes of illegal immigrants that we all know are overrunning the Old Dominion doing such awful things as working as gardeners or in poultry or crab-picking plants.
Up in places like mostly white and affluent Prince William County, the Republican board of supervisors won’t tolerate such Barbarians at the Gate. County police are under orders to check the citizenship of anyone stopped for any crime, including running a stop sign. They are finding that their provincial nationalism if not racism is expensive
Once you round up all of those illegal immigrants, typically dark-skinned and Spanish-speaking ones, where do you put them while they are waiting to be deported back to Mexico City or Tegulcigalpa or wherever?
The Town of Farmville and a tiny Richmond-based outfit called ICA-Farmville have an idea.
They have won approval from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a $21 million detention facility that will have 1,040 beds just for the typically dark-skinned people waiting the weeks or months for deportation. Town Manager Gerald Spates said that Farmville can use the detention center because it will employ about 200 people, have a $8.2 million payroll a year and generate more than $700,000 in taxes. Farmville is a college town with a few furniture stores so it can use the money.
The detention center was originally planned for Cumberland County but was rejected. “We decided it would be a good fit and we were very supportive of it,” Spates told me. So, Farmville sought and won an ICE contract for the facility.
The managers of the detention (or minimum security prison depending upon your point of view) is an outfit based in Richmond called ICA/Farmville. ICA stands for “Immigration Centers of America” and its principals include Ken Newsome who is also president of AMC Bakery in Richmond. Other partners are Warren Coleman and Russell Harper of Harper Associates in Richmond. ICA-Farmville did not return repeated phone calls.
I could not find out if ICA-Farmville had any experience running detention centers with human beings. I did find out that Newsome gave money to Republican Jim Gilmore’s senatorial campaign, however.
That’s not the only politically-connected contribution involved. The project has won two grants for $581,760 for water, sewer and other infrastructure for the center from the Virginia Tobacco Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission. This is the highly politicized body that decides how the state’s share of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with four tobacco companies will be spent.
So, once again, we have people in Virginia making a buck trading in human lives. Richmond, after all, used to be the nation’s No. 1 slave auction center. It raises other points as well:
The number of illegal immigrants has dropped below the 12 million estimate, Pew Research says. The reason is obvious. With the economy heading south fast to recession it’s harder to find jobs. Plus, the immigration crackdowns have made dark-skinned Spanish people skittish about being around whether they are illegal or not. With trends such as these, one wonders about the long term viability about the Farmville project.
The Washington Post has reported that ICE’s admininistration of illegals in Virginia is a bad joke. It takes lots of time and money to move captured suspects around and haul them hither and yon to appear before a judge, often via videoconferencing. The system the Post says, is beset by waste and dysfunction. Maybe the detention center is a good idea, if this is the case. But shouldn’t efforts be made to fix the system first before building prisons?
You have to wonder what the tobacco commission people are thinking. Why are awful projects like this considered so worthy of our share of the tobacco company settlement. Let me give you an idea what other states do with their tobacco money. In North Carolina, the Golden Leaf Foundation, that state’s tobacco commission, has given $20 million to Historically Black North Carolina Central University to create the Biomanufacturing Research Institute and Technology Enterprise (BRITE). The purpose of BRITE is to help train minority college students for jobs with top pharmaceutical firms in Research Triangle Park nearby.
Funny that when I mentioned this contrast to an editor of mine up in the DC area, he just laughed and said, “Well that’s Virginia for you.”
I still am puzzled why this state and some of the people in it are so inclined to create prisons. Spates tells me that the detention facility will feature bunk style housing with televisions and computers.
But let’s face it. It is still a prison. A handful of private investors will profit from it. Farmville will scarf up some limited tax dollars. And instead of using public money for more worthy purposes, such as helping train a new generation of drug researchers, Virginia will merely end up with more cooks and prison guards and “Cool Hand Luke” style wardens.
What we have here is “Failure to Communicate.”
–Peter Galuszka
