|
Indefinite
detention yields definite profits
When
Art Wallenstein was asked to cut his budget for the Department
of Correction and Rehabilitation, he faced the same dilemma
as every other Montgomery County department director: there
was not enough revenue to maintain his department at the current
level of spending.
But Mr.
Wallenstein was not only short of operating revenue. MCDCR
had just opened a state-of-the-art jail in Clarksburg last
month, and Montgomery County just couldn't supply enough convicted
criminals to fill the extra 1,054 beds.
With not
enough dollars and too many beds, the director of MCDCR pulled
a page out of "The Business of Government is Business" handbook
and talked to the Federal government about subletting cell
space in Clarksburg. It turns out the boom market in federal
prisoners is in the field of immigrant detainees. Homeland
Security's newly reconstituted Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services, formerly known as the INS, was very eager to place
the unwanted, poor, and huddled masses in local facilities.
According to a Gazette article of March 26, Mr. Wallenstein
has proposed to take in some 75 immigrant detainees at the
rate of $70 per head per day in order to save his department's
budget.
In the
article, Mr. Wallenstein, "who has had excellent experience"
with immigrant inmates, cited the jail's "cultural diversity"
as one of its selling points. In response to concerns that
the jail's new illegal immigrant storage program might actually
attract dangerous people, Mr. Wallenstein was confident that
these foreign exchange inmates would not be "terrorists or
political prisoners."
The genius
of this solution to Montgomery County's fiscal crisis comes
to focus in light of Attorney General John Ashcroft's recent
ruling that immigrants, from Haitian boat people to al-Qaeda
operatives, can be detained indefinitely if it is in the interest
of national security. Indefinite detention has the ring of
hard cash for fiscally-strapped Montgomery County.
—Richard
Jaeggi
|
