The Detention Center Prosperity Gospel Fails to Work Miracles in Rural Communities
Stewart Detention Center is located in one of the poorest counties in the country. Today we look at Stewart through the lens of a new report on rural facilities, a documentary, and a new OIG report.
In the documentary film “Lumpkin, Georgia”, Mac Moye, a longtime resident of Stewart County, Georgia, explains why his rural county became home to Stewart Detention Center, one of the largest detention facilities in the country run by a private contractor CoreCivic.
"Stewart County is ground zero for a lot of American history: Indian battles and slavery and civil rights issues. It is too obvious that Stewart Detention Center is located here. Once again, we're talking about people that aren't wanted by everyone here in the United States. There it is, right there." – Mac Moye
Stewart County is located in southwest Georgia on the state line with Alabama. The county is one of the poorest in the country. The county seat of Lumpkin (not to be confused with Lumpkin County in northern Georgia) is named after the former governor of Georgia in the early 1800s, who viewed his main accomplishment as effecting the removal of the Creek and Cherokee Indians from the region.
The first time I saw Stewart Detention Center was during an annual protest in 2015 that coincided with the annual protest against the conspicuously nearby School of the Americas. I returned in 2017 with Brian Hoffman at the start of the Southeastern Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI) that drew on lessons learned from the CARA Pro Bono project in South Texas. Both visits left me feeling sick to my stomach about the economic violence this country perpetrates on rural communities. Brett Story refers to these places as “sacrifice zones” in his book Prison Land, and, like “Thrive” and “Lumpkin”, Brett emphasizes the relationship between poverty and carceral power.
The CCA facility in Stewart is out past the east edge of Lumpkin. The water tower for the facility is all you can see at the end of a quarter-mile-long access road known as CCA Drive that seems to drive off to nowhere before turning right before the upright white cylinder and disappearing behind a stand of trees.
"If you look at where these detention centers are built, they're built in the middle of nowhere." – Marty Rosenbluth in “Lumpkin, Georgia”
“Stewart”, as people I interviewed in Georgia called it, has often been described as an exploitive and dangerous facility, not only for people on the inside—Salvador Vargas, who died while detained there in April, is only the most recent example—but also for the surrounding community of people living largely in rural poverty, whom ICE and CoreCivic (the private contractor that operates the facility) preyed upon with promises of jobs.
A recent report by Innovation Law Lab titled “Thrive” explores the false economic promises that often come bundled with rural detention facilities and rural prisons. The prosperity gospel of incarceration is rarely born out in practice. Although it is true that ICE contracts bring in some money to counties, often through utility bills, the jobs that are promised never materialize, or materialize and then dematerialize as local labor is replaced by out-of-towners. In “Lumpkin, Georgia”, two women reinforce this point, emphasizing that many people in their community do not have the qualifications, credit scores, or spotless criminal records that would make them eligible for jobs at the facility. Both “Lumpkin” and “Thrive” also expose the psychological toll that working in these dehumanizing facilities has on the workers themselves.
For a different perspective on the alleged economic value of rural detention facilities, or to at least situate “Thrive” in a larger context, see this article by the AJC titled “Closing an ICE jail in South Georgia would cheer activists but harm a rural community’s economy.”
“Thrive” goes further than I expected in providing actual solutions. I think this is important because I firmly believe that any reduction or closure in rural immigrant detention facilities needs to think seriously about how to also engage with questions of rural poverty rather than ignoring them. To that end, the report argues that people in lower-income rural communities do not see substantive gains promised by prisons and the report argues that residents would benefit far more from a mix of available government programs and industries that do, in fact, improve wages and quality of living. I didn’t expect such practical solutions, and although I am no expert on these matters, the report was not pie-in-the-sky wishfulness; I left the report convinced that rural communities really could do better than detention facilities.
“Thrive” is probably the most comprehensive recent examination of rural detention centers and is easy to recommend both for its content as well as its rich list of citations.1 “Lumpkin, Georgia” is also worth a viewing, and at barely 40 minutes, it’s also a great choice for teachers and professors in a wide range of social science courses. I bought the DVD (yes, a DVD!) but you can also stream it on Kanopy.
Since we’re on the topic of the Stewart Detention Facility, a new DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) report about the facility came out this week. The OIG’s recent unannounced inspection of the Stewart detention facility found that although the facility generally complied with maintaining adequate living conditions, the facility was mishandling grievances, mixing high-risk and low-risk detainees in the same spaces, and using administrative (non-punitive) segregation for punishment.
The OIG’s discussion of grievance management issues is particularly concerning. The report highlights that:
facility staff would often take a very long time to respond to grievances and sometimes ignored grievances completely (PBS reported on this recently, too)
even when grievances were responded to, it was often inadequate, including examples of facility staff closing out grievances lodged against themselves
non-medical staff had access to medical grievances that included sensitive personal medication information
the electronic grievance system was only available in English (and staff would simply ignore non-English grievances)
These findings—by DHS itself, no less—highlight the need for ongoing oversight and transparency in the realm of immigrant detention. The secretive and fraught grievance system within ICE detention facilities has prompted two groups—one in Florida and one in California—to find creative ways to make these grievances more transparent to the public.
The ACLU of Northern California has a grievance database project that you can view online at the California Immigration Detention Database.
Similarly, the ACLU of Florida has created the Florida Detention Database, although the methods and data of the two are somewhat different.
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Thrive is a valuable and fascinating report, and well-cited throughout, but suffers in one significant way by basing too many arguments on a single non-peer-reviewed research report from 2003 (Big Prisons, Small Towns) that examines the effects of the prison industry on counties in upstate New York in the 1990s. It doesn’t undermine the thrust of the report, but given how economic the report is, I would have liked to see the report do more to draw more expansively on existing contemporary scholarship and even to engage in an original way with the available economic data on the counties in question. Consider this a call for further research.
This is really important. I'm from rural Georgia and both of my parents have worked in prisons-- the carceral state is such a tragic business and honestly hurts everyone involved.
I was quoted accurately in the article, which is good.
On the other hand, the notion that Stewart Detention Center is purposefully in a remote area as an immigration maanagement strategy is not correct.
I can't speak for other detention facilities. However, the building in which SDC is housed was built by the private company as a speculative venture for a state prison contract that never materialized.
In fact, I am in a uniquely close position to make that statement. I worked at a museum adjacent to the current property, separated only by a creek from my area. I was there when the company acquired the property and when they started construction. They had the very first fiber optics in the county, and it was strung along the right-of-way outside my office.
Quite frankly, the "immigration facilities in remote areas" narrative has been around for decades. It fits a narrative whether or not it's true. In this case, it's not.