Prisonville Grows
August 27th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
When in debt, borrow more. That’s the Willacy way! Not content with just $129 million in prison-related debt, the Willacy County Commissioners Court voted last week to finance its fifth or sixth (who’s really counting?) project. This time it’s a $50.1 million, 1000-bed addition to the privately-run 2000-bed “Tent City” for immigrants. With the new addition, the extremely poor county earns several bragging rights: more jail beds - 4,600 in all - than the country of Finland; the largest immigrant detention camp in the country; and more debt than any rural county in Texas.
(For details on the private prison craze in Raymondville see my October, 2006 story in the Observer.)
Willacy is an economic backwater in South Texas with a near-comically dysfunctional local government. For over a decade area leaders have been trying to dig their way out of the doldrums by building prisons, jails, and detention centers and turning them over to private outfits for management. Raymondville, the county seat that locals are calling “Prisonville,” is host to what’s probably the largest concentration of privatized jail facilities in the world. It’s a great deal for the companies. They assume virtually no risk and get to collect healthy profits.
Meanwhile the county has to worry about paying down its staggering amount of debt, approaching $180 million, or about $8,700 for every man, woman, and child in the county. At times, the government has struggled to make the payments. But instead of putting down the shovel, they just keep digging deeper. It’s the American way! In the case of the 2000-bed immigrant detention center, which was built just last year, the county needed an average of 1,800 detainees to make the $2.6 million in debt payments every month. The Valley Morning Star reports that the number of detainees has hovered around 1,500. It’s not clear how the county is covering its obligations to bondholders. Even less clear is how building another 1,000 beds will improve the situation.
“I look at it as an economic opportunity,” Commissioner Eddie Chapa told the Star. “It’s an opportunity for Willacy County to get additional employment for the citizens of the county and more income to the county.”
The county leaders argue that the jails bring much-needed jobs and secondary economic benefits to the area. In the jobs department, they arguably have met with some success. Unemployment has plummeted from 24.1 percent ten years ago to 8.7 percent today based on Census figures. However, it should be noted that surrounding counties, without prison-based economies, have seen a similar drop in unemployment over the same time period.
