Southern Prisoner Profit
By 
Louisiana’s commander-in-chief could hardly contain his glee on Fox News this week as he announced that Donald Trump’s Gestapo force would soon be entering New Orleans: “I will tell you that when ICE is ready, we certainly welcome them to come into the city and be able to start taking some of these dangerous criminal illegal aliens off of our streets,” said Gov. Jeff Landry, explaining that local police have already been working with the agency.
But it was this next part that really made him smile: “And we’ve got a place to put them—at Angola.”
The Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola” after the slave plantation that once stood in its place, is the largest maximum-security prison in the country. It has also been called “the bloodiest.” Angola gained national attention this September as the site of Louisiana Lockup, a new partnership between the state and DHS to “expand detention space by 416 beds” and “house some of the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens arrested by ICE.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the prison was specifically chosen for its notoriety—a place where inmates still toil in the fields, surrounded by armed guards on horseback and alligator swamps—in hopes that it might scare immigrants into self-deporting. The facility is also known for its racism; in an ongoing class-action lawsuit, one inmate reported a white officer telling him, “We need a good hanging because these boys are out of line.”
It is no surprise that Gov. Landry seems thrilled by the prospect of rounding up “criminals” in New Orleans and sending them there. The former cop’s tough-on-crime rhetoric has always been a thin veil for his sadism; in Landry’s first year in office, he passed a law allowing for the perpetrators of certain sex crimes to be surgically castrated, and added two new methods of execution: the electric chair and suffocation by nitrogen gas. (If you’re someone who believes the punishment fits the crime, remember that Louisiana has the second-highest rate of known wrongful convictions in the country and New Orleans, as a city, has the first.)
But the reason Louisiana has become the center of mass deportation goes further than our governor’s personal cruelty and racism. A significant factor is profit.
When you take a look at demographics, ICE’s upcoming Operation Swamp Sweep doesn’t make much sense. Only about 6.5 percent of New Orleans’ residents are foreign-born, a paltry number compared to much larger cities like San Francisco (34 percent) or Dallas (23 percent), neither of which have been the focus of large-scale, publicly-branded operations. Yet according to documents obtained by AP News, DHS has plans to arrest 5,000 migrants in this next sweep—significantly more than the number arrested in Chicago, a city whose metropolitan area has nine times more people than New Orleans.
But like everything in this administration, Operation Swamp Sweep has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with pocket-padding: In Louisiana, migrant detainees are literally worth more money than ordinary inmates because their housing is federally funded. We also have a higher incarceration rate than anywhere in the world—besides, notably, El Salvador—and a track record for treating those inmates like filth. That means we have plenty of prisons to house people and we’ll do it at a fraction of the cost of other states.
Fun times for America!