Another for-profit detention center?

It’s kind of embarassing to have to do this, but without a subscription to the Houston Chronicle, I’m going to have to link to the odious “Free Republic” where someone downloaded the entire article about an unnamed “New York company” proposing to open a “3,500-bed shelter just outside the boundary of ” Clint, Texas, a town of under a thousand people.

While it may be a good faith offer, the sordid history of for-profit “detention centers” and jails scattered around rural Texas … and the even more sordid history of the Texas youth homes operated both by the State and those contracted to supposedly “responsible” organizations (one Lutheran run home was notorious for molestations and rape)… sends up some warning flares.

A supposedly “termporary” crisis does not call for a new 3,500 bed shelter (and they measure prison capacity by “beds” too, you know), nor does it seem that there is any way that 3,500 unescorted minors could be adequately cared for (or supervised) in a town the size of Clint.  My bullshit detector suggests this is a prison in the making, and that there will be every incentive to incarcerate more minors there (assuming minors are the intended clients), at the lowest cost, and best return to the shareholders possible.

Give me your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse… and I’ll make a buck off them any way I can.