Virginia Prison Town Part II

Friday, Sept. 4

Silly me, but I forget it’s Labor Day weekend until I begin to make my way out of DC on the Friday afternoon before the holiday, and get myself a fair dose of the notorious Beltway traffic. I’m headed through the Shenandoah Valley - the Alleghenies are on my right and the Blue Ridge Mountains on my left as I make my way south and west to southern Appalachia [k, folks in the know – the geography’s all new to me, so tell me if I’m getting these places mixed up!]. I’ll be staying then nite near The Greenbrier in West Virginia, a huge resort that was the site of a once secret Cold War installation to house the president and executive branch.

I make my way to Harrisonburg, VA to meet with Patrick Lincoln, who does organizing work with The People United, a multi-issue, multiracial organizing network. Harrisonburg’s economy is fairly robust and diversified with agriculture, manufacturing, universities, and R&D; and Rockingham County, where Harrisonburg is located, is one of the few 287(g) jurisdictions in the country. This agreement seems to have been made quietly, and some 40 immigrants are held in the jail on any given day. And 287(g) is the prime explanation the sheriff gives to justify his desires for jail expansion. Day to day work goes on with people who are held there.

Patrick puts another layer on this convict leasing (prison space renting) that Ms K talked about. In the fall of 2008, the group learned about a plan to build the “mid-Atlantic hub” for ICE detention in Farmville, VA after planning was well under way. They and other groups quickly mobilized a campaign, holding meetings with business owners, environmentalists, students and local media.

One city counselor defended the project saying:

“We’ve been hearing horror stories about detainees being put into prison with other criminals when all they have done is be here without documentation. Our goal is to keep them safe,” Spates continued, “But I want to be honest with you.
We do stand to gain financially from this.”

Likewise, an investor in the facility cited the need to keep immigrants detained away from criminals:

“You’re taking folks who aren’t criminals and you’re making a jail system house them. You’re treating people who aren’t criminals as criminals.” (Source: Virginia Organizing Project)

In the midst of the campaign, high profile press coverage (Washington Post, New York Times) was directed at the area following the death of an immigrant in the nearby Piedmont Regional Jail, and ICE’s subsequent removal of detainees from that facility. With this negative press, it seemed possible to derail the project and one month later in March, 2009, they held a march where folks from Mexicanos sin Fronteras, The Defenders, and indigenous leaders from the Tidewaters area all gathered. The local newspaper editorialized against the plan, but the project was too far along by the time people learned of it to halt construction, which is now underway.

Now there are plans for another immigrant detention just over the ridge from Harrisonburg in Pendleton County, West Virginia. Patrick emphasizes the differing political economy of these sites. In Farmville, the city council initiated the proposal; Immigrant Centers of America, a company already doing ICE contracting in Virginia, would run the facility. In West Virginia by contrast, the county was approached by a businessman in the transport and warehousing industry, whose family has ties in the region. [This is a rich irony considering that warehousing and transport is a fairly accurate description of what prisons do.] There is some local opposition to the project already brewing, some of it anti-corporate and other anti-immigrant. And so there is a question on how/if that conversation can be moved while preventing the detention center. This is an ongoing campaign, so I plan to keep following it and posting any new news/calls for support, etc.

So now Virginia is a different kind of border state. The geopolitics of the US-Mexico border and NAFTA-led restructuring of manufacturing, agriculture, and migration is building on and butting up against the post-bellum North-South border of race, class, and federal relations. To the racial stereotypes of Black people as drug users or gang members and Latinos as drug runners or gangbangers, there is the additional discourse of nationalism justifying massive policing and violent exclusion. In a national moment in which race is supposed to be over or where we’re supposed to be multicultural, the law is the place where race is delineated and simultaneously obscured. Blunt racial stereotypes grease the skids of hyper-policing and prison expansion, and overt racism is legitimated by virtue of the law (“they’re criminals,” “they don’t deserve anything because they broke the law”). Discourses about “the worst of the worse” facilitate expansive police powers, including traffic sweeps, sentence inflation and harsher conditions of detention, and legitimate abuses of power.

Both Lillie and Patrick discuss the ways in which politicians and government officials rely on the “worst of the worst” to legitimize prison expansion and treatment of prisoners. If it weren’t for their work, the line goes, then there would be more crime and more terrorism. This cycle of fear-mongering and institutional legitimation [wasn’t it Tilly who wrote about the state as a racket?] has an expansive logic that continually justifies new demands for power. Police, like military, claims that they are responsible for safety and security makes questioning abuses of power so difficult because, as Lillie observes, such questioning is tantamount to disloyalty to the community. This is why reframing the terms of community and safety is so imperative in terms of questioning the justness of the law rather than the frames of the criminal. Battling out who’s the good versus bad criminal or good migrant versus bad doesn’t do much to intervene in a cycle that determines community and safety by virtue of exclusion.