Your huddled terrorists yearning for revenge,
The wretched refuse we ripped from your teeming shore.
Send these, the swarthy and foreign, the shadowy and tempest-tossed, to us:
We lift our lamp beside the golden door.
Hardin, MT
Not since Ismay changed it’s name to Joe has an eastern Montana town generated so much media attention as Hardin, Montana with its campaign to become the new Guatanamo Bay. And oh has the national media eaten it up. In the past month, we’ve seen Time Magazine, CNN, Fox, NPR, and “Good Morning America.” And yesterday Al-Jazeera came to town.
Al-Jazeera? Yes, that network. The local news gave it all the shock-value of an invasion of the Taliban. In reality, the crew was two white dudes — one from D.C., one from Canada. It looked more like the invasion of the Nordic News Network. Not since Dick Cheney and a donor swooped down in a Blackhawk helicopter to fish the nearby Bighorn have two white dudes garnered so much attention in Hardin.
If You Build It They Will Come if Contractually Obligated.
Don’t know the backstory of the Hardin jail? Here’s the short version. Hardin’s broke. They financed a huge private prison with City bonds without securing any actual prison contracts before breaking ground. Thus, Hardin has a 464-bed, very empty, very new-ish prison which the State of Montana finds unfit to house prisoners because the “dormitory style” design is “insufficiently secure” and the determination that prison populations in Montana are dropping (“dormitory style” here means that prisoners are kept in “pods” of up to 24 inmates rather than cells of one or two). The result is that Hardin owes $27 million and they had to make their first payment of $200,000 in January. As of today, their loans are in default.
And it’s not like Hardin hasn’t been trying. First, they tried to get out-of-state prisoners, but the MT Attorney General ruled that would violate one statute or another. At this point someone on the Hardin City Council said “If we can’t house medium-security out-of-state prisoners, maybe they’ll let us house high-security, high-risk foreign terrorists.”
Crazy Talk You Say?
Not really. Hardin’s idea has some historical precedent. After all, the Federal Government housed German POWs during WWII in nearby Laurel, MT. And the Heart Mountain Japanese-American Internment Camp is nearby outside Powell, Wyoming. Hardin itself is a kind of gateway community to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations which are nothing if not a prototype of Guantanamo Bay in the sense of taking people the dominant culture views as dangerous and removes them to an isolated holding area.
We are a region with a long history of dubious internment; Hardin is smack dab in the center of a kind of historical Bermuda’s Triangle of federal internment projects. Perfect.
Max Baucus hates the idea. Our senior U.S. Senator told ABC News (and others): “we’re not going to bring Al-Qaeda to the Big Sky Country — no way, not on my watch.”
Whether you see Hardin’s case, like Joe/Ismay’s, as a cheap publicity or not, you gotta feel for towns like Hardin. Like many (most) towns its size, it’s dying. Unemployment rates are sky high, businesses are vanishing, the Post Office is shutting down many of their rural branches. The list is endless. Sorry folks, but Mayberry’s on life support. Politicians like Sarah Palin who (in)famously said “We grow good people in our small towns” pay only lip service to small towns and their presumed values while continuously sacrificing small towns on the alter of economic growth (read urban economic growth as the West, including Alaska is the more urban region in the nation—start here http://bit.ly/SZhBn for the figures: http://www.census.gov/ has all the figures ).
So when the residents of Hardin woke up this morning and read in the Billings Gazette about the enormous Cabela’s Superstore (80,000 square feet) that opens today in Billings, which will sit next to the state’s largest Sam’s Club (7.5 miles away from the Laurel Wal-Mart Superstore), you gotta give them some grace if the sound they hear isn’t the cheers from the non-stop raffles in the Cabela’s parking lot but the sound of another Hardin fly shot shuttering its doors, the sound of another van moving a neighboring family to “town.”
Sometimes when your back’s up against a wall, you either get busy growing bitter and clinging to guns and religion (to paraphrase Mr. Obama),[1] or you get busy figuring out a way to contain a group of people who have already are bitter and clinging to their guns and religion.
Methinks it’s a match made in heaven. Lock and load.
[1] Both of which may just be on sale at the new Cabela’s and at the Laurel Wal-Mart Superstore
Detention Triangle (Heart Mountain, Wyoming to the Laurel MT POW Camp to the Two Rivers Detention Facility, Hardin MT
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
The bonds didn’t go into default in “January” and they’re not shy $200,000. They went into default on May 1st last year.
How did this little town so thoroughly allow itself to be taken to the cleaners?
Fletcher-
my understanding (perhaps incorrect) was that Hardin issued 27m in bonds. The repayment schedule began in May of last year but that they weren’t considered in default until January (they paid some funds from an emergency account, etc.). Further, I understand that of today Hardin is $200,000 shy in missed payments as of this May. I will return to my sources and check. It is true: they owe $27,000,000 overall + interest and they are in default.
to your other comment:
I actually think Hardin’s problem is the problem of growth in the West, especially the rural west. It’s a longer rant/post, but in short: towns are dying, money and people only flow out. Now, this is part of an ideological trap in my opinion, one often complicated (and perpetuated) by notions of manifest destiny, the American Dream, and capitalism’s insatiable need for growth, etc.
But let’s leave aside the commie-pinko angle and go with the idea that towns need to find ways to grow; or if not grow at least stem the emigration through jobs, etc.
In that case, town leaders work to find ways to keep local money local (which usually isn’t enough) and ways to bring regional/national money in. A nursing home/retirement community seems to work in many cities as it transfers out of state money into local money (in the way it takes social security money and keeps it local, in the way it receives federal dollars via medicare, etc.). The key is to find a thing that captures revenue beyond the current local base.
Hardin looks around and says what do we have? We can’t compete with nearby Billings in the medical arena. We have a lot of crime, mostly misdemeanors. That money mostly flows to Billings already. So they say: let’s keep it here plus we can contract with the state. I’m also hearing that the former Governor supported the idea. So they build it. The political winds shift on the idea. Crime drops (no causal relationship between the last two). But for them it was an attempt to build something that generated local revenues beyond local.
In early May, 2009, the Montana Correctional Advisory Council called for 920 new prison beds in the state. They see the need for 3500 new “beds” by 2025. So it’s not completely absurd that a town would go after that “market” (and I put quotes around market because I don’t think we should look at incarcerating individuals as a market or a growth industry–that is I don’t think we should be counting it on the positive side of our economic growth balance sheet. We need to learn how to subtract if we’re ever going to get a real picture of our economy)
da best. Keep it going! Thank you
Third to the last paragraph — think you meant “fly shop” not “fly shot.” Or was it “fly sh-t.”