There’s a sleepy little town, Appleton, just a few miles south of Morris. I’ve visited it a few times to check out the spiders there — there’s no other reason to go there, it’s not much of a tourist attraction. Population 1400, no particular businesses there, they had a defunct prison that was shut down 16 years ago, and many residents were concerned about the loss of employment opportunities. I’d like to see more good jobs there, too, but reopening a prison, or setting up concentration camps for immigrants isn’t high on my list of “good” jobs.

But right now if I look at broadcast tv or TUBI, they’re saturated with ads for GOOD JOBS in Appleton. They want nurses and educators and guards that they’ll hire with good pay, and the ads run annoyingly non-stop. The Appleton prison is open for business! Yay?

CoreCivic, the private prison company that owned the place, had previously offered to sell the prison to the state of Minnesota for the price of $75 million. The state turned it down. It was too pricey, required too much renovation, and would require far too much investment in building housing for workers. It was impractical.

The state ultimately decided against the deal at the time on the basis that it might be difficult to staff Prairie Correctional given its remote location – a nearly three-hour drive from Minneapolis-St. Paul – and costly to build new homes to accommodate the approximately 500 employees required to run it, concerns seemingly not shared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Hey! I live 3 hours from Minneapolis-St Paul! Looking at it from my perspective, that’s rather insulting, that this side of the state isn’t worth the investment, but OK — I should see this as a declaration that prisons aren’t worth spending money on.

So who bought it now? It was sold by CoreCivic to ICE. For $495 million.

Cool business strategy bro. It turns out that CoreCivic had donated half a million dollars to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee, and then ICE turned around and gave CoreCivic a half billion dollars for an old neglected building in a remote part of the country. So in that sense it was good return on investment, just corrupt and criminal.

It’s ironic that Minnesota has been the focus of a corruption scandal — $250 million was skimmed off pandemic recovery funds. That corruption benefited Somali people, though, so clearly bad. Benefitting wealthy white Republicans is not a crime. Minnesota investigated our local scandal and found that the chief perpetrator, Aimee Bock, was guilty and sentenced her to 40 years in prison. One can only hope that the instigators of the Appleton grift get an equivalent sentence.