Brianna Nofil

The sheriff's office, in eight years, it is employing 400 people.

And by the end of the 1990s, there are five detention facilities operating in Evoyle's parish, which is just absolutely staggering.

They don't stay open forever, but many of them stay open for years.

And people throughout the country start to pay attention.

Folks are seeing what Bell is doing in his parish, and they are saying, huh, it doesn't seem like demand for immigration detention space is going away.

Like, maybe this is the industry of the future.

So private prison companies are going to say, the jails are great, the jails are all good and fine, but we can build you new, special, immigrant-only facilities faster and cheaper.

Why don't you also consider working with us?

I think there's like one version of the story where you go, okay, so we don't need sheriffs anymore, right?

We just bring in all of these like, you know, guys in suits who can run it for a fraction of the price.

But that doesn't happen.

Like even as private prison companies operate,

are going to take on greater and greater shares of the market, the immigration service never seriously loses its dependence on jails.

And I think that's for a few reasons, right?

I think one is geographic, that idea that a jail gives you a footprint everywhere in the country.

But the other thing we see is that these private prison companies are just wrecked with problems, particularly in the 90s.

There's massive scandals.

Many of these companies think they are not even going to be able to kind of stay afloat financially.

Their financial forecast looks so bad because there's high profile breakouts and there's uprisings and people from both political parties start to say, maybe this actually isn't something we should have privatized.

So when these scandals happen, when these uprisings happen, the Immigration Service uses this basically strategy they've used for 100 years, which is that they say, we're going to take people out of the site where there's a problem, and we're going to scatter them among these jails.