Saturday, October 18, 2014

Why Houston won't get the private prison museum it deserves

Okay, they almost got me. I couldn't tell for sure just from reading it if this Free Press Houston story was satire. Editors confirmed that it is. Lucky I checked before writing something, a reliable reader sent it to Grits thinking it was legit.

The last few paragraphs seemed too out there to be true, but somehow the world seemed just possibly weird enough to contemplate the viability of the story of a plain speaking, fascist School-of-the-Americas reject deported from America's first private prison facility in Houston in the 1980s who becomes inspired by Corrections Corporation of America, launches a chain of private detention facilities serving death squads and torturers in El Salvador, then returns to America to buy the converted motel where he was earlier imprisoned and turn it into a private prison museum that lionizes T. Don Hutto.

What makes it fine satire is that it could be true: The world is just nuts enough to allow for it. Alas, not this time. Good stuff, though. Read it.

2 comments:

  1. Fascists, death squads and torturers – that’s our history. A prison museum would document all this.

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  2. Australia's prisoner ships were turned into museums. Yes, this would sound realistic.

    LAVA

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