In These Times: The Strange Fruit of Desperation

[marmar]

The Strange Fruit of Desperation
How con men and paranoiacs learned to love the Hardin huskow.

By Beau Hodai


Hardin: a sleepy town set in the rolling plains of southeastern Montana, 50 miles east of Billings, 15 miles north of the site of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s slaughter at the battle of Little Bighorn. Population: about 3,500. Primary mode of economic production: agriculture. The City of Hardin website explains the town was dubbed the “City of Reason” in the early 20th century, due to its “potential for economic growth”—a prophetically ironic designation given recent events.

Not much happens in Hardin. The streets, set in a grid around simple ranch-style homes, run quiet and slow. At the heart of the city sits a large rectangular park—a few blocks away from the Broadway Flying J truck stop casino and bar, home to I-90 long-haulers playing electronic keno and poker. The occasional crew of wrinkled Greyhound patrons file in looking to buy withered hot dogs and cigarettes.

Across the Flying J parking lot sits a Pizza Hut. A few miles east, a short trip over a few frozen fields, lies the Two Rivers Detention Facility, which has been vacant since its completion in 2007. The jail was built to provide sorely needed jobs for Hardin and the neighboring Crow Reservation. When the idea to build this huskow was pitched, Hardin had the highest unemployment rate in Montana. The reservation, with its corrugated tin shacks and tourist “trading post” emporiums filled with “genuine” Chinese moccasins and beads, is one of the most impoverished places in the nation.

Despite the area’s need for employment, local officials have been unable to find inmates to fill their jail, and so the 464-room dormitory-style structure with its 20-foot fences and rolls of razor wire, leads a lonely existence at the city limits. The town’s insurance policy on the jail, which expired Nov. 1, 2009, was not renewed for lack of funds. All utilities to the facility have been disconnected. And so it sits, a $27 million folly, an asset being eroded by a cold wind blowing sheets of snow through the recreation yard where once, one of the jail’s sole occupants, a goat, used to graze during the brief period when the town’s animal control office was housed there. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5446/the_strange_fruit_of_desperation

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Hoosegow?

[burning rain]

2. Steer clear of the hoosegow.

It is a place of constant donnybrooks and fisticuffs.