#785 Remora, IL- Kevin Leahy
The factory town of Remora, Illinois was on the brink of collapse. The car plant shut down and unemployment was skyrocketing. They turned to the only opportunity they saw, the private prison industry. It guaranteed construction jobs, guard jobs and a steady stream of visitors to fill shops, hotels, and restaurants. They accepted the change before knowing exactly what it would mean. At first they were relieved.
“Those first paychecks were intoxicating. We’d forgotten the feeling of having money, and were starving for it.”
As the prison opened, they got a sense of life as a prison town. New people, a caste system of society and although good paying jobs, they were jobs that changed the nature of a person. Rather than instilling pride they created anxiety and violence. And they also had to acknowledge the inmates themselves, most people don’t ever have to really think about what a prison was.
“To the extent that we thought about the men in those buses, we imagined them as one type, multiplied: sullen, dangerous, and deserving of punishment, but potentially redeemable, through faith and good works.”
And then there was the face-to-face encounter with the racism made apparent by locking up a large percentage of non-white Americans. Racism in the system, in the country, in themselves.
“It was true that among many of us, a mental short-hand had developed: if we saw white strangers, we assumed they were police or lawyers…If they weren’t white, we assumed they were visiting an incarcerated friend or family member.”
This story appears in the 2013 Best American Mystery Stories. I don’t find any mystery in this story. If you told me this was non-fiction I wouldn’t have a hard time believing it. This is a great, sobering view of just one of the thousands of effects the over-inflated prison industry has on this country.
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