Vera Institute map shows where and how much the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent funding jails since 1996. (Click the image to enlarge it; click here for the interactive version, which gives detail on amounts and timing) |
When President Trump announced this summer that farmers hurt by the trade war would receive up to $12 billion in compensation, the administration also increased USDA funding for jail construction. Such funding has been justified as important to rural development since the Nixon administration authorized the Community Facilities Direct Loan and Grant Program in the Rural Development Act of 1972. But the USDA didn't fund the first jail through that program until 1996, when it supplied $2.2 million to the Hale County Jail in Greensboro, Alabama; since then the agency has funded more than $360 million for rural jail construction, Norton and Kang-Brown report.
Vera Institute chart |
Some local residents oppose the new jails, saying that they increase debt and that the payments will take money from other important local programs -- and motivate local courts and law enforcement to fill the jails. "The USDA Community Facilities program, meant to improve economic development and quality of life, is instead increasingly being used to fund the infrastructure to detain and incarcerate more people in rural counties across the country," Norton and Kang-Brown report.
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