The McCook Work Ethic Camp in McCook, Nebraska. (Courtesy of Nebraska Department of Correctional Services)
Nebraska and the federal Department of Homeland Security on Aug. 19 announced that the state’s Work Ethic Camp in McCook would be converted into a federal immigration detention facility, which Homeland Security branded the “Cornhusker Clink.”
About 186 people at the camp will be transferred to another facility within the state’s prison system, which has for years operated under an “overcrowding emergency.” Local leaders in McCook said they got only a half-hour briefing before the public rollout of the proposal. More than a dozen state lawmakers have since demanded a public hearing. More than 18,000 Nebraskans have signed a petition opposing the facility change.
The decision landed as the fall semester began. On the first day of class, I asked my law school students a simple question: What is prison for? Most answered rehabilitation, as if it were obvious. They imagined facilities with treatment programs, classes and job training designed so that the people inside return home better equipped than when they went in.
Nebraska’s own Department of Correctional Services has long called rehabilitation “at the heart” of public safety. The state’s Work Ethic Camp in McCook was one of the few facilities built to reflect that goal. Its mission statement is clear: “Empowering people to do better.”
That makes the August announcement telling. Nebraska is turning a facility built for rehabilitation into a warehouse for federal detainees. Spaces once used for programming will be repurposed into detention units for up to 300 people — a number well over the building’s stated capacity — in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The state insists rehabilitation is central, yet when faced with a choice, leaders sidelined that goal in favor of a contract with Washington.
Supporters of the plan point to money and safety. Both arguments are shaky. Financially, typical immigration detention contracts pay a daily rate for each person in custody. Many also include so-called “bed quotas” that require ICE to pay for a set number of beds whether they are filled or not.
On paper, that may look like stability. In practice, it ties Nebraska’s budget to shifting and unstable federal enforcement priorities. When ICE changes direction or cancels a contract, communities are left with obligations and no revenue stream.
Other states have learned how risky that bargain can be. In Florida, a court halted further construction at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center, leaving the state’s taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. Nebraska risks a similar mistake, trading rehabilitation for federal promises that can disappear overnight.
Even if the contract holds, communities carry the hidden costs of detention. Local health systems must respond to detainee needs. Ambulance crews make the runs and emergency rooms absorb the surges. In rural Nebraska, those systems are already stretched. More than half of the state’s rural hospitals operate at a loss. Community Hospital in McCook recently closed its clinic in nearby Curtis. Detention will not reverse that.
The safety rationale is equally weak. The people who will be held in McCook will not be serving criminal sentences. They will be immigration detainees facing civil proceedings, many with no convictions. Federal data show that most ICE detainees have no criminal record, and national research finds that immigrants are incarcerated for crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born Americans.
Adding detention beds in McCook will not reduce crime or improve public safety. What makes communities safer are the basics: staffed hospitals, strong schools and reliable infrastructure.
What this project offers is spectacle, not safety or stability. It is easier to announce a new detention hub with a catchy name than to confront the slow, difficult work of fixing overcrowded prisons, stabilizing rural hospitals and funding genuine reentry programs that actually keep communities safe.
This is not just Nebraska’s story. For decades, rural America was told prisons would bring prosperity. That promise rarely held. Now immigration detention is being sold as the replacement. The bargain is the same: dependence without security, spectacle without substance and the hollowing out of scarce rehabilitative capacity.
I do not tell my students that rehabilitation is the only purpose or function of prisons. But I do ask them to notice the gap between rhetoric and reality. Nebraska says rehabilitation matters. Yet when faced with a choice, the state is all but eliminating a rehabilitative facility and replacing it with detention beds. That choice is not only about corrections policy. It is about what Nebraska’s leaders value, how the state defines itself and how much control it is willing to cede to the whims of Washington.
Back in my classroom, the lesson is clearer now. My students still say prisons are supposed to rehabilitate. Nebraska just taught them something else: that what counts is not second chances, but how many people can be locked up. If that is not the message we want the next generation of lawyers, policymakers and citizens to absorb, this is the moment to change course.
Danielle C. Jefferis is a law professor who teaches prison law and studies detention’s impact. She writes in her personal capacity and not on behalf of any institution.
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