Deployable Detention Center: Porta-Prison. A proposal by Jenny Polak
500 ch Porta-Prison is a fictional design proposal: a deployable detention center conceived to bring seasonal labour to farms. The project includes an interactive promotional website and an intervention in the form of a seemingly serious presentation to government and corporate officials at a prison industry event such as the CCA conference. The project amplifies converging trends: the use of tents to expand immigrant detention cheaply without regard to minimum living conditions; the need for undocumented farmworkers; and the increasing use of prison labour.
500 wds Porta-Prison is a fictional design proposal: a ‘deployable detention center’ conceived to bring seasonal labour to farms. With an interactive website and a performed presentation to government and corporate officials at a prison industry event, the project amplifies converging trends: the use of tents to expand immigrant detention; the need for migrant farmworkers; and the increasing use of prison labour on farms.
Porta-Prison will be promoted as if it’s a real product from Porta-Prison, a company specializing in selling detention centers to local/national governments. There is a prevalent idea that design exists to serve progressive ends. New immigrant detention facilities belie this. My project will expose the Dark Side of Design, inviting those who seek to initiate new detention facilities in their communities to consider the ‘Deployable’ detention center as a fiscally and politically cheap solution. I will research and implement an intervention where this project is presented as if real, to a prison industry trade fair. For the website a mapping function will allow users to ‘site’ Porta-Prison units in real locations: an outlay-and-return calculator resembles mortgage calculators on real estate websites. A choice of unit features and a compelling logic will embellish the underlying facts of unfree labour, as current discussions about detainee pay do ($1/day - Houston Chronicle, 3/26/09). At the same time those trying to halt detention expansion in their neighbourhoods will get an early warning system.
Porta-Prison’s pitch. “The world’s farms need workers. In the US, crops waste in fields for want of people to harvest them. We in the prison industry share the blame for this. Over half of all farmworkers in the US are undocumented immigrants. We’ve worked hard to ensure that the government remains bent on imprisoning these workers, so the demand for detention beds will rise. Thanks to anti-immigrant policies business is booming.
PortaPrison has designed a new stand-alone tent structure that will reinstate the time-honoured equation of migration and seasonal work: a Deployable Detention Center that can be moved quickly onto a farm when workers were needed, accommodating just the right number of detainees for the job. The Deployable Detention Center is a design solution for the struggling farms of the US (and beyond). With it, US farmers can join their leading manufacturing counterparts in taking advantage of the country’s fastest growing resource: immigrant detainees.
No longer will growers grumble that they pay recruiters to bring in seasonal workers, only to find that they won’t leave when the job is done, or Immigration Enforcement interrupts the harvest with a raid. Now, American farmers can wait until immigrants are detained before booking their cheap, controlled workforce. Efficiently detailed with rural simplicity, the Deployable Detention Center comes with its own green power and mobile bathrooms, for minimal disruption of local ecosystems. The privatized, Deployable Detention Center is the shape of things to come. This Little Prison That Could heralds a ‘prisons without borders’ future that will make fortunes.
Deployable Detention Center: Porta-Prison. A proposal by Jenny Polak
500 ch Porta-Prison is a fictional design proposal: a deployable detention center conceived to bring seasonal labour to farms. The project includes an interactive promotional website and an intervention in the form of a seemingly serious presentation to government and corporate officials at a prison industry event such as the CCA conference. The project amplifies converging trends: the use of tents to expand immigrant detention cheaply without regard to minimum living conditions; the need for undocumented farmworkers; and the increasing use of prison labour.
500 wds Porta-Prison is a fictional design proposal: a ‘deployable detention center’ conceived to bring seasonal labour to farms. With an interactive website and a performed presentation to government and corporate officials at a prison industry event, the project amplifies converging trends: the use of tents to expand immigrant detention; the need for migrant farmworkers; and the increasing use of prison labour on farms.
Porta-Prison will be promoted as if it’s a real product from Porta-Prison, a company specializing in selling detention centers to local/national governments. There is a prevalent idea that design exists to serve progressive ends. New immigrant detention facilities belie this. My project will expose the Dark Side of Design, inviting those who seek to initiate new detention facilities in their communities to consider the ‘Deployable’ detention center as a fiscally and politically cheap solution. I will research and implement an intervention where this project is presented as if real, to a prison industry trade fair. For the website a mapping function will allow users to ‘site’ Porta-Prison units in real locations: an outlay-and-return calculator resembles mortgage calculators on real estate websites. A choice of unit features and a compelling logic will embellish the underlying facts of unfree labour, as current discussions about detainee pay do ($1/day - Houston Chronicle, 3/26/09). At the same time those trying to halt detention expansion in their neighbourhoods will get an early warning system.
Porta-Prison’s pitch. “The world’s farms need workers. In the US, crops waste in fields for want of people to harvest them. We in the prison industry share the blame for this. Over half of all farmworkers in the US are undocumented immigrants. We’ve worked hard to ensure that the government remains bent on imprisoning these workers, so the demand for detention beds will rise. Thanks to anti-immigrant policies business is booming.
PortaPrison has designed a new stand-alone tent structure that will reinstate the time-honoured equation of migration and seasonal work: a Deployable Detention Center that can be moved quickly onto a farm when workers were needed, accommodating just the right number of detainees for the job. The Deployable Detention Center is a design solution for the struggling farms of the US (and beyond). With it, US farmers can join their leading manufacturing counterparts in taking advantage of the country’s fastest growing resource: immigrant detainees.
No longer will growers grumble that they pay recruiters to bring in seasonal workers, only to find that they won’t leave when the job is done, or Immigration Enforcement interrupts the harvest with a raid. Now, American farmers can wait until immigrants are detained before booking their cheap, controlled workforce. Efficiently detailed with rural simplicity, the Deployable Detention Center comes with its own green power and mobile bathrooms, for minimal disruption of local ecosystems. The privatized, Deployable Detention Center is the shape of things to come. This Little Prison That Could heralds a ‘prisons without borders’ future that will make fortunes.