
At the same time, Congress has decided that the best way of dealing with illegal immigrants from Mexico who threaten to increase our GDP is to imprison them at great expense to the public. There are other factors at play here, all of which point to the ongoing degeneracy of the American people. Suffice to say, because of Texas’ booming incarceration industry, I was not one of those lucky-ducky federal inmates who got to kick back in a real live federal facility—because these babies are filled to the brim. Rather, I’m “housed,” as they call it, in a privately-run city facility used for government overflow. And this place is filled up, too. Nor was it built to house people for more than a few days or perhaps weeks; until a couple of years ago, it functioned as a lock-up for area arrestees while they awaited transit elsewhere. As such, my fellow inmates and I spend our time in cramped eight-man cells opening on to a day room the size of the cheapest Manhattan apartment that’s shared by 24 men. A few times a week we get to go outside onto a caged concrete strip and walk back and forth for an hour. This comprises our world, and is where I’ve spent most of the past year.In such a confined environment, a single television mounted to the wall is immeasurably pervasive, its influence inescapable. There are few places in our little enclave from which it can’t be seen, and none from where it can’t be heard. It is the moon; we are the tides. Of course, it is also a resource to be fought over. And lest repeated disputes turn our cozy unit into some kind of perpetual dystopian race-war zone, we have a schedule by which power is shared between the two ethno-linguistic blocs—the Union of Mexicans and Assorted Spanish Speakers on one hand, and the Black and White Imperial Combine on the other. (I like to give things dramatic, futuristic names.)
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