The private prison industry is doing quite well since September 11, says Alisa Solomon in this week's Village Voice.

"County jailers have long known that housing INS detainees pumps easy income into the coffers. Nearly 900 facilities around the country provide beds for the INS, and in interviews over the years, several county sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a 'cash crop.'

With the state prison population finally declining, "the only incarcerated populations sustaining reliable growth now are INS detainees and federal prisoners, many of them noncitizens."

Is there a problem with this? Two primarily:

"Like agriculture, restaurants, hotels, and other realms of American business, the prison-industrial complex now also looks to illegal immigrants as the most promising means of keeping them afloat. The danger, anti-prison activists say, is that the pressure to fill empty cells will add even more fuel to the demand to round up immigrants. "

In other words, echoes of "May we see your papers?"

Advocates are also concerned about the deals the feds may make with private prisons.

"They worry about bidding wars among potential jailers, who might be willing to further cut services to detainees in exchange for contracts. Many state and local providers, the advocates charge, already fail to meet the INS's own weak detention standards."

Advocates claim that "the profit motive undermines justice. We've seen that trying to keep costs low means setting up in isolated, rural areas, far from attorneys and support networks; avoiding expenses for special medical or dietary needs; attracting low-wage employees who aren't sufficiently professional."