Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on how China made the decision to utilize concentration camps in its campaign to repress Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. This week, we’ll look at what happens to policy when countries decide to outsource the task of creating and maintaining concentration camps — sites of indefinite detention without trial — to the private sector.

Last year, University of Texas architecture professor Sarah Lopez published a history of the built infrastructure of migrant detention in the US in the journal American Quarterly. She found that one of the most unavoidable aspects of that history was privatization. In Texas alone, detention facilities dedicated to holding migrants expanded from having space for 1,500 migrants in 1970 to a capacity of over 30,000 by 2017. As Lopez writes, that expansion took place largely through private industry. About 15% of the US federal prison population is held in private prisons, but roughly 73% of migrants detained by the US government are held in facilities owned by just five companies.

Those companies have almost limitless control over the built environment in which detained migrants are kept. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) manual titled, “Design Standards,” from 2007, detailed requirements for ICE offices down to the layout of copy rooms, but a section titled, “Detainee Living Zone,” was left blank, with a note labeling choices about how to build detention facilities a “Contractor Responsibility.”  The detention corporations, perhaps unsurprisingly, used this freedom to build living zones that closely resembled prisons, placing a premium on controlling detainees at the expense of detainees’ dignity.

After continued protests through the 2000s over conditions in largely private detention facilities, ICE conducted an internal audit in 2007 which found that life in detention facilities was effectively indistinguishable from life in prisons, despite most detainees not having been convicted of any crime. In response, in 2012 ICE designed and built a public facility in Karnes County, Texas, expressly for the purpose of demonstrating a kinder, gentler version of migrant detention. Among other amenities that distinguished the Karnes facility, detainees had private bathrooms and access to an internal courtyard so they could get fresh air. ICE gave journalists tours of the Karnes facility, which it dubbed the Karnes County Residential Center and made sure that photographs of the design —  which are hard to come by for most ICE facilities — were distributed widely.

The Karnes facility was a public relations coup for ICE, although within three years of its construction there were multiple allegations that women held in the facility had been raped, and two detainees had attempted suicide. Its existence, though, is an admission of an enduring problem of the private detention facilities: Even if we accept that Karnes is an acceptable standard for treatment of migrants, the private detention facilities aren’t built like Karnes, and they still hold the vast majority of detainees. What’s more, the long-term contracts the government signed with the detention companies incentivize holding detainees in private facilities. Many of the contracts commit the government to paying detention companies for holding a certain number of migrants per year in a facility regardless of how many are actually held. The cost of changing the privatized detention system and the architecture that grew up with it is, by design, much higher than the cost of maintaining it.

The system is also held in place by detention company lobbying. Between 2004 and 2014, two of the top detention companies alone spent $22 million lobbying the federal government on immigration. In that time, federal spending on migrant detention rose from $7 million to $2 billion per year. As Lopez argues, the built and financial structures of private migrant detention give businesses substantial and durable power over American immigration policy and the lives of people the US chooses to detain. Both structures are costly to dismantle and cheap to expand — and so, expand they have.

Lydia Emmanouilidou spoke to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who are concerned about a voting app that some states are using to gather overseas votes in the 2020 election. The app — dystopically named “Voatz” — has dangerous security vulnerabilities, the researchers said. Hackers could prevent votes from being counted, expose who users voted for, or even change peoples’ votes. Voatz claimed that the researchers investigated an outdated version of the app.

Emma Ashford highlighted the economic threat posed by coronavirus. Deaths from the virus are still far well below the number of people killed by the flu each year, but the economic effects have been widespread. Some sectors of China’s economy have effectively shut down as the government works to contain the disease, which has put a wrench in many global supply chains that rely on Chinese production. The slowdown is so dramatic that it is lowering global oil prices, causing OPEC countries to cut back on production.

Shirin Jaafari reported on Parents for Peace, an organization that helps families whose members are being targeted for recruitment by extremist groups. The group also brings former extremists to community centers to speak about the radicalization process and strategies for resisting and rejecting extremism. Soon, Parents for Peace will be expanding its services to include a telephone helpline for targets of extremist recruitment and their families.

Adults have been underestimating the security threat posed by Chilean expansionism, but teens know the truth. Also, “Ohio 2” is not to be confused with Space Ohio.

Last week, Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Christopher Ford gave one of the more surreal speeches you’re ever going to see from a mid-level State Department political appointee. Speaking in London, Ford accused the nuclear arms control community of being in the thrall of a “nuclear identity politics” pathology because of their contention that the world might be better off without nuclear weapons. The speech’s main consequence, aside from drawing Twitter derision from the actual nuclear arms control community, was to create a “pathologies” tag on the State Department website. Critical State will check back in six months to see what other widely held opinions America’s diplomats have declared pathologies.

Counterpoint: A shoulder-mounted party sub is, in so many ways, suspicious.

It’s honestly unclear if this is laughing at the tech industry or if it’s a tech industry in-joke.

Happy President’s Day everybody.