Seasonal Horrors: A Story of Survival In (Abandoned) Dunklin County Jail
A few months ago, while researching for a syllabus I was building for a class on citizenship and immigration in the U.S., I read a curious paragraph in an article about migrant farmworkers and their experiences with housing inequality: In 2018, a labor contractor named Jorge Marin was found to have been housing migrant workers in an old, dilapidated jail he had purchased. The structure once used as the Dunklin County Jail had been previously used as a seasonal haunted attraction for the local town.
When an inspector had originally investigated Marin’s operations, he promised that no people would be forced to live in the jail. Thanks to a negligent evaluation on the part of the Department of Labor, though, Marin was able to successfully avoid being discovered. In the summer of 2018 it was found that he had in fact been moving farmworkers into the jail without renovating the building at all.
As a result, the tenants were forced to endure unsafe conditions including faulty, outdated plumbing. Shockingly enough, they had been moved into the barbed-wire-fenced jail as a way of evacuating them out of the motel which Marin also owned, where rooms were riddled with bedbugs, among other hazards.
I decided to do a deep dive into this story because it’s exactly what concerns my doctoral project: the passive interpolation of defunct jails, prisons, and asylums and the problematic assumption that they will never again be used to abuse vulnerable populations. I address this in one of my chapters: the possibility of these institutions being preserved just enough that there is a future in which they could be reclaimed and reopened as carceral operations, even as they are often sold off to private real estate entities or individuals like Marin. The following is what I was able to find about Dunklin County Jail and how its remains continued to house crimes against humanity.
The Backstory of Dunklin County and The County Jail
First, it’s important to note that Dunklin County Jail still functions today, just at a different location in Kennett. Kennett itself is considered the capitol of Dunklin County ever since it was founded in the 1840s. Originally, the land was dwelled on and stewarded by Indigenous peoples from multiple tribes, including the Lenape, lead by Chief Chilletecaux. The people had build log cabins along the water, something which distinguished them as “progressive” and “forward-thinking” in the eyes of white settlers. Admiration for Chief Chilletecaux especially led to the settlement being named after him, though eventually it was believed the name was too “complicated.” So, in 1845, the town was officially named Kennett in honor of the then-Mayor of St. Louis, L.M. Kennett.
During the 20th-century, the forested region had been cleared for agricultural production. It soon after became the state’s largest producer of the cotton. In fact, it was one of two products — the other being watermelon — that Marin had transported farmworkers to harvest there.
The origin of the Dunklin County Jail is hard to parse, though there are records of its existence going all the way back to the 1940s. What I was able to find out was that the building, located on Slicer St., is still listed as a jail on the Dunklin County’s website despite being sold off. Eventually, I did find a facebook event post from 2015 for “Kennett Jaycees Haunted Jail.” The Kennett Jaycees describe themselves as young people “dedicated to improving our community,” and are still active to this day. According to the page, more than 600 people responded to the event’s invitation, though it’s impossible to know just how many actually attended or how popular it was.
Nevertheless, the event left its mark. Looking at photographed evidence of the jail for the DOL affidavit, surfaces are shown doused in red paint, some of which emulate bloody hand-prints.
Stories From The Farmworkers
Marin is based in Florida, where he had worked with the Department of Labor to legally contract migrants with H2-A Visas. He purchased the Jail property in April of 2018, and soon after, made the place into a different kind of house of terror.
In the affidavit previously mentioned, DoL investigator Lindsey Corona described what they came across in the jail-turned-dormitory from hell as follows:
“As part of our inspection of the Jail, I observed inadequate access to external light, extremely limited windows in the “cells,” broken “non-cell” windows, inadequate/non-existent personal storage for H-2A Workers, no drinking fountains or other access to water beyond bathroom sinks, only lukewarm water available through the facility, inadequate bathroom ventilation, an absence of laundry facilities, non-functional bathroom lights, leaking sinks, and a mattress on the floor. Moreover, I observed the former Jail kitchen to be unusable. Specifically, I found the sink, fridge, stove, oven, and other appliances to be completely inoperable. In fact, when we opened the fridge door, we discovered an old mattress. As a result, the H2-A Workers cannot cook onsite at the Jail.” (page 15)
The report clarifies that there was no custodial care of the facility known between the periods of its use as a jail, and when Marin purchased the property, meaning that the disastrous conditions were partially resulted from over years of abandonment by the County after the Jail was moved. I would make the argument that the conditions inside the Jail were likely far from pristinely humane to begin with. However, without full information as to what the Jail looked like before being abandoned and purchased by Marin, it’s impossible to know the extent to which the Jail was allowed to fall into disrepair as part of the original intention of holding and punishing its inmates.
Marin was not simply enabled by his own crookedness and a lack of government oversight. In July of that same year, just months after Marin bought the Jail, the City of Kennett officially deemed the property fit — as in, okay to house — up to 62 adult inhabitants. The day after the decision was made, Marin began moving workers from the motel to the Jail, making the Jail some kind of “improvement” to the awful conditions they were experiencing there.
Things happened rather quickly after that, with Corona reporting in the affidavit that her investigation of Marin started on July 18th, just a day after the moving-in process was begun at the Jail. Corona has a history with Marin, particularly in 2015, where she tried to investigate him for violating H2-A Visa Employer requirements, including jacking up Visa fees and inadequate housing facilities for workers and their families.
The case had been dismissed in October when the harvest season ended and the H2-A Visa workers returned to Mexico, which rendered the lawsuit “moot” in the eyes of the Department of Labor’s prosecution. However, Marin did meet with DoL officials and promised to abide by the law with regard to providing housing, access to food and water, and safety for H2-A workers. He also paid a fine of $1,650. Obviously, in the events that transpired just three years later in Kennett, Missouri, he lied.
Flash-forward back to the summer of 2018. The investigation begins in July. A month later, Investigate Midwest contributor and journalist Sky Chadde publishes an article including interviews with workers who were victimized by Marin’s illegal trafficking and abusive practices. The conditions were traumatizing:
“Around 2 a.m. one day in late June 2018, a bus stopped in front of a single-story motel in Kennett, Missouri, population about 10,000. On the ride from the U.S.-Mexico border, the mood was buoyant. In their late teens and early 20s, many had never been to America before. Rest up, the worker remembered being told upon arrival, you’re expected in the fields by daybreak.
Marin told state regulators his crew would work 36 hours a week, with Sundays optional. But their days started around 6 a.m. and ended at 8 p.m. or later. On the bus to the fields each morning, they were warned they’d never be hired again if they didn’t keep working, the worker said.
Water was scarce. The worker shared a container with about 1.5 gallons of water with several other men, he said. When investigators visited, one field had a water cooler, but workers had to drink from a shared Gatorade bottle.
Temperatures regularly topped 80 degrees and, sometimes, the heat index would rocket to 115 degrees. By the time investigators arrived, the crew had worked about 20 straight days in these conditions.”
According to farmworkers and local advocates, Marin restricted food and water, including completely depriving them breakfast so that they wouldn’t be “slowed down” when bending down to harvest in the Watermelon fields. The people were run down by chronic exhaustion, dehydration, and malnutrition, all for paychecks which would be less than they deserved and ultimately taken from them soon after they cashed them in a nearby Arkansas bank.*
The conditions at Kennett were and are emblematic of the broader culture of fear which permeates life in the U.S. when you are a H2-A Visa holder. Marin supported an atmosphere of scarcity and hostility which deterred many from reporting their experiences to local authorities. This disadvantage is structurally supported by the H2-A Visa program itself, which privileges “employer” rights over the lives and wellbeing of people working under them who are here on H2-A Visas. And if they choose to leave the job on account of abuse, they are not allowed to find employment elsewhere, making the job their sole “lifeline” keeping them in the U.S. and with whatever income that is not stripped from them for bogus “Visa Fees” or other obscure reasons orchestrated by the employers.
And contrary to the way labor law is often depicted in mainstream media, not all farmworkers exist in the U.S. within a legal and social monolith. That is to say, to be an H2-A Visa worker is not synonymous with being a “migrant farmworker.” Consequently, government regulation of housing and working conditions depends on what your status is, if you have any legible status to speak of, period.
H2-A is a temporary work permit which allows for people to travel to the U.S. to work for specific people/entities, in specific areas, for a set amount of time (seasonally). In the case of H2-A Visa workers, Missouri State law requires that housing be investigated by the Department of Higher Education and Workforce Management. In contrast, there is no official legal authority which is tasked with doing the same for domestic farmworkers.
This does not mean that H2-A Visa workers are well supervised and supported by the State. Some say it is due to the disproportionate stagnating in grant funding compared to the exponential rise in H2-A Visa worker populations, particularly in the Midwest. Sky Chadde and colleague Johnathon Hettinger elaborated in their December 2022 article:
“Advocates have pointed to a lack of funding as one reason problems persist with H2A housing. Until recently, states had to process an increasing number of applications for workers while receiving the same amount of grant funding.
Between 2006 and 2016, the number of workers in the H2A program increased 180%. The grant money to states during that time just rose with inflation, from about $12 million to $14 million.”
Given the catastrophic conditions of U.S. immigration and labor law, it’s underwhelming to suggest that lack of funding is the core issue at hand here. For people like Marin, precariousness is exactly what is necessary in order to facilitate worker abuse. To say that more top-down funding would change the ways in which officials regulate and oversee H2-A employers is naive at best, overtly deceitful at worst. Obscurity also empowers employers, government agencies, and this the United States as a whole to get away with acute labor exploitation of farmworkers across various citizenship statuses. Our billion-dollar food industry did not accomplish that status through paying those most vulnerable the wages they deserve.
In spite of all of this, 2018 was not the end for Marin’s labor contracting. According to Chadde’s reporting, Marin was approved in 2019 to take on H2-A Visa employees in Florida, Indiana, and later Missouri.
Two years later, in June 2022, Marin and his father pleaded guilty to federal misdemeanor charges. It is estimated that they brought over hundreds of H2-A workers from Florida to Missouri. Though the number was around 100 workers in 2018 alone, one article states that Marin and his corporation have been ordered to pay $165,805 in backwages to over 800 workers who were at one point housed in Kennett, including the former Jail.
The official charge is “unlawful employment of aliens,” which seems like a grossly detached way of describing the crimes Marin, his father, and their company inflicted on the lives of so many people.
Haunting Through Disposability
Recently, I have been reading Grace Kyungwon Hong’s 2015 book Death Beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference. Actually, reading this book is what compelled me to return to this story after having logged it away for future study. This particular passage resonates:
“If the fundamental characteristic of capitalism is circulation, rather than production, and if contemporary capitalism increasingly has become organized around finance capital unanchored by production, today’s populations are not only surplus labor but are also merely surplus: existentially and inherently surplus. While labor exploitation is certainly still an important mode of value extraction, certain populations are not destined ever to be incorporated into capitalist production as labor.” (Page 71-72)
She goes onto describe what she calls existential surplus, a way of understanding how vulnerable populations’ status as un-protectable, almost raw material to Capitalism, is in and of itself an attribution of value. That is to say: what happens when the utmost value you can provide to the capitalist, white supremacist hetero-patriarchy is to be considered so disposable that the loss of you is not just seen as a non-loss, but a gain? I am still making my way through these theorizations because, honestly, they puzzle me. I thought I felt confident in my understandings of personhood, necropolitics, and disposability, but Hong certainly threw a (good) wrench in that.
I have a lot of unfinished and hard-to-articulate ideas about what it means to most between surplus labor and existential surplus depending on context — after all, it would be counter-productive to envision these as siloed, static, essential phases of being. Disability and madness can testify to that and generatively problematize such an assumption. Aging, too. For instance, it’s noteworthy that researchers point to the rise in the average age of migrant farmworkers in the U.S. over the past ten years, as a reason for H2-A Visa employment increasing. As older migrants “settle down” and stop traveling as much for seasonal work, H2-A Visas are said to provide an avenue for exploitation which targets younger workers, and is able to do so year after year to new generations. Does the aging generation thus begin to shift from being surplus labor to existential, as their capacity to labor wanes over the years? I genuinely don’t know for sure what to make of that, if anything.
I also think about the systematic vanishing of people through immigration, refuge-seeking, and even human trafficking more broadly. What does it meant to be invisibilized while also being a “reserve” of materializing labor? Does that make you cleanly categorized within “surplus labor” which can be called upon to fulfill the white supremacist state’s economic needs? I don’t know. I think the concept of “death” as a universal end (as Hong argues is the prevailing belief in a western bourgeoisie setting) needs to keep being destabilized there.
But that’s a ball of twine for another time.
I will be following this story to see if any updates bubble to the surface, but seeing as how the most recent articles about this circumstance are from a year ago, I am not holding my breath. It begs the question, for me, of when the workers at the heart of these crises become invisibilized again after the legal system has its say. I hope wherever they are, they are happy, and are able to move forward from what happened in Kennett. People deserve more than this.
* The farmworkers interviewed were kept anonymous in the original article for their safety. This is one of many outcomes of the invisibilization and dehumanization of farmworkers as people, rather than vast, “elsewhere” communities. They are not “elsewhere,” they are always with us.