This section outlines the destructive relationship between public funding and private finance in the city of Detroit, that together contributed to the production of a contemporary ruin in the Wayne County Jail Project, a carceral structure that decayed in situ for over a decade in the 2010s. That structure embodied a version of Walter Benjamin's creative destruction wrought by seemingly opposing forces of capitalist withdrawal and development simultaneously, as suffused in public/private relationships that characterise contemporary American governance.