This paper has escalated from relevant to mission critical

From the summary:

“Who serves in secret police forces? Throughout history, units such as Hitler’s Gestapo, Stalin’s NKVD, or Assad’s Air Force Intelligence Directorate have been at the core of state repression. Secret police agents surveil, torture, and even kill potential enemies within the elite and society at large. Why would anyone do such dirty work for the regime? Are these people sadistic psychopaths, sectarian fanatics, or forced by the regime to terrorize the population? While this may be the case for some individuals, we believe that the typical profile of secret police agents is shaped by the logic of bureaucratic careers.”

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The details and history in the paper are illuminating. The economic logic is simple, but it remains fascinating to be reminded of how far the reinforcing incentives of shame, power, and labor market demand can go when trying to understand the world. To recap the obvious

1. For some the opportunity for cruelty is benefit and others a cost, no doubt heterogeneous across context for many (but not all). The selection effects into ICE officers is obvious.
2. Shame selects as well. The larger the fraction of the American public that view ICE behavior as shameful and cruel, the fewer and more specific the individuals who will select in.
3. Labor demand for individuals is heterogeneous in multiple dimension, but it always weaker for those who are broadly incompetent.

Combine those three and you get what we are observing: those with the weakest opportunities in the labor market are selecting into ICE service because they face the lowest opportunity cost. If there is a positive correlation between enjoying cruelty and weak labor market opportunties (which I am willing to believe there is. Few enjoy working with ill-adjusted, cruel people), then the broad incompetence selected into ICE ranks will be stronger. If being ill-adjusted and cruel limits the scale of your social network, leaving you isolated and lonely, then the expected shame of ICE services is lower, selecting for still greater cruelty within officers. Through this mechanism cruelty and incompetence don’t just correlate, they reinforce, until you are left with a very specific set of individuals exercising violent discretion.

To be clear this isn’t a complex or profound model. The individual insights are obvious, but it remains useful to consider them within the framework of a toy model because they emphasize how mutually-reinforcing incentives can create shocking institutional outcomes.