The Prison-Industrial Complex
As requested, I’ll try to give a brief overview of the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC). And I’ll add some links at the bottom if any of you want to do further research.
Most prisons in America are privately owned. The more prisoners the prison has, the more the prison companies profit. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but a big one has to do with labor. Prison labor is extremely cheap, since most wage laws don’t apply to prisoners. And then the company can sell the products of the prisoners’ labor, without giving the prisoners themselves much of anything. As you can imagine, this creates an incredible amount of profit.
Despite being “the land of the free”, the US has the highest number of prisoners in the entire world. While many countries focus on rehabilitation and education in prison, the US focuses on retribution and punishment. A retributive model is in the best interest of the PIC since it puts more prisoners in the system and keeps them in for longer. The PIC ensures that the status quo doesn’t change through two main mechanisms.
First, it uses its amount of money and power to influence the justice system. Judges and politicians can receive “help” so long as they push for retributive policies. So both the PIC and the politicians win at the expense of the population.
Second, it convinces people that retribution is necessary and moral. While the majority of criminals are victims themselves, the PIC tells people that all criminals are monsters who deserve their fate. It also plays on people’s fear of what’s different by demonizing racial and sexual minorities. Sixty percent of those incarcerated are people of color. Drug laws are a good example of the discriminatory nature of the PIC. White people account for 69% of drug arrests and black people account for 29%. Despite this, black people are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated for drugs. And nearly half of the prison population is black.
I’m assuming that virtual slavery, corruption, and racism are enough to make you hate the PIC. But there are even more problems that it causes. Most notably, despite the PIC’s claims that harsh, retributive punishments are necessary to stop crime, it actually creates even more crime. Locking criminals up treats the symptoms the cause. Lack of education is a major cause of crime. Seventy percent of prisoners haven’t finished high school. Over 50% are illiterate. An obvious solution to decrease crime would be to increase funds for public education, so people don’t have to turn to crime. The problem is, the PIC has consumed so much wealth pushing for retributive policies, there is much less to invest in education. Moreover, many rehabilitative programs involve basic education. But since the PIC favors retribution, there are very few of these programs. So once criminals get out, they often have no other choice but to resort to crime again. Thus, creating an endless cycle of crime.
So why isn’t this a big issue? Because no one cares. The PIC convinces people that retributive policies are needed for protection. And it primarily targets people that the majority are already afraid of (namely African Americans). And politicians don’t anything because they benefit from the PIC. And due to the PIC’s tremendous influence, speaking out against it would be political suicide. So all we can do is sit around and talk about how much it sucks.
If you want to read some more on this
http://www.publiceye.org/defendingjustice/overview/herzing_pic.html
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tio-hardiman/african-american-males-fa_b_2981163.html>
http://www.thetalkingdrum.com/prison.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/end-the-prison-industrial-complex-now/]
http://www.washburnlaw.edu/wlj/51-3/articles/fulcher-patrice.pdf
Pretty crazy stuff! According to the Bureau of Justice, some 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated in U.S. correctional facilities. That’s nearly a quarter of the global prison population, which is quite astonishing given that the U.S. is home to less than 5% of the world’s inhabitants.
One of the greatest recent resources on the topic is a book by Michelle Alexander called the New Jim Crow. From the title, you can tell that mass incarceration is also very much about race. Here’s an article based on the book:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/new-jim-crow-war-on-drugs
Plenty of people are fighting mass incarceration. For examples, see here:
http://newjimcrow.com/take-action
Broken on All Sides is a documentary on the issue:
http://brokenonallsides.com/ and it also lists groups that are fighting for reform.
Thanks so much for all of this information. The PIC is literally so disgusting, it makes me want to cry.
I actually read a chapter from the New Jim Crow about race as a factor.
Here are some of my favorite statistics from that chapter:
According to a study conducted by Human Rights Watch in 2000, in seven states, African Americans constituted eighty to ninety percent of all drug offenders sent to prison. In at least fifteen states, blacks were admitted to prison on drug charges at a rate from twenty to fifty seven times greater than that of white men. Moreover, in 2006, one in nine black men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five was behind bars.
In the exact same year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that white students used cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, used crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and used heroin at seven times the rate of black students. Nearly identical percentages of white and black high school seniors used marijuana. A separate survey in 2000 reported that white youth aged 12-17 were more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.
For some reason, the criminal justice system sweeps black men off the streets with stunning efficiency, yet neglects the majority, the white drug offenders. It is hard to believe this discrimination exists in a society where very few people openly endorse racial discrimination.
It is called racism without racists. We have (mostly) moved away from direct, in-your-face discrimination like separate water fountains. But, as Michelle Alexander shows, Jim Crow just took new form.
And we could have a whole separate conversations about schools. Did you know that New York City has the #1 most segregated schools in the US today?
The opening chapter in Alexander’s the New Jim Crow tells of a man named Jarvious Cotton who’s “great great grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great
grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot
vote be cause he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole”. This story is nothing short of incredible and yet is probably not that uncommon among African American men. Perhaps one of the largest issues in the PIC is the systematic inability to change it. Lobbyist from the private prison owners keep the politicians quiet and those prisoners who have seen the corruption first hand are disenfranchised.
The other day I spoke to an avid supporter of the PIC and he claimed that the system was saving the money billions of dollar worth of investment and up keeping. Furthermore he added, any abuse of the system, such as over search of certain communities and hired judges is just human nature and such corruption is to be expected with any system. I personally believe that human rights for all those unfairly incarcerated comes before reducing government spending. And although I do agree that some corruption is due in any system, it is the ability to change that keeps the system fair and that seems to have disappeared in the PIC.
It seems to me that the war on drugs has failed in all respects except for incarcerating black men. It is known that white children use drugs more often, substantially, and yet they are incarcerated less. Why do the black kids get incarcerated more? Is this because of internal racism on the part of the police? The judges? The society? I just don’t understand, I thought at first that maybe blacks were more likely to possess large amounts of “harder” drugs but then I learned that marijuana would be enough to become part of the PIC.
It appears that ending the war on drugs is a good starting point, but it would only be a starting point. It scares me to think that maybe this kind of internal racism extends past the drug-incarceration rates. Perhaps there is the stereotype that blacks use a lot of drugs, but even still this shows that the stereotype will dictate the outcome, not the facts. I want to think the system is fair but I suppose it most certainly isn’t. though I don’t know if it is unfair because blacks get caught unfairly or whites don’t get caught unfairly. That is, should our prison system be larger or smaller.
Also I completely agree that the goal of our prison system should be rehabilitation and not retribution and that funding for education at a younger age is key to preventing crime in the first place.
I had watched a reality show once where situations were created with black men and white men doing illegal things and seeing how many times a passerby would say something or call the cops (the situation was redone many times). Every time this kind of thing was done, the black men were always stopped more often than the white men. This matched up with the situation of black men being incarcerated more often than white men for drugs. It appears that there is still racist going on among various groups of people, not just one group such as the police or society.