There are plenty of legitimate reasons to send someone to prison— deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation and so on—but profit is not among them. Unfortunately, it is an obscenely large reason that American prisons today house more inmates than any other country on this planet.
If that fact doesn’t trouble you, it should. A nation that prides itself on freedom is, paradoxically, the world’s largest jailer. By some measures, the American incarceration rate is a whopping 743 per 100,000, well above the second biggest jailer’s (Russia, at 577). Twenty-five percent of the world’s inmates are American. There are perhaps more prisoners in America than in all of Europe—a continent with twice our population.
While there are numerous culprits behind our burgeoning prison population, especially draconian sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, the most troubling by far is an increasingly privatized prison system that makes money off rampant criminalization and the hiking up of more and more sentences to previously unheard of levels. Why is it troubling? Because introducing profit into the criminal justice calculus means lobbyists are pushing Washington to expend public resources for private interests. To put it bluntly, there are interests out there hoping to imprison more people simply so that they can make more cash. Freedom lost is money gained. This is nothing less than disgusting.
Despite the frightening scale of the prison-industrial complex, the general public is basically unaware of what a profitable business this unsavory thing has become or, indeed, that the industry even exists. Consider the introduction to a recent Salon article:
“Imagine living in a country where prisons are private corporations that profit from keeping their beds stocked at, or near, capacity and the governing officials scramble to meet contractual ‘lockup quotas.’ Imagine that taxpayers would have to pay for any empty beds should crime rates fall below that quota. Surprise! You already live there.”
In Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, author Jeremy Scahill outlines the parallel problems that arise in the context of military privatization. When mercenary companies profit from conflict, the government—a public institution—goes to war for private reasons. The U.S. begins fighting wars not because of national interests but instead because of corporate interests, for lobbyists with private interests push the public mechanisms of society to do their bidding. A hardworking blue-collar worker from Kansas thus pays taxes (or even gives his life) to fuel a war that was largely pushed for by military contractors who stand to profit.
Parallel concerns involving the tension between public and private goals arise from the prison-industrial complex. Prisons serve a public function, yet the privatization of prisons means that a small, wealthy group’s private interests will have effects that touch the rest of us and that are antithetical to legitimate public goals. According to a Mother Jones article, for example:
“Occupancy requirements… are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full.”
In addition to draining state coffers through unreasonable contracts, Corrections Corporation of America and other such companies motivated by higher profit margins have lobbied for mandatory minimums, “three-strike” laws, and “truth-in-sentencing” statutes that drive up the inmate population. Thus, one man’s incarceration—his ruined life—is another man’s livelihood.
I think we can all agree that American lives and freedom are not mere goods to be slapped with a price tag and bartered away. It is time to end the prison-industrial complex and to place the administration of prisons back where it belongs: the state.
Excellent article. Mass incarceration is happening in Massachusetts. You can join hundreds/ thousands of activists asking that $2 billion budgeted for prison construction in the Commonwealth be used for job creation insted, on April 26 at 1 pm on the Boston Common. Please find pasted in below the official invitation per the site “Blackstonian.”
April 26th Thousands Will Rally on Boston Common, Calling for Jobs Not Jails
WHAT: On April 26th, we will gather at the Boston Common Bandstand to call for an end to prison expansion in Massachusetts. The Jobs Not Jails coalition, including over 100 organizations from across the Commonwealth, are demanding that $2 billion be put into creating meaningful, long-term, living wage jobs. The coalition is bringing together organizations of formerly incarcerated people, organized labor, faith-based communities, LGBT organizations and youth groups among others. The Patrick Administration estimates that if current criminal justice policies are not changed dramatically, Massachusetts will spend $2 billion in the next seven years to build 10,000 new prison and jail units and $150 million more each year to fill them.
WHO: Speakers will include: Warren Tolman, candidate for Attorney General; Rev. Paul Robeson Ford, Union Baptist Church; CeCe Mcdonald; Manny Gines, Carpenters’ Local 107
WHEN: Saturday, April 26th 1:00pm – 4:00pm
WHERE: Parkman Bandstand, Boston Common
WHY: Massachusetts is behind most of the nation in pushing forward criminal justice reforms. For the last 40 years, we have been steadily and rapidly increasing the number and percentage of our people that we incarcerate, both in the United States as a whole and here in Massachusetts. According to a recent report published by MassINC, the incarceration rate in Massachusetts has tripled since the 1980’s and the impact of racism within the Massachusetts system is even worse than in other states. According to the report, “The most recent data, published in 2005, revealed that incarceration rates for African-Americans in Massachusetts were eight times higher than for white residents. For Latino residents, the state’s incarceration rate was six times higher than for whites”.
CONTACT:
Steve O’Neill, EPOCA (508) 410-7676 steve@exprisoners.org
http://www.JobsNotJails.org
@JobsNotJails #JobsNotJails
Jobs Not Jails on Facebook
We have the highest rate of incarceration in any industrialized nation. In fact, we have the highest rate of any nation, industrialized or not. Obviously we are doing things that other nations are not.
There is nothing conservative about this – and certainly not fiscally. It is entirely unprecedented, and it is harmful to our country.
First the fiscal backdrop – Indeed, the prison industry comes at a high price for YOUR tax payer dollars. The US spent about $52 billion last year on the prison industry. Education and health interventions, where appropriate, per incarcerated individual, is far less expensive, plus it has a greater ROI as they can seek employment, and become a tax-paying citizen contributing to our economy.
When one looks into a “correctional center”, one sees a host of societal problems, ranging from mental illness, drug addiction, lack of adequate education, systemic poverty, an enormous racial bias, so on and so forth. One also finds many, many men, as men commit the majority of the crimes which are punished in this way. (It is extremely rare, of course, to find high-level white collar criminals, especially wealthy ones. In general wealth will greatly reduce one’s chances of paying any kind of price for any kind of crime – even something as sick as child molestation – see DuPont Heir Robert Richard’s case: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.co… )
However, for the diversity of the problems – there is only one standard treatment when things go so badly – prison. Restorative justice, for example, would be one way to take a different tact. I am not saying this is the only or very best method – but it is a well studied and implemented method in other countries. Furthermore, treatment for treatable illnesses such as addiction are far less costly and effective than incarceration – which effectively is a perverse sub-culture created in massive facilities which divert state resources into communities which become dependent on the criminal justice system for both jobs and – oddly often enough – housing for poor and/or sick people who have been caught up in the justice system. There is a reason that other nations do not come to study the U.S. prison system – it is abhorrent and ineffective.
To address my first point – indeed, we are failing miserably and our rate of incarceration is some of the evidence of this. Furthermore, the prison industrial complex uses incarcerated people to make people wealthy. For example, we know that people who maintain family contacts have a much lower rate of recidivism. Family bonds are critical to personal development. However, telephone companies make huge profits off of prisoners, both by employing them at vastly underpaid positions, and by charging families and inmates ridiculous amounts to make phone calls. At the end of the day, what is best for us as a society and for individuals in turned into a sick ploy by predatory companies looking to exploit the situation as a way to generate income. Ditto this dynamic in private prisons, which very effectively take incarceration and put it into a purely capitalist environment for profit, while stripping away any incentive to prevent recidivism – after all, these companies benefit form lower costs and encouraging more ‘customers’ – i.e. offenders and criminality. This system, itself, is a crime against our humanity.
Our rate of incarceration speaks for itself – the ineffectiveness of our present systems.
Good piece. I just finished reading Sinclair Lewis’ Ann Vickers, one of his undervalued novels. It deals with a number of interesting matters in following the life of Ann Vickers, including the suffrage movement, abortion, and prisons. Lewis isn’t as good a writer in the English Department-sense that Fitzgerald is but he’s a terrific social analyst and many of his books, including this one, are still timely and provocative.