Incarceration Nation: The Rise
of a Prison-Industrial Complex
by Andrew Bosworth
www.dissidentvoice.org, November
8th, 2008
In a nation originally founded on personal
liberty, almost two and a half million Americans are behind bars.
No doubt, violent criminals should be in jail, but most Americans
are not aware that well over half of the inmates are jailed for
non-violent offenses, many of which are extremely petty: possession
of marijuana, public intoxication, street hustling, prostitution,
loitering, bouncing checks, failure to produce identification,
and even writing graffiti.
Consider this fact: The United States
has less than 4 percent of the world's population but almost 25
percent of the world's prisoners. Amazingly, the US has a higher
incarceration rate than China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Burma.
Out of 1,000 people, more Americans are behind bars than anywhere
in the world except in Kim Jong-Il's Neo-Stalinist North Korea,
which is basically one giant Gulag.
Why is this happening? Inmates have become
the raw material for a prison-industrial complex, shoring up perpetual
profits for McJails. Corporate prisons are paid on a per-prisoner/per-day
basis, and thus they lobby hard for longer mandatory sentences.
Inmates also provide cheap labor, and they are about to become,
once again, guinea pigs for pharmaceutical trials. All of this
signals the conversion of people into valuable "bio-mass."
Incarceration makes sense, politically.
Prisons provide jobs to rural and small town Americans who would
otherwise be unemployed. These workers and their families represent
votes, especially in the South, where electoral majorities are
White and electoral minorities are Black. The drug war is, in
large part, a race war by other means.
Study after study documents the following:
African Americans are disproportionately stopped and searched;
African Americans are disproportionately arrested; African Americans
are disproportionately charged; and African Americans are disproportionately
convicted. And all felons are disenfranchised, never to vote again.
Texas is the most enthusiastic jailer
in the nation. The Lone Star State has become the Lock-Down State.
It has the highest incarceration rate in the nation (which in
turn has the highest rate in the world). Texas insists upon locking
up people like Rodney Hulin, a 16 year old African American who
was convicted of setting a dumpster on fire. His sentence was
8 years in an adult prison. Despite pleading to be removed to
another section, prison officials refused to extract him from
the general population. Hulin was repeatedly raped and infected
with HIV, and he ended the nightmare by hanging himself in his
cell. But what is a 16-year-old doing in an adult prison? It is
not that uncommon:
The United States has 2,225 adolescent
offenders incarcerated and serving life without the possibility
of parole. The United States is the only country in the world
that continues to sentence children to life without the possibility
of parole.
Florida has 713 child inmates who have
received adult sentences of 10 years or more for crimes committed
before their 17th birthdays.1
Even "progressive" states like
California are pushing mass incarceration, locking up the hapless
and the marginal. Billy Ochoa, for example, is serving 326 years
in a "Supermax" (super maximum security) prison for
welfare fraud. Billy is an addict, an inept burglar, and not-very-good
trafficker of food stamps. Under California's "Three Strikes
and You Are Out" law he is locked up in a tiny cell for 23
hours a day.
In Arizona, among other places, incarceration
fits into a Blood-and-Soil subculture: anti-immigrant, anti-minority
and neo-fascist. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, for example,
delights in humiliating inmates, making them wear pink and sleep
in tents in 100 degree weather. Arpaio even reduced inmate food
intake to sub-human levels:
Arpaio makes inmates pay for their meals,
which some say are worse than those for the guard dogs. Canines
eat $1.10 worth of food a day, the inmate 90 cents, the sheriff
says. "I'm very proud of that too."2
Arpaio, as America's Uber-Jailer, even
puts women in chain gangs and then boasts about obtaining "free
labor" for the State. Stalin would have been proud. Instead
of being jailed for human rights abuses, Arpaio enjoys high approval
rates in the Phoenix area.
So the prison-industrial complex gets
fatter and the prisoners get thinner. Both private and public
prisons are cutting corners on guard training, libraries, education
centers and even food. From Florida:
Mushy bland broccoli stems accompanied
by a greasy mystery meat endowed with undercooked rice is as good
as it gets for inmates behind bars
The Senate has proposed slicing $6 million
from the current prison food budget, while the House wants to
cut $11 million.
Basically, Florida wants to lower the
quality of prisoner food from this already-miserable level:
'The quality of the food is substandard,'
said a relative of an inmate at Marion Correctional Institution
in Lowell, who asked not to be named because she feared retaliation
against the prisoner. 'The preparation is haphazard. They're supposed
to wear hairnets and gloves. You find hair in your food and you
find a Band-Aid in your food. Things are so overcooked it's mush,
or it's not cooked at all.'3
Texas, Florida, California and Arizona
have vast quantities of prisoners. Of course, we'll never know
how many prisoners are even guilty. They've been locked up through
mass "plea bargaining" agreements. Here's the deal:
Plead guilty to a lesser crime (to something you might not have
done) and go to jail for 3 years or risk a trial and the chance
of doing 10 years. It's a no-brainer.
Plea bargaining runs against the grain
of the Fifth Amendment's right to a fair trial. It specifically
contradicts the US Constitution, Article III, Section 2: "The
trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be
by jury." That seems pretty clear. Theoretically, an individual
can choose to forfeit his or her own civil liberties, but the
Constitution is degraded when plea bargaining becomes standard
operating procedure, when it becomes a conveyor belt for mass
incarceration, feeding inmates to hungry corporate prisons.
At this pace, the US is in danger of witnessing
the development of a Gulag to jail the entire lumpenproletariat,
the flotsam of society, a large and growing segment of the population,
under-educated and under-employed. (But don't fret too much, since
news about jails seldom makes the mainstream press.) Women are
now the fastest growing population of inmates, and many of them
are young mothers with babies. Sarah B. From, with the Women's
Prison Association, explains:
Nearly two-thirds of women in state prisons
are there for nonviolent offenses; most are mothers. Their children
face the emotional and developmental effects of separation, and
the public incurs additional costs related to the child welfare
system.
Most women in prison report histories
of substance abuse, mental health issues and past trauma - factors
that contribute to the crimes they commit. Prison does little
to address these issues or to decrease the likelihood of recidivism.4
Immigrant women and their children are
beginning to experience long-term detention. This too has been
privatized, as Steve Watson and Paul Watson report:
The federal government is accepting bids
on the contracts from county governments or private companies
to build and run the "family detention centers
The T. Don Hutto detention center, which
is privately run by a company called Corrections Corp. of America,
currently interns political asylum seekers who came to the U.S.
on legal visas. Most of them are families including pregnant women
and children who have never been accused of any wrongdoing but
are forced to endure squalid conditions inside literal internment
camps5
Every major human rights group condemns
family detention centers as sites of "collective punishment"
(which might be classified as "concentration camps"
under international law). Of course, the federal government promotes
a sanitized image of detention centers in order to hide the fact
that the Hutto center, for example, is a retro-fitted prison.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) is selling the concept of detention centers as miniature
cities, models of healthy living. As Anna Gorman reports for the
Los Angeles Times:
The agency calls for minimum-security
residential facilities that would provide a "least restrictive,
nonsecure setting" and provide schooling for children, recreational
activities and access to religious services.6
This ICE propaganda is reminiscent of
the Nazis, literally. Several years before the Nazis began their
extermination campaign, they invited film crews onto concentration
camps to show how happy the residents were with their schools
and facilities
Work Shall Set You Free
In the 1970s, a Supreme Court Justice,
Warren Burger, proselytized for more leeway as to what kinds of
"projects" prisoners could work on. Before too long,
Congress amended the laws. In a Great Leap Backward, the US Congress
has repealed two federal laws (the Hawes Cooper Act and the Ashurst-Sumner
Act) that virtually outlawed prison labor, making it a felony
to move prison-made goods across state boundaries. Stamping state
license plates for cars was generally acceptable, but these Acts
tried to end the leasing out of prisoners to private companies;
they tried to eliminate prison-plantations and "factories
with fences."
By 1990 it was permissible for prisoners
to produce products entering the stream of interstate commerce.
Many of the largest corporations in America have exploited prison
labor in what might be called "Operation Sweatshop."
Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing, Victoria's Secret and other companies
have participated in prison labor programs.
Now, the federal government is taking
the entire concept of prison labor to a new level: The Federal
Inmate Labor Program. Details of the program can be found on the
Pentagon's own website. Documents released as far back as 2005
establish "Procedures for establishing a civilian inmate
prison camp on Army installations." Sample text from the
Federal Inmate Labor Program:
b. The Army is not interested in, nor
can afford, any relationship with a corrections facility if that
relationship stipulates payment for civilian inmate labor
(3) No photograph, film, nor video may
be taken or made of any inmate labor detail or member for any
reason without prior written permission from both (name of the
Army organization) PAO and (name of local federal corrections
facility) officials.7
In other words, the federal government
is seeking unpaid laborers from among the pool of prisoners who
would not be incarcerated long-term in other nations - non-violent
and petty offenders who do not need constant guard. Just as in
the Third Reich, federal authorities wish to convey their good
intentions; in this case, they seek to enrich the life of prisoners:
"(2) Providing meaningful work for
inmates"
So it is not surprising that inmates are
becoming guinea pigs for medical experiments and drug testing.
Big Pharma faces a shortage of experimental subjects. Ian Urbina,
in the New York Times, explains how the pharmaceutical lobby is
on the verge of changing - or reversing - federal law:
An influential federal panel of medical
advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations
that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates,
a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations
of abuse
The discussion comes as the biomedical
industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects8
In fact, it is precisely because of pharmaceutical
experiments that federal law began to protect prisoners in the
late 1970s. Technically, under a Department of Health and Human
Services regulation (45 CFR 46), prisoners are supposed to receive
the same "protection of human subjects" as children
and pregnant women. As the law currently stands, the only research
that may be conducted with prisoners has to be material to their
lives. Prisoners may not be used, under current law, as a "population
of convenience." But all this may soon be rolled back.
The profit motive worms its way into all
aspects of prison life. The executives of these for-profit prisons
sponsor "tough-on-crime" legislation and even line the
pockets of politicians who back "mandatory sentencing"
laws. It's all profitable. On correctionscorp.com there is a separate
section for investors.
Corrections Corporation of America is
the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional
and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators
in the United States, behind only the federal government and three
states.
A recent analysis of the prison industry
by Leslie Berestein is telling:
The industry leaders' stock prices have
rebounded. Since 2001, CCA shares have split twice and multiplied
tenfold, closing recently at $26.17. The GEO Group, which changed
its name from Wackenhut Corrections in 2003, has also completed
two stock splits and seen its stock value jump from roughly $2.50
a share in early January 2001 to $26.76 recently.
Meanwhile, the industry has broadened
its political influence, spending more to lobby agencies such
as the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Prisons.9
A nation that once represented personal
liberty, the United States, has become the world's most ardent
incarcerator, turning the hapless and marginalized into inmates,
cheap laborers, and guinea pigs for pharmaceutical trials.
Maria E. Castagliuolo, "State Metes
Living Death Penalties to Children," Florida Issues, 5 April
2008. [_]
News Report, "Arizona Criminals Find Jail Too In - 'Tents,'"
July 27, 1999. [_]
Dara Kam, "Vendor, Lawmakers Suggest Cutting $11 million
from Prison Food Deals," Palm Beach Post Capital Bureau,
29 March 2008. [_]
Sarah B. From, "Letter to the Editor," New York Times,
24 April 2008. (Sarah B. From is Director of Public Policy and
Communications Women's Prison Association). [_]
Steve Watson and Paul Watson, "Federal Government Taking
Bids On Construction Of Internment Camps," Infowars.net,
19 May 2008. [_]
Anna Gorman, "Immigration Agency Plans New Family Detention
Centers," Los Angeles Times, 19 May 2008. [_]
Government Report, Federal Inmate Labor Program, Department of
the Army, 14 January 2005. [_]
Ian Urbina, "Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials,"
New York Times, 13 August 2006. [_]
Leslie Berestein, "'Private Prison Industry' Experiences
Boom," Copley News Service, 11 May 2008. [_]
Andrew Bosworth, Ph.D., is author of Biotech Empire: The Untold
Future of Food, Pills, and Sex, & Profit, Power, and the War
on Your Health. he can be reached at: aaabos@gmail.com. Read other
articles by Andrew, or visit Andrew's website.
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