Introduction,

A New Commodity,

The Crime Gap

excerpted from the book

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

How America Profits From Crime

by Joel Dyer

Westview Press, 2001, paper

Introduction
p1
The United States now incarcerates between 1.8 and 2 million of its citizens in its prisons and jails on any given day, and over 5 million people are currently under the supervision of America's criminal justice system. That's more prisoners than in any other country in the world, an estimated 500,000 more than Communist China and just a few more than Russia, which offers the United States its only real competition when it comes to imprisonment. But perhaps the most telling comparison of penal systems can be found in the statistics kept in the archives of our own Department of Justice. Today's 2 million prisoners represent a prison and jail system ten times larger than that which existed in the United States a mere twenty-nine years ago. This unprecedented rise in the number of prisoners in the U.S. prison system reflects the largest prison expansion the world has ever known.

p2
By way of comparison, the United States now locks up about five to seven times as many people as most other industrialized nations-nations whose crime rates are often similar to ours, but which have chosen to deal with the majority of their nonviolent offenders outside of prison walls through drug rehabilitation programs, various forms of community service, and well-supervised probation and parole.

p2
Census Bureau statistics reflect that crime rates have been relatively flat or falling for the last three decades ...

p4
Mandatory sentencing, including "three-strikes" laws and "truth in sentencing," are the weapons of the war on crime that have increased our prison population ten times over in recent years

p5
... politicians ... divert tax dollars out of existing programs such as education, child welfare, mental-health care, housing, and substance abuse programs to repay the market and its investors for having put up the money to construct the prison facilities.

p5
As a result of investors and corporations being willing to fund the construction of prisons that the majority of voters have shown increasing hesitance to bankroll, the budgets of corrections departments all across America have exploded.

p6
... America's prison population is being harvested from our growing fields of urban poverty. Since these fields are disproportionately composed of minority citizens, so too is the new prison population. By 1992, one out of every three black men in the United States between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine was under the supervision of the criminal justice system. In some cities such as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, 50 percent of black men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five are now under the watchful eye of the Justice Department. Seventy percent of those being sent to prison these days are black or Hispanic, even though statistics tell us that these minorities are not committing anywhere near 70 percent of America's crimes.

p6
... blacks compose only 13 percent of monthly drug users, yet they are arrested five times as often as whites on drug charges, and once arrested, they are twice as likely to receive a prison sentence as their white counterparts and, on average, that sentence will be 20 percent longer than one doled out to a white offender.

p7
... if this prison expansion continues for twenty more years in its current discriminatory manner we will eventually find ourselves imprisoning over 6 million minority citizens."

p9
E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 1973
"Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic," you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper."

The New Commodity
p9
As you drive through the streets of Youngstown, Ohio, it's not hard to find the usual reminders that we live in a market-driven culture. Electronic bulletin boards nailed to buildings that house investment firms flash their alternating messages of current temperature and the latest stock quotes, a newspaper headline questioning whether Wall Street will catch the Asian flu can be seen through the foggy plastic of a coin-operated box, and at every turn, vibrantly colored billboards and other signs testify to the products we cannot live without or as to the way we should live-"Just do it."

We have become so accustomed to seeing these images that represent the capitalistic forces that shape our lives that they tend to blend together in a meaningless information stew, this ingredient being no more important than that one. "Drink Coke," "Invest in Microsoft," "Vote Republican," "Supersize your fries"-it's all the same, or so it seems after a while. But on the outskirts of Youngstown there is one more sign, one last symbolic message from the market that we cannot allow to be blended into the jumble. It may look like more of the same, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The words "Yesterday's closing stock price" hang on a nondescript placard near the road that runs past the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center. And though these may be the only words on the sign, the message being conveyed is not nearly as simple as it initially appears. The stock price being quoted is for Corrections Corporation of America, the largest of the new private-prison companies that have sprung forth from America's decision to turn punishment into a booming industry. As of January 1999, the company has 67,992 beds in sixty-eight facilities in three countries, and it has more than quadrupled the value of its stock since 1993.

p10
... the business of turning crime and prisoners into profit has become one of the fastest-growing industries in the nation, an industry with hundreds of billions of dollars up for grabs each year. Corrections is now the fastest-growing category in most state budgets, and each year, more of this taxpayer money is finding its way into the bank accounts of companies in the private sector.

p11
Today's prison industry has its own trade shows, mail-order catalogs newsletters, and conventions, and literally thousands of corporations are now eating at the justice-system trough.

p12
Since 1990, the United States has been constructing enough prison facilities to hold an average of 92,640 new beds per year, and these beds are not cheap. As of 1998, the cost for creating a new maximum-security bed was $70,909; for medium security, it was $49,853 per bed; and for minimum security, the price was $29,311 for each bed added.

p13
It has been said that you can tell a lot about a culture by its great public works. If this is true, then America at the end of the twentieth century will be at least partially remembered as the society of imprisonment.

p19
Of the billions being made off this captive labor force, prisoners are generally paid between $.20 and $1.20 per hour-less at private prisons and a little more in some federal- and state-run facilities. Imagine how appealing inmate labor looks to corporations, considering that these industries are generating an average of $14.54 profit per inmate-hour worked. In a foreshadowing of things to come, at least one company has already closed its data-processing operation in Mexico's maquiladora district in favor of a labor force from San Quentin State Prison. Other companies have laid off their entire workforces, immediately replacing them with cheap prisoner labor.

The Crime Gap
p27
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the Census Bureau's mechanism for measuring crime, our nation's overall crime rate between 1973 and 1982 was relatively flat, a little up in this category one year, a little down the next. An examination of the years between 1983 and 1999 shows that the rate of people being victimized by crime was actually declining. Clearly these are not statistics that would warrant a 1,000-percent increase in incarceration rates ...

p28
Since the early 1980s, when ultraconservative president Ronald Reagan declared the current "war on crime" by telling a television audience that to win this new war against criminals would require the same level of commitment it took to win World War II, crime has been at or near the top of the public's stated concerns in nearly every poll. Americans have truly become convinced that they are living in a war zone.

p29
President Dwight Eisenhower's, January 17, 1961 farewell speech

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.... We should take nothing for granted."

p50
Marc Mauer, Atlantic Monthly, December 1998

"We have embarked on a great social experiment. No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control."

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

Index of Website

Home Page