Pubdate: 1 Oct 1998
Source: Fairfield County Weekly (CT) 
Copyright: 1998 New Mass. Media, Inc.
Contact:  Angela Y. Davis
Note: Angela Davis is a former political prisoner, longtime activist,
educator and author who has devoted her life to struggles for social justice. 

REFLECTIONS ON THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the
social problems that burden people who are mired in poverty. These problems
often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category
"crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of
color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness and
illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view
when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people who continually
vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a proliferating network of
prisons and jails have been tricked into believing in the magic of
imprisonment. But prisons do not make problems disappear, they make human
beings disappear. And the practice of disappearing vast numbers of people
from poor, immigrant and racially marginalized communities has literally
become big business.

The seeming effortlessness of magic always conceals an enormous amount of
behind-the-scenes work. When prisons make human beings disappear in order
to convey the illusion of solving social problems, penal infrastructures
must be created to accommodate a rapidly swelling population of caged
people. Goods and services must be provided to keep imprisoned populations
alive. Sometimes these populations must be kept busy and at other times --
particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons and in INS detention
centers -- they must be deprived of virtually all meaningful activity. Vast
numbers of handcuffed and shackled people are moved across state borders as
they are transferred from one state or federal prison to another.

All this work, which used to be the primary province of government, is now
also performed by private corporations, whose links to government in the
field of what is euphemistically called "corrections" resonate dangerously
with the military industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from
investment in the punishment industry, like those that accrue from
investment in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking
into account the structural similarities and profitability of
business-government linkages in the realms of military production and
public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a
"prison industrial complex."

The Color of Imprisonment

Almost 2 million people are currently locked up in the immense network of
U.S. prisons and jails. More than 70 percent of the imprisoned population
are people of color. It is rarely acknowledged that the fastest-growing
group of prisoners are black women and that Native American prisoners are
the largest group per capita. Approximately 5 million people -- including
those on probation and parole -- are directly under the surveillance of the
criminal justice system.

Three decades ago, the imprisoned population was approximately one-eighth
its current size. While women still constitute a relatively small
percentage of people behind bars, today the number of incarcerated women in
California alone is almost twice what the nationwide women's prison
population was in 1970. According to Elliott Currie, "The prison has become
a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history
- -- or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass
incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social
program of our time."

To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political
economy of prisons relies on racial assumptions of criminality -- such as
images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children -- and on
racist practices in arrest, conviction and sentencing patterns. Colored
bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to
make the major social problems of our time disappear.

Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution,
what is revealed is racism, class bias and the parasitic seduction of
capitalist profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally
impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed to
address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners.
As prisons take up more and more space on the social landscape, other
government programs that have previously sought to respond to social needs
- -- such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families -- are being squeezed out
of existence. The deterioration of public education, including prioritizing
discipline and security over learning in public schools located in poor
communities, is directly related to the prison "solution."

Profiting from Prisoners

As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has become enmeshed
in the punishment industry. And precisely because of their profit
potential, prisons are becoming increasingly important to the U.S. economy.
If the notion of punishment as a source of potentially stupendous profits
is disturbing by itself, then the strategic dependence on racist structures
and ideologies to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even
more troubling.

Prison privatization is the most obvious instance of capital's current
movement toward the prison industry. While government-run prisons are often
in gross violation of international human rights standards, private prisons
are even less accountable. In March of this year, the Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA), the largest U.S. private prison company,
claimed 54,944 beds in 68 facilities under contract or development in the
United States, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Australia. Following the
global trend of subjecting more women to public punishment, CCA recently
opened a women's prison outside Melbourne. The company recently identified
California as its "new frontier."

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC), the second largest U.S. prison
company, claimed contracts and awards to manage 46 facilities in North
America, U.K., and Australia. It boasts a total of 30,424 beds as well as
contracts for prisoner health-care services, transportation and security.

Currently, the stocks of both CCA and WCC are doing extremely well. Between
1996 and 1997, CCA's revenues increased by 58 percent, from $293 million to
$462 million. Its net profit grew from $30.9 million to $53.9 million. WCC
raised its revenues from $138 million in 1996 to $210 million in 1997.
Unlike public correctional facilities, the vast profits of these private
facilities rely on the employment of non-union labor.

The Prison Industrial Complex

But private prison companies are only the most visible component of the
increasing corporatization of punishment. Government contracts to build
prisons have bolstered the construction industry. The architectural
community has identified prison design as a major new niche. Technology
developed for the military by companies like Westinghouse are being
marketed for use in law enforcement and punishment.

Moreover, corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of
punishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison
industrial complex. Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources
of profitable investment for leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI
charges prisoners and their families outrageous prices for the precious
telephone calls, which are often the only contact prisoners have with the
free world.

Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned
that prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power
exploited by U.S.-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly
unionized workers to joblessness and many of those workers even wind up in
prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola,
Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft and Boeing.

But it is not only the high-tech industries that reap the profits of prison
labor. Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as "Prison
Blues," as well as T-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons. The
advertising slogan for these clothes is "made on the inside to be worn on
the outside." Maryland prisoners inspect glass bottles and jars used by
Revlon and Pierre Cardin, and schools throughout the world buy graduation
caps and gowns made by South Carolina prisoners.

"For private business," writes Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans (a political
prisoner inside the Federal Correctional Institution at Dublin, Calif.)
"prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No
health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay.
No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are
being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls.
Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA,
raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds and
lingerie for Victoria's Secret -- all at a fraction of the cost of 'free
labor.' "

Devouring the Social Wealth

Although prison labor -- which ultimately is compensated at a rate far
below the minimum wage -- is hugely profitable for the private companies
that use it, the penal system as a whole does not produce wealth. It
devours the social wealth that could be used to subsidize housing for the
homeless, to ameliorate public education for poor and racially marginalized
communities, to open free drug rehabilitation programs for people who wish
to kick their habits, to create a national health-care system, to expand
programs to combat HIV, to eradicate domestic abuse -- and, in the process,
to create well-paying jobs for the unemployed.

Since 1984 more than 20 new prisons have opened in California, while only
one new campus was added to the California State University system and none
to the University of California system. In 1996-97, higher education
received only 8.7 percent of the state's General Fund while corrections
received 9.6 percent. Now that affirmative action has been declared illegal
in California, it is obvious that education is increasingly reserved for
certain people, while prisons are reserved for others. Five times as many
black men are presently in prison as in four-year colleges and
universities. This new segregation has dangerous implications for the
entire country.

By segregating people labeled as criminals, prison simultaneously fortifies
and conceals the structural racism of the U.S. economy. Claims of low
unemployment rates -- even in black communities -- make sense only if one
assumes that the vast numbers of people in prison have really disappeared
and thus have no legitimate claims to jobs. The numbers of black and Latino
men currently incarcerated amount to 2 percent of the male labor force.
According to criminologist David Downes, "Treating incarceration as a type
of hidden unemployment may raise the jobless rate for men by about
one-third, to 8 percent. The effect on the black labor force is greater
still, raising the [black] male unemployment rate from 11 percent to 19
percent."

Hidden Agenda

Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution
to the vast array of social problems that are hidden away in a rapidly
growing network of prisons and jails. However, the great majority of people
have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even
though the historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work.
Racism has undermined our ability to create a popular critical discourse to
contest the ideological trickery that posits imprisonment as key to public
safety. The focus of state policy is rapidly shifting from social welfare
to social control.

Black, Latino, Native American and many Asian youth are portrayed as the
purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs and as envious of commodities
that they have no right to possess. Young black and Latina women are
represented as sexually promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating
babies and poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance
is thus focused on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed, the
undereducated, the homeless, and in general on those who have a diminishing
claim to social resources. Their claim to social resources continues to
diminish in large part because law enforcement and penal measures
increasingly devour these resources. The prison industrial complex has thus
created a vicious cycle of punishment which only further impoverishes those
whose impoverishment is supposedly "solved" by imprisonment.

Therefore, as the emphasis of government policy shifts from social welfare
to crime control, racism sinks more deeply into the economic and
ideological structures of U.S. society. Meanwhile, conservative crusaders
against affirmative action and bilingual education proclaim the end of
racism, while their opponents suggest that racism's remnants can be
dispelled through dialogue and conversation. But conversations about "race
relations" will hardly dismantle a prison industrial complex that thrives
on and nourishes the racism hidden within the deep structures of our society.

The emergence of a U.S. prison industrial complex within a context of
cascading conservatism marks a new historical moment with unprecedented
dangers. But so are its opportunities. Considering the impressive number of
grassroots projects that continue to resist the expansion of the punishment
industry, it ought to be possible to bring these efforts together to create
radical and nationally visible movements that can legitimize
anti-capitalist critiques of the prison industrial complex. It ought to be
possible to build movements in defense of prisoners' human rights and
movements that persuasively argue that what we need is not new prisons, but
new health care, housing, education, drug programs, jobs and education. To
safeguard a democratic future, it is possible and necessary to weave
together the many strands of resistance to the prison industrial complex
into a powerful movement for social transformation.
- ---
Checked-by: Richard Lake