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February 10, 2012 AVOID
Profit Driven Prison Industrial Complex: The
Economics of Incarceration in the USA
For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars
by Nile Bowie
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29109
Global Research, February 6, 2012
James Nachtwey / VII
For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage
of issues that fundamentally challenge the
underpinning moral infrastructure of American
society and the values it claims to uphold. Under
the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things
are more sobering than the amount of Americans
who will spend the rest of their lives in an
isolated correctional facility – ostensibly,
being corrected. The United States of America has
long held the highest incarceration rate in the
world, far surpassing any other nation. For every
100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars.
Presently, the prison population in America
consists of more than six million people, a
number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in
the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history.
While miserable statistics illustrate some
measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring
in the detainment centers inside the land of the
free, only a partial picture of the broader
situation is painted. While the country faces an
unprecedented economic and financial crisis,
business is booming in other fields – namely, the
private prison industry. Like any other business,
these institutions are run for the purpose of
turning a profit. State and federal prisons are
contracted out to private companies who are paid
a fixed amount to house each prisoner per day.
Their profits result from spending the minimum
amount of state or federal funds on each inmate,
only to pocket the remaining capital. For the
corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity
depends on housing the maximum numbers of inmates
for the longest potential time - as inexpensively as possible.
By allowing a profit-driven capitalist-enterprise
model to operate over institutions that should
rightfully be focused on rehabilitation, America
has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial
complex. Under the promise of maintaining
correctional facilities at a lower cost due to
market competition, state and federal governments
contract privately run companies to manage and
staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design
and construct facilities. The private prison
industry is primarily led by two morally
deficient entities, the Corrections Corporation
of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (formerly
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation). These
companies amassed a combined revenue of over $2.9
billion in 2010, not without situating themselves
in the center of political influence.
The number of people imprisoned under state and
federal custody increased 772% percent between
1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible
influence private corporations wield against the
American legal system. Because judicial leniency
and sentencing reductions threaten the very
business models of these private corporations,
millions have been spent lobbying state officials
and political candidates in an effort to
influence harsher “zero tolerance” legislation
and mandatory sentencing for many non-violent
offenses. Political action committees assembled
by private correctional corporations have lobbied
over 3.3 million dollars to the political
establishment since 2001. An annual report
released by the CCA in 2010 reiterates the
importance of influencing legislation:
“The demand for our facilities and services could
be adversely affected by the relaxation of
enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or
parole standards and sentencing practices or
through the decriminalization of certain
activities that are currently proscribed by our
criminal laws. For instance, any changes with
respect to drugs and controlled substances or
illegal immigration could affect the number of
persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced,
thereby potentially reducing demand for
correctional facilities to house them.
Legislation has been proposed in numerous
jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences
for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates
eligible for early release based on good
behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives under
consideration could put some offenders on
probation with electronic monitoring who would
otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions
in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent
and enforce crime could lead to reductions in
arrests, convictions and sentences requiring
incarceration at correctional facilities.”
Considering today’s private prison population is
over 17 times larger than the figure two decades
earlier, the malleability of the judicial system
under corporate influence is clear. The
Corrections Corporation of America is the first
and largest private prison company in the US,
cofounded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, former Chairman
of the Tennessee Republican Party. The CCA
entered the market and overtly exploited
Beasley’s political connections in an attempt to
exert control over the entire prison system of
Tennessee. Today, the company operates over
sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the
US Marshal Service, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The
GEO Group operates 118 detention centers
throughout the United States, South Africa, UK,
Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name,
the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was
synonymous for the sadistic abuse of prisoners in
its facilities, resulting in the termination of several contracts in 1999.
The political action committees assembled by
private prison enterprises have also wielded
incredible influence with respect to
administering harsher immigration legislation.
The number of illegal immigrants being
incarcerated inside the United States is rising
exponentially under Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), an agency responsible for
annually overseeing the imprisonment of 400,000
foreign nationals at the cost of over $1.9
billion on custody-related operations. The agency
has come under heavy criticism for seeking to
contract a 1,250-bed immigration detention
facility in Essex County, New Jersey to a private
company that shares intimate ties to New Jersey's
Governor, Chris Christie. Given the private
prison industry’s dependence on
immigration-detention contracts, the huge
contributions of the prison lobby towards
drafting Arizona’s recrementitious immigration
law SB 1070 are all but unexpected. While the
administration of Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer
is lined with former private prison lobbyists,
its Department of Corrections budget has been
raised by $10 million, while all other Arizona
state agencies are subject to budget cuts in 2012’s fiscal year.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this
obstinate moral predicament presents itself in
the private contracting of prisoners and their
role in assembling vast quantities of military
and commercial equipment. While the United States
plunges itself into each new manufactured
conflict under a wide range of fraudulent
pretenses, it is interesting to note that all
military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof
vests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other
equipment used by military occupation forces are
produced by inmates in federal prisons across the
US. Giant multinational conglomerates and weapons
manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and
Raytheon Corporation employ federal prison labor
to cheaply assemble weapons components, only to
sell them to the Pentagon at premium prices. At
the lowest, Prisoners earn 17 cents an hour to
assemble high-tech electronic components for
guided missile systems needed to produce Patriot
Advanced Capability 3 missiles and anti-tank projectiles.
In the past, political mouthpieces of the United
States have criticized countries such as China
and North Korea for their role in exploiting
prisoner labor to create commodity products such
as women’s bras and artificial flowers for
export. Evidently, outsourcing the construction
of the military equipment responsible for
innumerable civilian causalities to the prisons
of America warrants no such criticism from the
military industrial establishment. In utter
derision toward the integrity of the common
worker, prison inmates are exposed to toxic spent
ammunition, depleted uranium dust and other
chemicals when contracted to clean and reassemble
tanks and military vehicles returned from combat.
Prison laborers receive no union protection,
benefits or health and safety protection when
made to work in electronic recycling factories
where inmates are regularly exposed to lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.
In addition to performing tasks that can result
in detrimental illnesses, prison labor produces
other military utilities such as night-vision
goggles, body armor, radio and communication
devices, components for battleship anti-aircraft
guns, land mine sweepers and electro-optical
equipment. While this abundant source of low-cost
manpower fosters greater incentives for corporate
stockholders to impose draconian legislation on
the majority of Americans who commit nonviolent
offenses, it’s hard to imagine such an innately
colossal contradiction to the nation’s official
rhetoric, i.e. American values. Furthermore,
prison labor is employed not only in the assembly
of complex components used in F-15 fighter jets
and Cobra helicopters, it also supplies 98% of
the entire market for equipment assembly
services, with similar statistics in regard to
products such as paints, stoves, office furniture, headphones, and speakers.
It is some twisted irony that large sections of
the workforce in America’s alleged free-market
are shackled in chains. Weapons manufactured in
the isolation of America’s prisons are the source
of an exploitative cycle, which leaves allied
NATO member countries indebted to a
multibillion-dollar weapons industry at the
behest of the U.S. State Department and the
Pentagon. Complete with its own trade
exhibitions, mail-order catalogs and investment
houses on Wall Street, the eminence of the
private prison industry solidifies the ongoing
corrosion of American principles – principles
that seem more abstract now, than the day they were written.
Predictably, the potential profit of the prison
labor boom has encouraged the foundations of US
corporate society to move their production forces
into American prisons. Conglomerates such as IBM,
Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless,
Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell,
Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies,
3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's,
Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret,
and Target have all begun mounting production
operations in US prisons. Many of these Fortune
500 conglomerates are corporate members of civil
society groups such as the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED). These think tanks are critical
toward influencing American foreign policy. Under
the guise of democracy promotion, these civil
societies fund opposition movements and train
dissent groups in countries around the world in
the interest of pro-US regime change. With naked
insincerity, the same companies that outsource
the production of their products to American
prisons simultaneously sponsor civil societies
that demanded the release of Myanmar’s Aung San
Suu Kyi from house arrest – an overly political
effort in the on-going attempts to install a compliant regime in that country.
The concept of privatizing prisons to reduce
expenses comes at great cost to the inmates
detained, who are subjected to living in
increasingly squalid conditions in jail cells
across America. In 2007, the Texas Youth
Commission (TYC) was sent to a West Texas
juvenile prison run by GEO Group for the purpose
of monitoring its quality standards. The monitors
sent by the TYC were subsequently fired for
failing to report the sordid conditions they
witnessed in the facility while they awarded the
GEO Group with an overall compliance score of
nearly 100%. Independent auditors later visited
the facility and discovered that inmates were
forced to urinate or defecate in small containers
due to a lack of toilets in some of the cells.
The independent commission also noted in their
list of reported findings that the facility
racially segregated prisoners and disciplined
Hispanics for speaking Spanish by denying their
access to layers and medical treatment. It was
later discovered that the TYC monitors were
employed by the GEO Group. Troublingly, the
Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF)
operated by the GEO Group in Mississippi has been
subject to a class-action lawsuit after reports
that staff members were complicit in the beating
and stabbing of a prisoner who consequently
incurred permanent brain damage. The official
compliant authored by the ACLU and Southern
Poverty Law Center also highlights cases where
the administration turned a blind eye to brutal
cases of rape and torture within the facility.
The first private prison models were introduced
following the abolishment of slavery after the
American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, which saw
expansive prison farms replace slave plantations.
Prisons of the day contracted groups of
predominately African-American inmates to pick
cotton and construct railroads principally in
southern states such as Alabama, Georgia and
Mississippi. In 2012, there are more
African-Americans engrossed in the
criminal-justice system than any point during
slavery. Throughout its history, the American
prison system has shared little with the concept
of rehabilitation. Like the post-Civil War prison
farms, today’s system functions to purport
required labor, largely on a racially specific
basis. African-Americans consist of 40% of the
prison population and are incarcerated seven
times more often than whites, despite the fact
that African-Americans make up only 12% of the
national population. Once released, former
inmates are barred from voting in elections,
denied educational opportunities and are legally
discriminated against in their efforts to find
employment and housing. Few can deny the
targeting of underprivileged urban communities of
color in America’s failed War on Drugs. This
phenomenon can largely be contributed to the
stipulations of its anti-drug legislation, which
commanded maximum sentencing for possession of
minute amounts of rock cocaine, a substance that
floods poor inner-city black communities.
Unbeknown to the vast majority of Americans, the
US government has been actively taking steps to
modify the legal infrastructure of the country to
allow for a dramatic expansion of the domestic
prison system at the expense of civil rights. On
December 31st, 2011, Barack Obama signed into law
the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
H.R. 1540. Emulating the rouge military
dictatorships the US Government has long
condemned in its rhetoric, the NDAA introduces a
vaguely worded legislation that allows for US
citizens to be arbitrarily detained in military
detention without due process - might they be
predictably be deemed radical, conspiratorial or
suspected of terrorism. In a climate of rising
public discontent, the establishment media has
steadfastly worked to blur the line between
public activism and domestic extremism. In
addition to the world’s largest network of prison
facilities, over 800 located detainment camps
exist in all regions of the United States with varying maximum capacities.
Facing economic stagnation, many Americans have
been detained in responder camps as a consequence
of publically demonstrating in accordance with
the Occupy Wall Street movement launched in New
York City. Under the guise of protecting
Americans from a largely contrived and abstract
threat of fundamentalist violence, citizens have
been denied the right of peaceful assembly and
placed in detainment apparatuses, managed by the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Documents have been released by the American
Civil Liberties Union detailing the Pentagon’s
widespread monitoring of public demonstrations
and the targeting of individual activists under
threat of national security. Co-authored by
Senator Joe Lieberman, the Enemy Expatriation Act
(HR 3166) gives the US government the power to
detain nationals and revoke their American
citizenship under suspicion of behavior perceived as terrorism.
This legislation becomes increasingly more
dangerous as citizens can be labeled domestic
extremists based on their constitutionally
protected activism or personal political
leanings. In January 2006, a contract to
construct detention facilities for the Department
of Homeland Security worth a maximum of $385
million was awarded to KBR, a subsidiary of
Haliburton. Following the signing of NDAA earlier
in 2012, leaked documents reveal that KBR is now
seeking to staff its detention centers and award
contracts for services such as catering,
temporary fencing and barricades, laundry and
medical services, power generation, and refuse
collection. It would be reasonable to assume that
these facilities could be managed in partnership
with private corporations such as the GEO Group
or the CCA, as many federal and state
penitentiaries privatize sections of their
facilities to privately owned companies.
Declassified US Army documents originally drafted
in 1997 divulge the existence of inmate labor
camps inside US military installations. It is all
but unexpected that the relationship between the
upper echelons of government and the private
prison enterprise will grow increasingly more
intimate in the current climate of prison industrial legislation.
The partnership between the United States
government and its corporate associates spans
various industries however, they all seek the
common pursuit of profit irrespective of the
moral and ethical consequence – the human
consequence. The increasing influence of the
Prison Industrial Complex towards official
legislation and economic undertakings signifies a
reprehensible threat to basic human rights.
Perhaps the issuance of government legislation
that leads offenders into detainment for the
benefit of private shareholders is the purest
embodiment of fascism, as cited in Mussolini’s
vision of a Corporate State. Perhaps we all (this
author included) fail to grasp the seriousness of
these legislations and their implications on our lives.
Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent over three decades on
death row in the throngs of the American prison
system. Prior to his conviction in 1981 for the
murder of a white police officer, Jamal was a
political activist and President of the
Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.
Critical evidence vindicating Jamal was withheld
from the trial prior to the issuance of the death
penalty. Forensic experts believe he was denied a
fair trial. On December 7, 2011, the Philadelphia
District Attorney announced that prosecutors
would no longer seek the death penalty for Jamal.
He remains imprisoned for life without parole and
continues his work as a journalist from his jail cell in Pennsylvania.
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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