Punishment for Profit

May 7, 2019

In the United States there are about 2.2 million people who are

incarcerated. The majority of the imprisoned populations are people of color,

around 70 percent to be more precise. The number shoots up to around 5

million when you include people on parole and probation. Prison populations

have been growing exponentially, 30 years ago prison populations were

1/8​th​its current size. The large number of colored people being sent away to

cages, has created a high demand for the creation of prison infrastructures,

which used to be the primary job of the government, but is now also

performed by private corporations. Imprisonment has become the 1​st ​resort to

too many of the social problems poor people face today, problems such as

homelessness, joblessness, drug addiction, literacy rate, and overall good

health. These problems are often covered over, in the sense that they are

strategically grouped together under the same category as crime. The

automatic attribution of criminal behavior to colored people leads the general

public to believe that it’s okay to send colored people away because they’re

“bad” people who commit crimes anyway.

As capital moves easily across national borders because of recent trade

and investment agreements, corporations close up shop in the U.S and

transfer manufacturing operations to third-world nations that provide cheap

unorganized labor, fleeing from organized labor unions in the U.S to avoid

paying higher wages and benefits. In doing so, they leave communities

devastated, making them vulnerable to joblessness by dismantling the

economic base of the community. Leaving men, women and children prey to

the drug trade and at the same time turning these people into perfect

candidates for prison. This also creates an economic demand for prisons.

Prisons themselves are becoming a source of cheap labor that attracts

corporations, the same way that cheap labor in a third-world country does.

For example, prisoners can’t go on strike nor can they unionize, prisoners

aren’t covered by the Fair Labor Standards act. So they are hired and fired at
will, and they are also paid much less than minimum wage, about less than a

dollar an hour in some prisons. It’s self-evident that prison labor is hugely

profitable for corporations. Private capital has become so intertwined in

punishment because of its profit potential; it’s becoming increasingly central

to the U.S economy. The exploitation of prison labor in an increasingly

privatized context is modern day form of convict leasing.

Private prisons are expanding at four times the rate of public prisons. County

governments pay private prisons a fee for each inmate, which incentivizes

private prisons to retain prisoners for as long as possible, and keep their

prison facilities filled. Unemployed colored men and women constitute an

unending supply as prisoners for the prison industry. Because the prison

industry needs sufficient number of prisoners to guarantee long term growth,

for the supply of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a

sufficient number of Americans who are deemed disposable regardless if

crime is actually rising and regardless if incarceration is necessary.

At the moment of the abolition of slavery, the 13​th​amendment declared

slavery unconstitutional except as punishment for a crime. This authorization

of enslaving individuals only after being convicted of a crime created an

immense black presence within prisons and transformed punishment into a

means of managing former slaves. Black codes were put into place to

criminalize black people. Black codes made such things as insulting gestures,

not coming into work, breaking contracts, joblessness, and homelessness

crimes that deserved imprisonment. Prison populations that used to be

predominantly white during slavery became predominantly black in the

aftermath. Convict leasing either replaced penitentiaries or were restricted to

black convicts only. This racialization of punishment (convict leasing)

recreated conditions of slavery, and sometimes worse, within prisons.

In all, prisons are becoming an eminent presence in our society. The

abstract perception of prisons that the public holds works against the

engagement needed to solve the real issues affecting these communities from
which prisoners are being drawn in disproportionate numbers. Also prisons

devour the social wealth needed to address the very problems that these

communities are facing. Despite the common rhetoric that prisons fix the

problem of crime, the study of history reveals that it doesn’t. If it did at the

rate of “criminals” being sent away in the U.S, which is at a substantially

higher rate than any other nation in the world, crime should have been

abolished. Prisons do not fix the problem, they just make the people

contending with these problems disappear, and the act of making people

disappear has literally become big business.