By Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans
More than 1.8 million people are currently behind bars in the US — the highest per capita incarceration rate in the history of the world. In 1995 alone, 150 new US prisons were built and filled.
This monumental commitment to lock up a sizeable percentage of the population is an integral part of the end of the Cold War, changing relations between labour and capital on an international scale, domestic economic decline, racism, the US role as policeman of the world and growth of the international drug economy, creating a booming prison-industrial complex. This complex is rapidly becoming an essential component of the US economy.
Like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests. Its twofold purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime.
Not so long ago, communism was "the enemy" and communists were demonised as a way of justifying gargantuan military expenditures. Now, fear of crime and the demonisation of criminals serve a similar ideological purpose: to justify the use of tax dollars for the repression and incarceration of a growing percentage of the population.
The media blitz about serial killers, missing children and "random violence" feeds fear. In reality, however, most of the "criminals" locked up are poor people who commit non-violent crimes out of economic need. Violence occurs in less than 14% of all reported US crime, and injuries occur in just 3%.
In California, the top three charges for entering prison are: possession of a controlled substance for sale, possession of a controlled substance and robbery. Violent crimes like murder, rape, manslaughter and kidnapping don't even make the top 10.
The building and maintenance of prisons are big business. Investment houses, construction companies, architects and support services such as food, medicine, transportation and furniture, all stand to profit by prison expansion. A burgeoning "specialty item" industry sells fencing, handcuffs, drug detectors, productive vests and other security devices to prisons.
Defence industry giants like Westinghouse are retooling and lobbying Washington for their share of the domestic law enforcement market. "Night enforcer" goggles used in the Gulf War, electronic "hot wire" fencing and other equipment once used by the military are now being marketed to the criminal justice system.
Communications companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI are getting into the act as well — gouging prisoners with exorbitant rates for phone calls, often six times the normal long-distance charge.
Smaller firms like Correctional Communications Corporation, dedicated solely to the prison phone business, provide computerised prison phone systems — fully equipped for systematic surveillance. They win government contracts by offering to kick back some of the profits to the government agency awarding the contract.
These companies are reaping huge profits at the expense of prisoners and their families; prisoners are often cut off from communication by the excessive cost of phone calls.
Corrections companies
One of the fastest growing sectors of the prison-industrial complex is private corrections companies. Investment firm Smith Barney is a part owner of a prison in Florida. American Express and General Electric have invested in private prison construction in Oklahoma and Tennessee.
Correctional Corporation of America, one of the largest private prison owners, already operates internationally, with 48 facilities in 11 states, Puerto Rico, the UK and Australia.
Under contract by government and paid a fixed sum per prisoner, these firms operate as cheaply and efficiently as possible. This means lower wages for staff, no unions and fewer services for prisoners.
Private contracts also mean less public scrutiny. Prison owners are raking in billions by cutting corners which harm prisoners. Substandard diets, extreme overcrowding and abuses by poorly trained personnel have all been documented and can be expected in these institutions.
Prisons are also a leading rural growth industry. With traditional agriculture being pushed aside by agribusiness, many rural US communities are facing hard times. Economically depressed areas are falling over each other to secure a prison facility of their own.
Prisons are seen as a source of construction, local vendor and prison staff jobs, as well as a source of tax revenues. An average prison has an annual payroll of several million dollars.
Like any industry, the prison economy needs raw materials. In this case the raw materials are prisoners. The prison-industrial complex can grow only if more and more people are incarcerated for longer periods — even if crime rates drop.
"Three strikes" and mandatory minimum sentences are two examples of the legal superstructure quickly being put in place to guarantee that the prison population will grow and grow and grow.
The growth of the prison-industrial complex is inextricably tied to the fortunes of labour. Since the Reagan-Bush years, workers in the US have been under siege. Aggressive union busting, corporate deregulation and especially the flight of capital in search of cheaper labour markets have been crucial factors in the downward plight of US workers.
Into the gaping economic hole left by the exodus of jobs from US cities has rushed another economy: the drug economy.
The war on drugs
The "war on drugs" launched by President Reagan in the mid-'80s has been fought on interlocking international and domestic fronts.
At the international level, the war on drugs has been both a cynical cover-up of US government involvement in the drug trade, as well as justification for US military intervention and control in the Third World.
Over the last 50 years, the primary avowed goal of US foreign policy has been "to fight communism" (and protect corporate interests). To this end, the US government has, with regularity, formed strategic alliances with drug dealers throughout the world.
At the conclusion of World War II, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) allied itself with heroin traders on the docks of Marseilles in an effort to wrest power away from communist dock workers.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA aided the heroin-producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle area. In return for their cooperation with the US government's war against the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of south-east Asia into the US. It's no accident that heroin addiction in the US rose exponentially in the 1960s.
Nor is it an accident that cocaine began to proliferate in the US during the 1980s. Central America is the strategic midpoint for air travel between Colombia and the US. The Contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua, as well as the war against the national liberation forces in El Salvador, was largely about control of this critical area.
When Congress cut off financial support for the Contras, Oliver North and Bill Casey found other ways to fund the Contra resupply operations at Reagan and Bush's behest, in part through drug dealing. Planes loaded with arms for the Contras took off from the southern US, off-loaded their weapons on private landing strips in Honduras, then loaded up with cocaine for the return trip.
US military presence in Latin America has not stopped drug traffic, but it has influenced aspects of the drug trade, and is a powerful force of social control in the region.
US military intervention — whether in propping up dictators or squashing peasant uprisings — now operates under cover of the righteous "war against drugs and narco-terrorism", while the real narco-terrorists and narco-dictators operate with US protection.
In Mexico, for example, US military aid supposedly earmarked for the drug war is being used to arm Mexican troops in the southern part of the country. The drug trade (production, transfer and distribution points), however, is all in the north. The drug war money is being used primarily to fight the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas.
In the Colombian jungles of Cartagena de Chaira, coca has become the only viable commercial crop. In 1996, 30,000 farmers blocked roads and airstrips to prevent crop spraying from aircraft.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, one of the oldest guerilla organisations in Latin America, held 60 government soldiers hostage for nine months, demanding that the military leave the jungle, that social services be increased and that alternative crops be made available to farmers.
Given the notorious involvement of Colombia's highest officials with the powerful drug cartels, it is not surprising that most US drug war military aid actually goes to fighting the guerillas.
One result of the international war on drugs has been the internationalisation of the US prison population.
For the most part, it's the low level "mules" carrying drugs into the US who are captured and incarcerated in ever-increasing numbers. At least 25% of inmates in the federal prison system today will be subject to deportation when their sentences are completed.
War on African-Americans
In the US, the war on drugs has been a war on poor people. Particularly poor, urban, African-American men and women.
It's well documented that police enforcement of the new, harsh drug laws have been focused on low-level dealers in communities of colour. Arrests of African-Americans have been about five times higher than arrests of whites, although whites and African-Americans use drugs at about the same rate.
African-Americans have been imprisoned in numbers even more disproportionate than their relative arrest rates. It is estimated that in 1994, on any given day, one out of every 128 US adults was incarcerated, while one out of every 17 African-American adult males was incarcerated.
The differential in sentencing for powder and crack cocaine is one glaring example of institutionalised racism. About 90% of crack arrests are of African-Americans, while 75% of powder cocaine arrests are of whites. Under federal law, it takes only five grams of crack but 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.
This flagrant injustice was highlighted by a 1996 nationwide federal prison rebellion when Congress refused to enact changes in sentencing laws that would equalise penalties.
Statistics show that police repression and mass incarceration are not curbing the drug trade. Dealers are forced to move, turf is reshuffled, already vulnerable families broken up. But the demand for drugs still exists, as do huge profits for high-level dealers in this US$50 billion international industry.
The war on drugs could be seen as a pre-emptive strike — the state's repressive apparatus working overtime to put poor people away before they get angry. Incarcerate those at the bottom, the helpless, the hopeless, before they demand change.
What drugs don't damage — in terms of intact communities, the ability to take action, to organise — the war on drugs and mass imprisonment aim to destroy.
Prison labour
A US worker who once made $8 an hour loses his job when the company relocates to Thailand, where workers are paid only $2 a day. Unemployed and alienated from a society indifferent to his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents an hour.
For private business, prison labour is like a pot of gold: no strikes, no union, no unemployment insurance or workers compensation to pay, no language or shipping problem, as in a foreign country.
New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds and even lingerie for Victoria's Secret.
Prisoners can be forced to work for pennies because they have no rights. Even the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, excludes prisoners from its protection.
More and more, prisons are charging inmates for basic necessities, from medical care to toilet paper to use of the law library. Many states are now charging room and board. Berks County Prison in Pennsylvania is charging inmates $10 per day to be there. California has similar legislation pending.
So, while government cannot (yet) require inmates to work at private industry jobs for less than the minimum wage, they are forced to by necessity.
Some prison enterprises are state run. Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry corporation) make recycled furniture and work 40 hours a week for about $40 per month.
Oregon Prison Industries produces a line of "prison blues" jeans. An ad in its catalogue shows a handsome prison inmate saying, "I say we should make bell-bottoms. They say I've been in here too long."
Prison industries often compete directly with private industry. Small furniture manufacturers around the country complain that they are being driven out of business by UNICOR, which pays 23 cents an hour and has the inside track on government contracts.
US Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150 workers unemployed. Six weeks later, the electronics plant reopened in a nearby prison.
The New World Order
Since the end of the Cold War, capitalism has gone on an international business offensive. No longer impeded by an alternative, nominally socialist economy or by the threat of national liberation movements supported by the Soviet Union or China, transnational corporations see the world as their oyster.
Agencies such as the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, bolstered by agreements like NAFTA and GATT, are putting more and more power into the hands of transnational corporations by putting the squeeze on national governments.
The primary mechanism of controls is debt. For decades, developing countries have depended on foreign loans, resulting in increasing vulnerability to the transnational corporate strategy for the global economy. Access to international credit and aid is given only if governments agree to certain conditions known as "structural adjustment".
Structural adjustment requires cuts in social services, privatisation of state-run industry, repeal of agreements with labour about working conditions and minimum wages, conversion of multi-use farm lands into cash crop agriculture for export and the dismantling of trade laws that protect local economies.
Police and military expenditures are the only government spending encouraged. Trade sanctions are threatened when governments don't comply.
The basic transnational corporate philosophy is that the world is a single market, natural resources are to be exploited, people are consumers, anything which hinders profit is to be rooted out and destroyed.
The result is that while economies are growing, so are poverty, ecological destruction, sweatshops and child labour. Across the globe, wages are plummeting, indigenous people are being forced off their lands, rivers are becoming industrial dumping grounds and forests are being obliterated. Massive regional starvation and "World Bank riots" are becoming more frequent throughout the Third World.
As more people are forced into illegal activity for their own survival as social structures are destroyed, crime and imprisonment rates are on the rise. And the US law enforcement establishment is in the forefront, domestically and internationally, in providing state-of-the-art repression.
Within the US, structural adjustment takes the form of welfare and social services cuts, massive military spending and skyrocketing prison spending. Walk through any poor urban neighbourhood: schools are crumbling and after-school programs, libraries, parks and drug treatment centres are closed. But you will see more police stations and more cops.
The growing dominance of the right-wing agenda in US politics has been made possible, at least in part, by the repression of the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s and '70s. Many of the leaders — Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and others — were assassinated. Others, like Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal, have been locked up.
More than 150 leaders from the black liberation struggle, the Puerto Rican independence movement and other resistance efforts are still in prison. Many are serving sentences of between 40 and 90 years. Oppressed communities have been robbed of vital radical political leadership which might have led an opposition movement.
The number of people in US prisons has more than tripled in the past 17 years, from 500,000 in 1980 to 1.8 million in 1997. Today, more than 5 million people are behind bars, on parole or probation, or under other supervision by the criminal justice system.
The state of California now spends more on prisons than on higher education, and over the past decade has built 19 prisons and only one branch university. Between 1980 and 1994, the number of women in prison increased five-fold, many of them mothers.
Welcome to the New World Order.
[Abridged from Turning the Tide — Journal of Anti-Racist Activism, Research and Education, Volume 11, Number 2, 1998. To subscribe, write to PART (People Against Racist Terror), PO Box 1055, Culver City, CA 90232-1055, USA. US$15 regular, US$25 institutional or foreign, US$50 sustaining.]