Prison–industrial complex
The prison–industrial complex is a term, coined after the "military-industrial complex" of the 1950s, used by scholars and activists to describe the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment and the various businesses that benefit from them.
The term is most often used in the context of the contemporary United States, where the expansion of the U.S. inmate population has resulted in economic profit and political influence for private prisons and other companies that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. According to this concept, incarceration not only upholds the justice system, but also subsidizes construction companies, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, surveillance and corrections technology vendors, telecommunications, corporations that contract cheap prison labor, correctional officers unions, private probation companies, criminal lawyers, and the lobby groups that represent them. The term also refers more generally to interest groups who, in their interactions with the prison system, prioritize financial gain over rehabilitating criminals.
Proponents of this concept, including civil rights organizations such as the Rutherford Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, believe that the economic incentives of prison construction, prison privatization, prison labor, and prison service contracts have transformed incarceration into an industry capable of growth, and have contributed to mass incarceration. These advocacy groups note that incarceration affects people of color at disproportionately high rates.
Many commentators use the term "prison-industrial complex" to refer strictly to private prisons in the United States, an industry that generates approximately $4 billion of revenue a year. Others note that fewer than 10% of U.S. inmates are incarcerated in for-profit facilities, and use the term to diagnose a larger confluence of interests between the U.S. government, at the federal and state levels, and the private businesses that profit from the increasing surveillance, policing, and imprisonment of the American public since approximately 1980.
History
Early American jails were largely privately managed, holding both criminals awaiting trial and debtors awaiting repayment, and charging holding fees to local governments and creditors. After the first publicly-run prison was established in 1790 in Pennsylvania, private business involvement in corrections largely diminished to providing contracted services, such as food preparation, medical care, and transportation. The major 19th-century exception to the relative separation between public punishment and private industry was the convict lease system in the American South, in which private parties paid public prisons for forced prisoner labor.During the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, business leaders and unions successfully pressured the federal government to prohibit private corporations from contracting cheap prison labor and undercutting competition. In 1930, the federal government established Federal Prison Industries, a prison labor program to produce goods and services for the public sector.
Many scholars and activists argue that the contemporary prison-industrial complex has its origins in the war on drugs, a legislative campaign orchestrated by the U.S. federal government since the early 1970s aimed at criminalizing and punishing drug trafficking and use. Following tougher anti-drug legislation and harsher sentencing standards under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, incarceration increasingly became the standard punishment for non-violent offenses. As the overall incarcerated population dramatically increased, new correctional facilities needed to be built, staffed, and maintained, and private-sector prisons began to emerge as cost-effective solutions. Also during this period private-sector wage labor was reintroduced into the national prison system.
The number of Americans awaiting trial or serving a sentence for a drug conviction in prison or jail increased from about 40,000 in 1980 to about 450,000 in 2004. In May 2021 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed 46.3 percent of federal inmates as incarcerated because of drug convictions.
1970s
In 1973, following the lead of President Nixon, New York State passed the Rockefeller Drug Laws, establishing mandatory minimum prison sentences for small-scale drug possession. Although not as harsh as Governor Nelson Rockefeller had originally called for, these laws inspired other states to enact similarly strict punishments for drug offenses, including mandatory minimum sentences in almost every instance. Also in 1973, conservative businesses and tough-on-crime politicians came together to establish the influential lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council.In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union restricted prisoners’ First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, and prohibited them from organizing labor unions. In 1979, inspired by legislation proposed by ALEC, the U.S. Congress overturned the New Deal–era legislation against for-profit prison labor by establishing the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program. Intended to allow inmates to contribute to society, offset the cost of their incarceration, reduce idleness, cultivate job skills, and improve the rates of successful transition back into their communities after release, the PIE program created a cheap captive domestic labor market, which set the stage for the adoption and expansion of private-sector labor in public prisons. The PIE program also allowed prisons themselves to be privatized and operated as for-profit entities.
Meanwhile, incarceration rates began to soar. After a period of relative stability since 1925, the overall U.S. imprisonment rate grew rapidly and continuously from 1972, increasing annually by 6 to 8 percent through 2000.
1980s
President Ronald Reagan's 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act further accelerated mass incarceration. Very shortly many state prisons were experiencing unprecedented overcrowding. Rockefeller's successor, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, was unable to generate enough support to dismantle the drug laws, and to keep pace with increasing arrests, was forced to expand the prison system using the Urban Development Corporation, a public state agency, which could issue state bonds without voter support. Despite a general economic retrenchment and avowed state government austerity policies, these events proved that government funds could nevertheless be made available for prison construction.Meanwhile, in 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America was founded by Nashville businessmen who claimed they could build and operate state and federal prisons with the same quality of service provided by government prisons, but at a lower cost. In 1984, CCA was awarded a contract for a facility in Hamilton County, Tennessee, the first instance of the public sector contracting management of a prison to a private company. By 1987, the company had signed more contracts, with Tennessee, Texas, and Kentucky, establishing the legal precedent for other startups and established corporations to enter into the industry, not only operating prisons but also immigrant detention facilities for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. As of 2012, the multibillion-dollar corporation, now known as CoreCivic, manages over 65 correctional facilities and boasts an annual revenue exceeding $1.7 billion.
In 1988, the now-second-largest for-profit private prison corporation, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was established as a subsidiary of The Wackenhut Corporation. The WCC is now known as GEO Group, and as of 2017, their U.S. Corrections and Detention division manages 70 correctional and detention facilities.
Between 1980 and 1989, the total U.S. prison population increased by 115%, from 329,821 to 710,054 people.
1990s
In 1992, William Barr, then United States Attorney General, authored a report, The Case for More Incarceration, which argued for an even further increase in the United States incarceration rate. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in U.S. history, which directly allotted a $9.7 billion funding increase to prisons and introduced the three-strikes law, assigning unprecedentedly long sentences to third-time convicts.As the prison population continued to grow steeply throughout the 1990s, the profit margins of private prison corporations such as CCA and GeoGroup continued to increase. Throughout the 1990s, the CCA and GeoGroup were both significant donors to the American Legislative Exchange Council. In 1995, Congress passed another piece of ALEC-influenced legislation, the Prison Industries Act, allowing corporations to pay prison laborers less than the federal minimum wage and divert the difference to constructing facilities for further prison labor.
By the end of 1999, the U.S. had a total incarcerated population of 2,026,596. This included 71,206 prisoners held in privately operated facilities, accounting for 5.5% of state and 2.8% of federal prisoners. In 1999, nearly 43% of all sentenced inmates were African-American men, and an estimated 9% of African-American men in their late 20s were in prison.
2000s
Through the 2000s, the federal government continued outsourcing prison management to private facilities, while states varied in their approach to private incarceration. Between 1999 and 2010, six states began using private prisons, while nine states ended their private prison contracts. By 2010, the number of privately held state prisoners in the 30 practicing states ranged from a low of 5 in South Dakota to a high of 19,155 in Texas.Overall U.S. incarceration peaked in 2008 at 2,308,400 people, approximately 1% of the adult population.
A 2010 investigation by the United States Department of Justice found that Federal Prison Industries had routinely exposed federal inmates to toxic heavy metals, exported hazardous wastes to developing countries, and attempted to conceal evidence of unsafe working conditions from OSHA inspectors.