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Who's Getting Rich Off the Prison Industrial Complex?
Angela Davis's
book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, describes a
phenomenon that should make even staunchest capitalist shake in his or her
proverbial boots. In chapter 5, Davis
describes the prison industrial complex (PIC) and how it came to being in the
United States, and to some degree, other countries around the globe. In terms of how the PIC came to being, Davis
describes how the state, with its ever-shrinking budget, resorted to
privatizing prisons, thereby making them for-profit organizations that have a
responsibility to meet shareholder expectations around profitability. As a result, privately-owned prisons are
incented to keep people incarcerated, as the state pays them based on prisoner
headcount. In chapter 6, Davis also
described what must happen in order to change this bleak scenario. For starters, she describes decriminalizing
activities that primarily target the poor and people of color, like drug
possession laws. Ultimately, Davis presents
a compelling argument as to why prisons are truly obsolete from the perspective
of preventing crime and rehabilitating perpetrators of crime. I think her ultimate point of this book to
highlight the notion that prisons exist for one reason only – to make their
owners and stockholders rich.
In concert
with this theme, I have selected three different images/articles (see above
links) that are complimentary to Davis’s arguments. The first image is a barcode, the same ones
found on just about everything you buy at a store, with a prisoner’s arms
pushed out between the bars, to make the barcode look like a jail cell. This image is an interesting metaphor for the
PIC as it implies a commodification of prisoners, implying that there’s a
profit to be made. It also demonstrates
how prisoners are dehumanized in American society, a notion supported even by
our own vernacular – they are ‘prisoners’, not ‘people’, and more specifically,
they are a product to be sold for profit, not a human life that should be
rehabilitated and restored as a functioning member of society.
The next link
demonstrates the notion that people of color, and in particular black men, have
a greater tendency to be incarcerated, and thereby commoditized, than to be
supported by fair treatment laws such as Affirmative Action and education. Personally, I find it interesting and
horrific that the state will provide effectively unlimited support for
institutions of incarceration, yet programs such as Affirmative Action receive
little, if any, state support. Additionally,
capitalists from the same corporations that profit from the incarceration of
millions in the U.S. quickly cry ‘Socialism’ when public programs are created
to help poor communities and people of color.
Why is that? Why is one scenario acceptable
and the other considered a mortal sin?
More importantly, why do Americans, by-in-large, accept this dichotomy
in general and the institutional racism it supports implicitly, yet at the same
time preach freedom for all? The answer
must come from the same roots as the justification for the notion that “all men
are created equal”, yet blacks continued to be enslaved when that famous phrase
was coined.
Finally, the
third link is an article from the HBO series Vice. This article calls
out, by name, the profiteers from the PIC.
I’ll let the article speak for itself and not describe it in too much
detail, other than the fact that my stomach literally turned while I was
reading it. The truly scary part is,
these profiteers, instead of simply admitting that they are okay with earning money
off the backs of prisoners, have convinced themselves that they are justified
for effectively promoting yet another means for commoditizing the poor in
general, and black men specifically. Conscious
folks might refer to this as modern-day slavery, primarily because, it is…..
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