The American Prison-Industrial Complex & How To End It

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Private prisons further exploit the American criminal justice system, which is already characterized by racial discrimination and corruption. Private prisons exist because just how overpopulated public prisons have become, and they are known for disproportionate imprisonment of people of color, increased violence, as well as immoral deals with politicians to keep mass incarceration profitable. In order to halt the economic and familial impact this has on the African American community, as well as reverse the terrible race relations these institutions establish, private prisons must be one of the first things to be done away with, so the entire discriminatory system can begin to unravel. This is possible by the collective action of American voters to oust national representatives that receive political donations from private prison corporations and urging statewide legislators to effectively pass laws that will prohibit all business with private prisons.

INTRODUCTION:

It is all too well-known that the United States of America has the largest incarcerated population in the entire world, with over two million people (NAACP, 2020). And it is well-documented that African Americans make up an alarmingly disproportionate amount of the "correctional population," 34% to be exact (NAACP, 2020). Despite having a significantly smaller population compared to white Americans, black Americans "are incarcerated at more than [five] times the rate of whites" (NAACP, 2020). This deliberate racial inequality in the criminal justice system is a long-running trend in American history, but this relatively recent prison population boom initiated in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon's painfully obviously "war on drugs [people of color]." From then to now, this time in history has been coined the era of mass incarceration and is just one strategy of many, orchestrated by the American government, to exploit as well as undermine minority rights. Clearly, mass incarceration is a monumentally important issue that needs to be addressed nationally and promptly redressed. However, in order to properly combat such an overarching issue, smaller institutions and practices inextricably linked to mass incarceration should be tackled first.

One of these institutions exists because of the immense strain prison overpopulation has put on the justice system and has only contributed to the perpetuation of exaggerated criminal sentences, as well as inhumane treatment of inmates: the prison-industrial complex. At the same time Nixon's successor to the racially charged crackdown on illegal drugs, President Ronald Reagan, was locking people up and throwing away the key, private prisons rose to prominence. "A rapid expansion in the nation's prison population" finally reached an unsustainable level in 1983, so the first for-profit prison company was established, and since that point, they have managed to infiltrate "many states and [even] at the federal level" (Gotsch & Basti, 2018). In addition to operating all across the country for decades now, these facilities have also seen massive growth, both in their inmate populations and in their profit margins. The influx of new prisoners entering private prisons is staggering; the population growth inside of for-profit prisons has "increased five times faster than the total prison population" (Gotsch & Basti, 2018). Present-day, roughly eight percent of those previously mentioned two million incarcerated individuals nationally, which is over 121,000 people, are locked up in American private prisons (The Sentencing Project, 2019). And as for the profit-seeking aspect of the insidious private prison industry, the two largest corporations have "combined revenues of $3.5 billion" in 2015 alone (Gotsch & Basti, 2018).

Those behind these massively influential companies might be thriving, but the fact of the matter is that the inmates housed inside of these prisons-for-hire are suffering. The appeal of private prisons, since the very beginning of their infancy, has been to cut costs as to alleviate the immensely expensive budget dedicated to incarcerating millions of Americans. But, all the corner-cutting for-profit prisons commit in order to preserve their dividends comes at the expense of everyone inside of these prisons (guards included). These corporations are notorious for "hiring fewer employees and paying and training them less," ultimately leading to reduced overall security within their private prisons (Joy, 2018). In fact, the supposed goal of for-profit prisons to reduce government spending is rarely achieved, "and in some cases cost as much as $1,600 more per year" (Joy, 2018).

Now, besides the inadequate care towards prisoners as well as guards, and the lackluster attempts at effectively cutting costs, there is a more fundamental, moral problem with the existence of private, for-profit prisons. The criminal justice system's objective should be to rehabilitate those that are convicted of a legitimate crime. However, this system has been tarnished by the introduction of financial incentives to continuously incarcerate new Americans to keep private prisons in business and corrupt politicians in power. It is on record that the two largest private prison corporations in America "invest heavily in lobbying…and make hefty contributions to political campaigns," ultimately exerting their immoral agenda on the legislative process (Margulies, 2016). Frankly, there is a conflict-of-interest to let business entities have any influence in the United States' criminal justice system. For these reasons, the prison-industrial complex must be dismantled so the United States can begin to cleanse the corruption and discrimination that has infected the criminal justice system, as well as combat the broader issue of mass incarceration.

APPROACH & RESULTS:

The entirety of the information within this policy brief, quantitative or qualitative, was acquired by individual analysis of research by credible sources and databases that have expertise in the criminal justice system. All together, these sources reveal the racial discrimination characteristic to the United States’ criminal justice system, the overpopulation of correctional facilities as a result, the creation of an ineffective, unsafe private prison industry in order to continue this mass incarceration, and the actors responsible for perpetrating this unjust, destructive system.

When it comes to the inadequate training of guards, “private prison employees…receive 58 hours less training than their publicly employed counterparts,” in addition to earning “$5,327 less in annual salary for new recruits and $14,901 less in maximum annual salaries” (Mason, 2012). As a result of this inexperience, “private prisons [have] a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults, as well as twice as many illicit weapons than comparable federal facilities” (Joy, 2018). The total private population has also increased 47% since 2000 (Gotsch & Basti, 2018), and the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, as well as Texas all have people of color as more than 50% of their private prison populations (Petrella, 2014). In addition, “Attorney General Jeff Sessions withdrew an Obama-era directive to phase out private prison contracting” (Gotsch & Basti, 2018). During this same time, “the largest private prison company in the US…has spent $17.4 million on lobbying expenditures in the last 10 years and $1.9 million on political contributions between 2003 and 2012” to keep private prison populations growing (Joy, 2018).

CONCLUSIONS:

Conclusively, there are American politicians in highly influential positions that are receiving funds and favors from the executives of private prison corporations in order to continue the influx of new inmates. This corruption has led to the pushing of exaggerated criminal sentencing laws that disproportionately affects African Americans, as well as the stoppage of any national initiatives to end the prison-industrial complex. And inside these prisons, the guards, as well as inmates, are experiencing increased violence that threatens their well-being.

IMPLICATIONS & RECOMMENDATIONS:

If this cycle of political corruption and racial discrimination remains, the African American community, as a whole, will continue to experience crippling fallout. The more and more African American adults as well as kids that are trapped in the criminal justice system, the less and less economic uplift there will be. The more African American fathers and mothers that are imprisoned, the more single-parent households there will be, which drastically affects children for life, both emotionally and mentally. The more injustices that are committed against African Americans, the more strained race relations will become, which will, in turn, lead to more interracial violence and discrimination.

But, as previously stated, this entire system of injustice cannot be dismantled without attacking specific, smaller institutions part of it, and this is where the following recommendations come into play in regard to ending private prisons. First, we, the people, must vote out corrupted politicians that take private prison’s contributions, so they can no longer taint the system. This is possible by researching whether or not your local representative and state senators have accepted political donations from private prison corporations (namely GEO Group, CoreCivic Inc, and Management & Training Corp) at OpenSecerts.org. Secondly, there is a recent movement of states that have begun or already have banned contracts with private prisons. So, as a result, we ought to apply even more pressure to our state’s lawmakers by contacting them at OpenStates.org with the message, “My name is [_____] and I urge you to pass a bill that will end our state’s contracts with private prisons.” In combination, these two calls to action will make the difference necessary to overthrow private prisons across the nation, and subsequently bring larger awareness as well as galvanization against the larger issues of mass incarceration.

Bibliography

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (2020). Criminal justice fact sheet. Retrieved from https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/

Gotsch, K., & Basti, V. (2018, August 2). Capitalizing on mass incarceration: U.S. growth in private prisons. The Sentencing Project. Retrieved from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/

The Sentencing Project. (2019, October 24,). Private prisons in the United States. Retrieved

from https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/

Joy, T. (2018, February 2). The problem with private prisons. Justice Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://www.justicepolicy.org/news/12006

Margulies, J. (2016, August 24). This is the real reason private prisons should be outlawed. Time. Retrieved from https://time.com/4461791/private-prisons-department-of-justice/

Mason, C. (2012, January). Too good to be true: Private prisons in America. The Sentencing

Project. Retrieved from https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Too-Good-to-be-True-Private-Prisons-in-America.pdf

Petrella, C. (2014). The color of corporate corrections, part II: Contractual exemptions and the overrepresentation of people of color in private prisons. Radical Criminology. Retrieved from http://journal.radicalcriminology.org/index.php/rc/article/view/44/html