Readers of “The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits” might arrive at the impression that the book presented carceral institutions as shadowy planets in a parallel universe about which everyone has heard something, but no one knew any concrete details. For anyone curious about the mass-incarceration universe, Bianca Tylek exposed a dozen aspects dealing with dollars circulating deep in the shadows of jails, prisons, and other vaguely defined detention facilities.
Readers might find themselves disturbed to learn that parasites have attached themselves to the mass-incarceration universe and that such parasites have operated invisibly-but-in-plain-sight within that universe. Most bizarrely, the parasites’ prey have kept on thanking the parasites for their presence.
“The prison industry is comprised of a vast matrix of public-private partnerships that undergird the nation’s commitment to human caging and control. It is a seemingly amorphous system of more than 4,000 corporations and their government conspirators that profit from the incarceration of grandparents, parents, children, siblings, and cousins. It relies on starvcommunities of economic, social, and political capital to exploit their devastation,” Tylek wrote.
Tylek’s arguments sounded thoroughly convincing. Every chapter in the book offered a brief description of the profiteering sector, displaying easy-to-understand statistics. The book covered 12 sectors of incarceration: architecture and construction, operations and management, personnel, labor and programs, equipment, data and information, telecom, financial services, food and commissary, healthcare, transportation, and community corrections.
The book has one unnamed but common thread across the dimensions it examined: extraordinarily intelligent business thinkers have figured out surreptitious ways to profit parasitically from mass incarceration. The thinkers all recognized one exploitable advantage: the Thirteenth Amendment, which allowed the continuation of slavery as punishment for crime. Tylek’s book subtly made the point that big business has employed this principle as the basis for its profiteering.
The book provided many useful history lessons. Anyone not familiar with the Ashurst-Sumners Act (1935) that prohibited the sale of products made using prison labor in interstate commerce would see the way big business maneuvered its way around the act by using chain gangs to build public infrastructure. Established at the beginning of the New Deal, Ashurst-Sumners exempted agriculture and services. The Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, created by Congress in 1979 at the tail end of the New Deal, continued the exemptions and corporate profiteering on (literally) the backs of incarcerated persons.
A year later, the U.S. entered the neoliberal era that intensified profiteering on every level and legitimized parasitical profits in the carceral sector. One prime example, Global Tel Link, came into existence in 1980 and, after various ownership changes, ended up in the portfolio of American Securities, which rebranded it as ViaPath in 2022.
The neoliberal era typified such juggling of companies as if tokens in a game of Monopoly, and the book’s section on telecom detailed such corporate maneuvers. Anyone interested in the history of the way H.I.G. Capital formed Securus, which later turned into Aventiv (owned by Platinum Equity), should consult page 90.
ICE Air does not stand for Iceland’s national airline or a brand of air-conditioner, but as the private-public partnership that flies deportees unlucky enough to have ended up stuck in a web spun by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It began in 2006 as a partnership between ICE and the private aviation company-slash-military contractor CSI Aviation. ICE spent $420 million on immigrant removals in 2023, which this year would increase exponentially.
The dollar amounts detailed in the book only raised eyebrows. Every penny looked meticulously documented in a 53-page endnote section that substantiated every one of Tylek’s arguments and every statistic with a comprehensive reference.
The book’s conclusion sounded a sad tone: “Unknowingly, many of us are implicated. Our tax dollars are funding the prison industry and the harm it causes. Our personal savings sit with banks that provide billions in financing to it. The financial aid that helps us make tuition payments is, at times, supplied by the prison industry.”
Tylek listed Worth Rises as a co-author of the book. She described Worth Rises as “a nonprofit organization dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation it touches.” As a committed prison abolitionist, Tylek in the past often took radical approaches at odds even with incarcerated persons. In this book, though, Tylek kept her abolitionist rhetoric at a detached distance.
Tylek’s book showed who has extracted from the carceral system’s wealth beyond the wildest dreams of Croesus, not only at the expense of incarcerated persons and their families but also from correctional officers working double shifts and volunteers sacrificing their time to help prisoners. The book would not help anyone go home tomorrow, but it would give innovative residents the necessary background to think their way forward strategically. Perhaps one of its readers could one day successfully outthink the parasites.