America needs to rethink the purpose of prisons and how they operate, some criminal justice reformers recommend.
The country needs to change its ideas of what offenses deserve incarceration and for how long. It also needs to make prisons contribute to the general economy, reform security issues and increase educational and vocational programs to give inmates job skills, according to an article on counterpunch.org.
The writer, Jacob Ertel, says more and more critics are rethinking the “prison-industrial complex,” or PIC. Ertel uses the term to denote “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.”
The article refers to Critical Resistance, a national self-described abolitionist organization comprised of a range of scholars and activists including Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Dylan Rodriguez.
Critical Resistance says the PIC “helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through racial, economic and other privileges by way of mass media, electioneering and the exercising of private corporate influence within the prison system itself.”
The article stated that “the notion of the PIC has been central in galvanizing public interest in the country’s astounding incarceration boom — and the 2.2 million people enveloped by it, over 60 percent of whom are people of color — since the 1980s.”
French sociologist Loic Wacquant “is among the most brazen of the term’s critics,” particularly prison labor on the economy, the story says.
Wacquant explains that only a miniscule percentage of incarcerated people actually work for private firms. In 2009, for example, only 0.3 percent of inmates nationwide were employed by such companies.
Even if this trend were to develop exponentially in the coming years, it would still fail to account for the fundamental features of the prison system, as no single sector relies principally or even significantly on prison labor, says Wacquant.
Prisons do not constitute a significant boom to the United States economy, Wacquant states. He adds that inmates are generally employed at a loss to the government.
The story says it is a negative factor that the private prison industry is growing: Corrections Corporation of America’s profits alone have increased by 500 percent in the past 20 years, and the three largest private prison corporations have spent over $45 million combined in lobbying efforts.
Private prison companies are responsible for 62 percent of the beds used by the Department of Homeland Security Immigrations and Customs Enforcement branch, the story says.
Private firms such as the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group operate nine out of 10 of the country’s largest immigration detention centers, the story reports.
