S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world's people.
From
less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2
million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago
there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population
of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is
expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000,
according to reports.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
"The
private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock
people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off
prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their
workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive
Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of
Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration
camps."
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions,
conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has
direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction
companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies,
food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large
variety of colors."
According to the Left Business Observer, the
federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets,
ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents,
bags, and canteens.
Along with war supplies, prison workers
supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of
paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36%
of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of
office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According
to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that
increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison
industry complex:
* Jailing persons convicted of non-violent
crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic
quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years'
imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of
crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than
2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine
powder requires possession of 500 grams -- 100 times more than the
quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use
cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly
Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced
for up to two years' imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana.
Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides
for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4
ounces of any illegal drug.
* The passage in 13 states of the
"three strikes" laws (life in prison after being convicted of three
felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the
most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a
prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year
sentences.
* Longer sentences.
* The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.
*
A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate
the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.
* More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.
HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Prison
labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system
of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the
slavery tradition.
Freed slaves were charged with not carrying
out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in
exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were
almost never proven – and were then "hired out" for cotton picking,
working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the
state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93%
of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm
similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out
convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.
During
the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were
imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing,
marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of
markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.
Who
is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of
prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside
state prisons.
The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument,
Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies,
3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstroms, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre
Cardin, Target Stores, and many more.
All of these businesses
are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just
between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31
billion.
Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado,
they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in
privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a
maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month.
The
highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners
receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled
positions.†At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the
pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25
an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can
send home $200-$300 per month.
Thanks to prison labor, the United
States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that
was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a
maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its
operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California.
In
Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of
prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit
boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.
[Former] Oregon State Representative
Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and
bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that “there
won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive
prison labor (here).â€
PRIVATE PRISONS
The prison
privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald
Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William
Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes.
Clinton's
program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice
Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the
incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.
Private
prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About
18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are
Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together
control 75%.
Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of
money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each
one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in
Virginia, "the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number
of guards for the maximum number of prisoners."
The CCA has an
ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on
dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons,
inmates may get their sentences reduced for “good behavior,†but for
any infraction, they get 30 days added – which means more profits for
CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA
inmates lost “good behavior time†at a rate eight times higher than
those in state prisons.
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits
are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with
long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled
that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the
CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run
new jails and share the profits.
According to a December 1998
Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors
from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and
the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state’s
governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York
and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting
into private prison profits.
After a law signed by Clinton in
1996 – ending court supervision and decisions – caused overcrowding
and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison
corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were
overcrowded, offering “rent-a-cell†services in the CCA prisons
located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell
salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for
each prisoner.
STATISTICS
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000
federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is
believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or
county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of.
Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses.
Sixteen percent of the country's 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
(January 31, 2013) Human rights organizations, as well as political and
social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of
inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison
population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are
working for various industries for a pittance. 
No comments:
Post a Comment