According to a recent study by the Justice Department, the number of inmates in state and federal prisons continue to increase even as violent and property crimes continue to decrease. In an alarming trend, huge dividends have been allocated to the private sector at the expense of social justice to a great number of American citizens. In particular, with many of our fellow citizens who happen to have dark skin and are living under relatively poor economic conditions without the possibility of quality legal representation.
In a Nov. 8, 2004 [I]New York Times[I] article by Fox Butterfield on prison statistics, the column reports that an estimated 44 percent of state and federal inmates were black, and that almost 10 percent of all American black men ages 25 to 29 were in prison. The social implications to these numbers alone are unsettling, but when these statistics are shown alongside profits being made by the private sector the result is outright disturbing.
Since 1990, the economic incarceration business has boomed with the practices of privatization, with many corporations trying to receive their cut of the proverbial economic pie.
From the web site thetalkingdrum.com, in an online article called “The Prison Industrial Complex,” an example is given on just how influential these corporations are as it relates to the business of incarceration. It goes on to state, “A pay phone at a prison can generate as much as $15,000 a year about five times the revenue of a typical pay phone on the street. It is estimated that inmate calls generate a billion dollars or more in revenues each year. The business has become so lucrative that MCI installed its inmate phone service, Maximum Security, throughout the California prison system at no charge. As part of the deal it also offered the California Department of Corrections a 32 percent share of all revenues from inmates’ phone calls. MCI Maximum Security adds a $3.00 surcharge to every call, when free enterprise intersects with a captive market, abuses are bound to occur.” The article goes on further to say, “The prison complex now includes some of the nation’s largest architecture and construction firms, Wall Street investment banks that handle prison bond issues and invest in private prisons, plumbing supply companies, food service companies, health care companies, companies that sell everything from bullet resistant security cameras to padded cells available in a ‘vast color selection.’ A directory called the Corrections Yellow Pages lists more than a thousand vendors. Among the items now being advertised for sale: a ‘violent prisoner chair,’ a sadomasochist’s fantasy of belts and shackles attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles B.O.S.S., a ‘body orifice security scanner,’ essentially a metal detector that an inmate must sit on…”
The business partisan to correction facilities is so overwhelming that it is easy to see its direct correlation to the increase in the prison population. In 1990, the U.S. had just over 1 million people locked up in state and federal prisons. As of February 8, 2005 the current prison population had exceeded 2.1 million people (which is almost one-quarter of the earth’s entire prison population). In addition, the U.S. also has more people on death rows than any other nation in the world.
Even with the drop in crime at the national level, the increase in the inmate population in prisons are due in part to new tougher sentencing laws implemented during the 1990s, such as mandatory minimum sentencing laws, and numerous three-strikes laws which increase penalties for repeat offenders. And the central reason for the tougher crime laws is directly related to profits awarded to the private sector, because like any other business the primary purpose of law is economics, not justice!
