The Prison-Industrial Complex

Prison week (because that's what it's become) continues!

Although the establishment of private, for-profit prisons is not part of the Conservative omnibus crime bill, there's been anxiety on left ever since 2007 about the potential for a shift in that direction. For Canadians used to penal issues being a strictly government matter, private prisons may seem novel and counter-intuitive, but the for-profit jail business has a long though inglourious tradition (Fleet Prison, one of London's most Notorious, was operated by subcontractors on a for-profit basis, charging prisons for food and board, with fees for removing irons and turning keys). In post-Reconstruction Mississippi, convicts could be leased out to private interests for their labour, and the state prison at Parchman farm, though government-run, turned a profit as a cotton plantation. It was only the progressive reforms of the late 19th and 20th century that brought those kinds of practices to an end.

Well, until the 80s. A side-effect of the "tough on crime" politicking of the post-Nixon Republicans was a massive surge in the inmate population in the 80s and 90s, creating an over-crowding crisis in state prisons across the US. These were the days of Reaganism, so rather than building up the government penal apparatus, the free market was unleashed to work its magic, creating the modern American prison-industrial complex, in which private businesses take government money in order to build, maintain and operate prisons. Every dime that can be saved by, say, reducing programs for inmates, or reducing their space allowances, or any other privation great or small, translates immediately into improvements in the bottom line. Likewise, the prison operators partner with other firms in order to make the most lucrative use of their unfree labor. Depressed communities, eager for the corrections jobs that come with a private-built prison, compete to house the jails, with local representatives serving as lobbyists in the state house for the private prison industry. The results are predictable - overcrowding, violence, and inmates unfit and unprepared for life after release. Predictably, they tend to reoffend, perpetuating the system, and supplying the private prison companies with a steady stream of profit.