Notes on the so-called “prison industrial complex”
“Prison industrial complex” is a catchy phrase but it simply isn’t a reality. It is a complete mischaracterization of how prisons function and what their role is in the united states in particular. Perpetuating the myth that prisons are about profit harms prisoners because if we don’t understand what the prison system actually is, we can’t form any kind of strategy for how to bring about change.
Here are some illustrations that might convince you to change your approach to thinking about prisons…
Here’s James Kilgore on the notion that prisons are a major source of “slave labor”:
I spent six and a half years in Federal and state prisons at high, medium and low security levels. In all these institutions, very few people, if any, were under contract to private corporations. My memories of prison yards feature hundreds and hundreds of men trying to pump some meaning into their life with exercise routines, academic study, compulsive sports betting, religious devotion, and a number of creative and entrepreneurial “hustles.” But being under the thumb of Bill Gates or entering a Nike sweatshop was just about the farthest thing from our warehoused reality.
Statistics bear my memories out. Virtually all private sector prison labor is regulated under the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). Any prison wanting to publicly markets goods worth more than $10,000 must register with PIECP. The PIECP statistical report for the first quarter of 2012 showed 4,675 incarcerated people employed in prison or jail PIECP programs, a miniscule portion of the nation’s more than two million behind bars.
Likely the largest single user of contract prison labor is Federal Prison Industries, which handles such arrangements for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Of the nearly 220,000 people housed in BOP facilities, just 13,369, representing approximately 8% of the work eligible “inmates” were employed as of September 30, 2012. However, the overwhelming majority of this production was for government departments like Defense and Homeland Security, rather than private corporations.
There is an economic rationality to why prison labor is so infrequently used. While incarcerated people may constitute a captive workforce, in the era of mass incarceration security trumps all other institutional needs, including production deadlines. A fight on the yard, a surprise cell search, even a missing tool can occasion a lockdown where all activities, including work assignments come to a halt for hour, days, or, in some cases even weeks or months. Multinational corporations accustomed to just in time production systems and flexible working hours don’t respond well to this type of rigidity.
Portraying our prisons as slave labor camps satisfies a certain emotional appeal, but hunting down multinationals that are extracting superprofits from the incarcerated diverts us from the crucial labor issues at the heart of mass incarceration. Those behind bars constitute a displaced and discarded labor force, marginalized from mainstream employment on the streets by deindustrialization in their communities and the gutting of urban education in poor communities of color. More than half of all Black men without a high-school diploma will go to prison at some time in their lives. The school to prison pipeline is far more of a reality than slave labor camps.
Here’s Loic Wacquant summarizing some of his research on prisons and labor:
[I]n the United States, militants for criminal justice are strongly mobilized against privatization of prisons and what the thesis of the “prison-industrial complex” portrays as the exploitation of the captive labor force of prisoners. In reality, carceral employment by private firms employs barely 0.3% of inmates: it is an absolutely miniscule phenomenon. To battle to abolish “slave labor” in prisons is to fight a chimera. Even if for-profit prisons were closed down overnight in the United States, the confined population would remain unchanged: the authorities would simply stow it with 6% fewer cells. By focusing obsessively on privatization, you miss the core of the problem: it is not the search for capitalist profit that drives the stupendous expansion of the population behind bars in the US but the construction of a liberal-paternalist state, that is, a political project which requires that we bring economic deregulation, the restriction of social assistance and the expansion of the penal sector into a single framework for analysis and action. [emphasis added]
Wacquant again on the size of the “prison industry”:
While it is true that the corrections budget of the United States has increased to outlandish proportions by historical and international standards, it still makes up a tiny and negligible chunk of the domestic economy. The $70 billion the United States spent in 2008 to operate its jails and prisons (adding up the budgets of counties, states, and the federal government) amounts to less than one-half of one per cent of its Gross Domestic Product…
To realize the exaggeration entailed in asserting that prisons have become central to American capitalism (to say nothing of world capitalism), consider that the country’s annual expenditures on penal confinement come to about twice the sums Americans disburse for “chocolate, gum, cereal bars and sugar confectionery” (which together generated revenues of $32.9 billion in 2008). They equal the size of the personal products industry which includes “over the counter healthcare, skincare, haricare, makeup, fragrances and others” (with sales of $73.7 billion); and they come to just over one-half of the monies Americans devote annually to soft drinks (with $128 billion). How credible is the notion that the “Soda Industrial Complex” has become a locomotive for the American economy? Prisons have grown as a government function and a political institution, as a vehicle for regulating marginality and staging the authority of the Leviathan, but they remain negligible in terms of economic weight and thus nonexistent as a vehicle for profit on a national scale—and a fortiori on the global stage…
In direct contradiction to PIC, what distinguishes punishment in America—as in other advanced societies—is the degree to which it has remained stubbornly and distinctively public. After two decades of gusting ideological winds at their back, favorable economic and budgetary circumstances, frantic lobbying, and the pressing need to expand custodial capacity given grotesque overcrowding in existing facilities, private prison firms managed to capture only 6% of the “carceral market” at their peak in 2000 (one-fourth of their projected goal of 1995). The bursting of the stock market bubble in 2001 nearly destroyed the sector—its leaders owed their survival to magnanimous new contracts to house immigrant convicts under the supervision of the INS—and their share is unlikely to grow much further…
Incarceration is far and away the one canonical government function that remains firmly in the grip of public officials because penal confinement does not just serve to curb disorder, discipline the unruly, and warehouse the supernumerary. It also anchors a core civic theater for dramatizing collective norms, asserting political authority, and staging the sovereignty of the state… PIC obscures the political logic of penal expansion because it inverts the cause and consequence: the ring of “prison profiteers” has enlarged because the penal state has expanded to gargantuan proportions, and not the other way around. [emphasis original]
I also touched on why i think the PIC narrative is harmful before on this blog:
Profit is not the reason why prisons exist and it’s not the reason people get locked up. Because of that, fighting against private prisons, for example, is not actually a radical demand, as an end to private prisons would leave the system virtually unchanged. Ditto for fighting against the exploitation of prison labor by corporations; an end to that would make very little if any difference for the conditions of prisoners. Prisoners and people who work with prisoners regularly seem to generally understand this as the “prison industrial complex” narrative is, at least in my experience, hugely less common in political organizing of prisoners than it is in political discourse among those who are less familiar with what the prison system is actually like. But the idea that prisons are about profit is nonetheless a persistent theme in leftist circles. And i think it’s an enormous distraction because when they’re talking about prisons in such a superficial and uninformed way they’re not talking about the control units (which disproportionately house Black people and Latin@s and politically active prisoners generally), sexual abuse in prisons (often carried out or condoned by prison guards, which prisoners are punished for agitating against), “tough on crime” laws which white people of virtually all walks of life clamor for, etc.
If we must talk about economic factors, it makes more sense to talk about how prisons systematically deprive nationally oppressed territories in the u.s. of a huge chunk of labor-power and effectively cut off people from gaining skills, helping maintain the relative exclusivity of high-quality jobs for white folks. Even here though we’ve gotta look beyond just economics to get the full picture. Because really it’s the social control of oppressed populations, and on the other side the social stability that comes with having a large, privileged stratum of society ready to carry on business as usual and even to defend the system if necessary—a stratum which the prison system helps construct—that is the real, long-term benefit.
Basically, the notion of a “prison industrial complex” is an easy thing to get enraged about but it’s not actually helpful in a fight against prisons, because it doesn’t remotely capture what prisons are actually about. If you want a more accurate picture, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is a much better starting point. Though it doesn’t have particularly radical recommendations for a solution, it does capture that prisons in the u.s. are much more about race and population control than they are about profit.
In my view the attraction to the notion of PIC among the left is similar to the persistent notion of gender oppression as sourced in property relations that many Marxists inherit from Engels—it allows leftists to collapse prison struggles (or gender struggles) entirely into the contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. In the PIC conception, much like in dogmatic Marxist “feminism,” the only real enemy is the bourgeoisie. To acknowledge that prisons are about something other than profit would force leftists to recognize race and nation as relatively autonomous structures that necessarily divide the working class (much like gender is a relatively autonomous structure which does the same). If this were to be recognized, it would force a significant change in leftist practice. Rather than subsuming race, nation, gender, etc. as mere “reflections” or manifestations of class struggle, leftists would have to realize that addressing and struggling against these different structures in their specificity will be required for class struggle to actually coalesce into a revolutionary process. The notion of the “prison industrial complex,” then, is part of an ideology which allows us to rationalize the realities of the rapidly expanding prison system without disrupting our existing theory and practice. In this way, the PIC notion holds us back severely.
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