Stuffing prisons with migrants and blacks makes for great business
NEW YORK – The dramatic increase in incarceration in the United States is not the result of an increase in the crime rate but of new laws and policies introduced by federal and state politicians under the electorally effective campaigns of “a tough stand against crime” and “law and order” that began in the 1970s.
In this context, the so-called “war on drugs” was the greatest factor in the explosive growth of the prison population. It was also a manifestation of what many critics describe as a “war against minorities.”
Approximately half of the inmates in federal prisons are there for nonviolent crimes related to illicit drugs. As a consequence of the so-called “war on drugs,” the number of people imprisoned in federal and state institutions for the nonviolent transgression of antidrug laws has increased 1,100-fold since 1980.
In 1989, about 40,000 people were sentenced to prison for narcotics-related crimes. At present, the number is almost 500,000.
The racial disparity in the application of those antidrug laws has been widely documented. African-Americans account for between 14 and 15 percent of the users of illicit drugs but represent 37 percent of those arrested for drug-related crimes, 59 percent of those who are sentenced by the courts, and 74 percent of those who are given prison sentences, according to civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis in an article published by The Guardian.
The result, Karakatsanis states, is that “20 or more years after the beginning of the ‘war on drugs,’ the United States imprisons blacks at a rate 6 times higher than South Africa’s in the days of apartheid.”
Michelle Alexander, a professor and renowned author of the book “The New Jim Crow,” about today’s systemic racism in this country, wrote that there are more black men “in prisons or jails or on parole than black slaves in 1850.”
That is why some criticize the so-called “war on drugs” as a war against the poor and the minorities in the United States and the rest of the world.
On the average, to house an inmate costs between $20,000 and $30,000 per year, and the growth of the prison population has added to the serious fiscal deficits that state governments incur in the construction and operation of prisons. According to some estimates, California spends 2.5 times more on its prisoners than on its students, and five states allocate more money to their penal systems than to university education, says a Pew Center survey.
The federal and state governments spend approximately $74 billion every year in their penal systems. The sector employs almost 800,000 people.
To some, this represents a great market. With the expansion of the prison “industry,” the sector is now being privatized, which generates increasingly larger profits. Private-prison operators insist on contracts that specify that occupancy must remain higher than 90 percent (otherwise, the state pays for the shortage of inmates), because the profits in these “hell hotels” are generated by the occupants.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has studied the phenomenon and filed lawsuits for abuses in private prisons, the number of inmates in those prisons increased 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009. At present, for-profit companies operate 6 percent of all the state prisons and 16 percent of the federal prisons.
Almost 130,000 inmates are now housed in state or federal prisons operated by private enterprises.
Between 2010 and 2011, the two largest firms engaged in the prison business earned almost $3 billion per year. The largest, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), operates 66 prisons in 20 states, followed by GEO Group with 65, according to ProPublica, an investigative journalism center.
CCA reported to its stockholders that its business depends on several factors, “including the rates of crime and patterns of sentencing in the United States,” In other words, the growth in profits requires more and more prisoners; therefore, these companies spend millions in political lobbying to keep the imprisonment rates high and pass laws that establish long sentences.
At present, the sector with the greatest growth in this industry is that of immigrants arrested by the federal government, and private enterprises are in charge of almost 50 percent of those prisoners. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service sentences to prison about 400,000 undocumented individuals every year and spends almost $2 billion in their incarceration.
Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, says that, as the growth of prisons has decelerated in recent years, the private-prisons industry “is increasingly turning to the detention of immigrants as a source of profit.”
“In Arizona, for example, the notorious anti-immigrant legislation passed in 2010 was drafted to a great degree by private-prisons operators working hand in hand with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization devoted to promoting conservative and pro-business state laws,” Mauer says.
In fact, ALEC has promoted laws in several states to exploit prison labor for government jobs, as in the past, and private enterprises. Almost one million inmates work in the manufacture of furniture, telephone services, farming and even in the manufacture of footwear. Their wages are way below the minimum. Sometimes, they are paid between 93 cents and $5 per day, researchers report.
In other words, they earn less than workers in China or in Mexican maquiladoras.
(From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.)
