Shedding Light on the United States’ Catastrophic Prison-Industrial Complex
Defining It
The first step in understanding the effects that the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) can have on you and the rest of the country is understanding what it is. While there are many potential definitions, for the purposes of this article, we will consider it to be the public institutions and private companies that perpetuate the current criminal justice system, and exploit its flaws for profit or power.
With the massive growth in the incarcerated population over the last few decades there is a good chance this either has already, or will affect you or someone you know. In the early ‘70s the number of Americans arrested and imprisoned began to rise at an unprecedented rate, which continued until the U.S. had an incarceration rate of about 5 times the global average, and almost a quarter of the entire world’s prison population.
It is widely accepted that the criminal justice system as it stands is in need of radical reform, but if you don’t believe or understand the scope of its negative effects you can read our multi-part series on the effects of mass incarceration on individuals, businesses, and the nation.
Beyond that, high incarceration rates have been proven to be an ineffective and expensive method of reducing crime. From 1975 to 2000, incarceration rates rose by 270%, which corresponded to a decrease in property crimes of about 20%. Violent crime rates remained relatively the same. It has also been proven that each additional increase in incarceration rates produces diminishing returns with regards to crime reduction and in some cases even increases it.
What Causes It?
Criminal justice reform, to some extent has bipartisan support all across the country, so why is there never any real policy addressing it? As mentioned in the definition, there is a complicated network of both private and public institutions that work cooperatively to slow or even halt legislation aimed at reducing the country’s reliance on incarceration. In this article, I will only be able to get into a few of the more substantial ones but there are hundreds of resources online with more in depth analysis.
1. Private Prisons
Among the most influential institutions is the massive industry of private (or for-profit) prisons. Functionally, they serve the same purpose as federal or state run prisons, but are owned and operated by a third party that is contracted by the government. With over 120,000 Americans (1/12 of the incarcerated population) currently housed in them, they are extremely prevalent and have a massive impact on millions of lives. The idea behind these companies is that they can drive down the price of incarceration on tax payers and improve the conditions faced by inmates through competition. In reality, however, there are nearly endless moral and practical issues.
“From 1925 to 1980 the prison population stayed consistent with the general population. The private prison population began to increase at an disproportional rate in 1983 (the year that private prisons began operation in the United States). From 1925 to 1980 the prison population had a gradual increase from 150,000 to 250,000. However, From 1983 to 2016 the Prison population has increased from 250,000 to 1,500,000.” -Kara Gotsch and Vinay Basti, The Sentencing Project
The first and potentially largest ethical concern with privately run prisons is that they attach a profit motive to incarceration. Many of these prisons are paid per cell occupied, which means their shareholders make more when they have more people locked up, for longer. This may be a major cause of the trend described in the quote above — a massive rise in the incarcerated population. The potential to make money off of human beings also leads these massive corporations to oppose legislation that would cut into their revenue, no matter the effect it could have on the country as a whole. This is not just speculation either, as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic), one of the biggest private prison companies, wrote in a 2014 annual report to their shareholders, “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”
Diving deeper than this vague warning to shareholders, in order to protect their bottom line, the three largest private prison companies have all been active members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), where they have pushed for legislation to increase incarceration and reduce the number of inmates leaving their prisons. In 2003, Alan Greenblatt wrote that “ALEC has been a major force behind both privatizing state prison space and keeping prisons filled. It puts forward bills providing for mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes sentencing requirements. About 40 states passed versions of ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing model bill, which requires prisoners convicted of violent crimes to serve most of their sentences without chance of parole”.
Attaching a price tag to the freedom of millions of Americans has shifted the primary goal of prisons away from rehabilitation and reform. Corporations like the CCA, with its nearly $2 billion in annual revenue will always have their own best interests at heart. As Michael Cohen of the Washington Post puts it, “The influence of private prisons creates a system that trades money for human freedom, often at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: children, immigrants and the poor.”
Putting aside these major moral concerns, there are practical issues that arise from private prisons as well. In many cases unsafe and inhumane conditions are ignored in pursuit of lower costs. Private prisons have been proven to be less safe, both for the inmates housed in them as well as the staff they employ, with 2 to 3 times more instances of violence or assaults. An NPR investigation conducted by Seth Freed Wessler into private prisons revealed many of the dangers facing inmates in private facilities. “Wessler wrote a series of stories which told of crowded conditions, understaffing, inmate deaths from untreated illnesses and four prison riots, all related to complaints about medical care.”
“the Office of Inspector General report from the Department of Justice that came out recently found that when prisoners died inside of these facilities, and those deaths were connected to medical negligence — that the Bureau of Prisons didn’t have an effective way to force the companies to correct those problems. And so prisoners would die. And the problems would go on.” -Wessler, NPR
In addition to the poor conditions faced by inmates, the entire country suffers from the reduced effectiveness of private prisons. One major method of determining the success of a prison institution is by how likely an individual is to commit a crime after being released. Studies have found that for-profit prisons have higher rates of recidivism than their federal or state counterparts. Factors in private facilities that contribute to this include, having higher rates of violence, housing prisoners farther from their homes and families, charging high calling rates and banning cell phones, and banning in-person visitation so that inmates lose contact with loved ones. This results in an increase in the likelihood of an individual being reconvicted of up to 22%, which also happens to improve profits for the corporations responsible.
In summary, private prisons are a corrupt, soulless, weaponized branch of the Prison-Industrial Complex that drive incarceration rates, impede beneficial reform, and needlessly endanger American lives. The country would benefit massively from dismantling and replacing them, but this information has been available for decades, with no changes in sight. So why is nothing being done about it?
2. Government Lobbying
Ever since the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United v. FEC, in which it was decided that money can be considered an extension of free speech, massive corporations have used campaign donations as a method of establishing mutually beneficial relationships with politicians. This has caused countless problems and corruption in every major industry in the country, but it has also been used to perpetuate the Prison-Industrial Complex.
The two largest for-profit prisons (GEO and Corrections Capital of America) have spent a total of almost $25 million lobbying politicians to maintain or expand the current system. These bribes correspond to a doubling of the private prison population from 2000 to 2010, and a current annual revenue of $3.3 billion.
In one of the most blatant examples of circumventing democracy, Marco Rubio, while a speaker at the Florida House of Representatives, hired an economic consultant who had previously been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust. Shortly after, GEO was given a $110 million prison contract and Rubio, as of 2015, (before his presidential bid) had accumulated about $40,000 in campaign donations from GEO.
This exact scenario has played out with dozens of candidates at all different levels of government, basically ensuring that no major reform will ever be passed. Lobbying has enabled companies to expand their power, avoid regulations, and even dismantle legislation, and the corporations that profit off of incarceration have taken full advantage.
3. Courts, Judges, and Sentencing
Lobbying through legal channels is not the only method that private prisons have of filling their beds and boosting their profits. In 2009, two Pennsylvania judges were removed from their positions after receiving a total of $2.6 million in kickbacks in exchange for sending minors to two privately-run juvenile detention centers with unnecessarily long sentences. For-profit companies were able to bribe state judges to funnel thousands of children into their own facilities after trials that lasted a matter of minutes and neglected to provide legal representation for the children involved.
Among the thousands of children sentenced, there were some accusations as minor as creating a fake MySpace page of an assistant principal, writing a prank note, owning drug paraphernalia, and stealing loose change. Many of these cases did not have attorneys to represent the minors, which is in clear violation of the Supreme Court’s 1967 ruling.
This is an event so blatantly corrupt, it’s almost unbelievable. A private company was able to pay off government officials to illegally sentence thousands of children to detention centers in order to boost their own revenue.
While it is the most obvious, this is far from the only example of for-profit prisons impacting sentencing in the criminal justice system. A UCLA study found that, when a new private prison opens nearby, judges will sentence individuals to prison roughly 3 months longer than they were before the prison opened. No such change has been observed with public prisons. “In short, private prisons appear to have an effect on sentencing precisely as long as they have vacant capacity. There are no pre-trends in sentencing before a private (or public) prison is opened. Interestingly, however, private prison closings are preceded by a strong negative pre-trend (sentences getting shorter)”. For reasons that have not been fully confirmed, judges are inclined to fill vacancies in private prisons by increasing sentencing shortly after they open, while also decreasing sentencing when a private institution is closing nearby. This creates a discrepancy among those incarcerated, where people that just happen to be convicted at certain times face harsher penalties than they otherwise would have.
And if for some reason you need more examples of judges illegally imprisoning thousands of children, look no further than Judge Donna Scott Davenport in Tennessee. Davenport is the self-proclaimed “mother of the country" and has taken it upon herself to correct some perceived decline in the nation’s youth. In her first year as a juvenile court referee, her county, Rutherford, Tennessee violated federal law 191 times by imprisoning children for longer than the allowed 24 hours. These violations usually took the form of her deciding that the children should be jailed for 2 to 10 days for cursing at her. When asked about her actions, she said “Was I in violation? Heck yes. But was I going to allow a child to cuss anyone out? Heck no.” In the 2016 fiscal year alone, Rutherford County imprisoned 986 children for a total of 7,932 days.
The incident that attracted national attention was when 4 girls as young as 8 years old were handcuffed in their own school and escorted to the local police station, crying and throwing up from fear. While this was happening, the investigating officer sat in an office miles away puzzling over what crime to charge the children for. The reason for their arrest? They could be seen in a video taken a few days before, not breaking up a fight that was happening between some of the boys in their school. The girls were released after public outcry, but their parents noticed signs of serious trauma, with one girl refusing to return to school for fear of being arrested again, and needing counseling for the next few months. Even more horrifyingly, this was not an isolated case, but a pattern with this county. “Lawyers created a spreadsheet showing that more than 50 kids, identified by their initials, had been jailed for offenses that wouldn’t be crimes if they were adults. While most were 14 or older, exceptions abounded. C.V., D.L. and J.S., all age 13, were locked up for being ‘unruly’; J.B., age 12, for ‘truancy’; and A.W., age 11, for ‘runaway.’” It should be noted at this point that studies have repeatedly shown that arresting young kids is counterproductive to reform. “Arresting and detaining kids hurts not only the children, but society. Kids who have been arrested and jailed are more likely to commit crimes in the future. They’re more likely to struggle in school, and to struggle with drugs and alcohol.” As one of the children that was illegally imprisoned puts it, “They’re not coming out better than they went in.” This is only scratching the surface of the injustices committed by this one county, and I highly recommend you read the entire ProPublica article, provided again here.
So after all of these illegal actions, what punishments were faced by the adults of Rutherford County? The officer that called for the illegal arrests of the four girls received a 3-day suspension (her 10th suspension in 15 years) before returning to work. This is half as long as the cumulative time that the girls spent in detention. The police sergeant, lieutenant, and major that failed to stop the investigation, despite warnings from other concerned officers, were reprimanded, and one officer that refused to show up to arrest the girls was given a 1-day suspension. Judge Davenport still runs the juvenile court in Rutherford, still making her $176,000 salary. The juvenile detention center where children were placed in inhumane conditions is still run by the same people, but now makes itself available to contract out to other counties. Overall, even though many of the children that were wrongfully arrested or imprisoned were able to sue the county, it is clear that there was no real justice being reached here, and this one county highlights many of the flaws with the court systems and sentencing guidelines that fuel the Prison-Industrial complex.
4. Prosecutors
More often than not, cases never even make it to a judge and an official trial, with defendants pleading guilty and settling behind closed doors in almost 95% of cases in which prosecutors decide to press charges. The natural instinct is that this is just the most efficient use of resources. Why bring a case to court if it is not necessary? Surely no innocent person would plead guilty, so this just saves everyone time and money right? Unfortunately, in most of these cases, the defendant is pressured into accepting a plea deal, regardless of their innocence, under threat of severe penalties, often referred to as “trial penalties”.
This is the reality faced by Rodney Roberts, who was later exonerated by DNA evidence but, even though he was innocent, he took a plea deal and spent two years in prison. He has since described the conversation he had with his own attorney.
“‘They’ll only offer you two years, you’ll be home in two years. And if not, they’re gonna take you off to trial and the judge is ready to give you a life sentence if you get found guilty, and I think you’re gonna get found guilty.’ And this is my attorney telling me, it’s the one person I had there to help me… I thought that, to get home to my son, to my family, and salvage my life, that the best thing I could do for myself was to plead guilty.”
Even when defendants reject plea deals and decide to go to trial, prosecutors have the power to strike potential jurors for absurd reasons. A training document for prosecutors in Texas provided a list of “race-neutral” reasons for dismissing potential jurors that had been accepted previously, including having a 1970’s hairdo, being a male with earrings, wearing a Malcolm X hat, and even for being a “very pretty girl, who might be attracted to the defendant”. A few more of the reasons provided can be seen below, and they are as entertaining as they are disheartening.
“‘Bad Boys Club Jacket’, pink hat, and snakeskin belt”
“Long, unkempt hair and a goatee”
“Two jurors were obese, which the prosecutor felt was equivalent to being lenient on punishment”
“Juror left his papers in the court room during lunch break”
“Juror had prior legal training, including criminal pre-law courses, and had taken the LSAT”
There are more insidious ways for prosecutors to evade the law as well. In many cases, prosecutors have neglected to provide evidence relevant to the case, even when it can prove the innocence of the individual they are bringing charges against. Prosecutors were found to have committed misconduct in about 30% of exoneration cases which mostly consists of concealing exculpatory evidence or witness tampering. This illegal behavior is so common because it goes largely unpunished. Out of the 660 cases studied by the Innocence Project from 2004 to 2008 in which courts confirmed prosecutorial misconduct, only 1 prosecutor was ever disciplined.
Almost no one has felt the effects of this system more than Michael Morton. He was wrongfully imprisoned for almost 25 years after the prosecutor in his case, Ken Anderson, withheld crucial pieces of evidence. When this was discovered, Ken Anderson did became the only prosecutor to serve time for his misconduct, but after robbing an innocent man of 25 years of his life, he was sentenced to only 10 days in prison, of which he served 5.
In the current system, prosecutors wield a disproportionate amount of power, have almost no oversight, and don’t actually care about the innocence of the person they are accusing. Relying on individual accountability is clearly not enough and we badly need to refocus the prosecution process on justice and truth, rather than prosecutorial success.
5. Policing Institutions
The role of police in America is a complicated topic that deserves an article of its own. For now, if you are interested in finding out more, you can read about the benefits and misconceptions of defunding the police, the rates of police killings in the U.S. compared to other developed nations, the costs associated with police brutality, and the financial, social, and humanitarian harm caused to the country by the current policing system.
6. Investment Banks
For years after they were first established, private prisons were seen as lucrative investment opportunities for major banks. Since the loan repayments came from government contracts, they were very low risk and became a common and well-known investment. As noted by the Center for Popular Democracy, banks provide 3 critical financial services to for-profit prisons: credit lines, term loans, and bonds. In 2019, even after some major banks began to pull out of this type of financing, these credit arrangements totaled about $2.69 billion between all remaining Wall Street banks. After decades of funding companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic directly, every one of their known banking partners recently began divesting from private prisons. This decision was a result of pressure from advocates, politicians, and the general public, which was intensified by President Trump’s election and adoption of anti-immigration policies. While it was a big step forward in removing power from the private prison industry, it does not stop banks like this from profiting off of mass incarceration. Many still fund companies that prisons outsource their services to, such as the predatory phone companies that charge inmates absurd fees to speak with their loved ones. This enables them to publicly divest from private facilities while still profiting directly off of the people incarcerated, and enabling companies to make lucrative contracts with the same private prisons that they stand against.
What Can be Done About It?
For all of the reasons already provided, one of the biggest and most ambitious goals of Criminal Justice Reform movements is dismantling the Prison-Industrial Complex. This will be a long and difficult process but these are a few of the steps that can be taken to begin moving the nation in the right direction.
Reform or Abolish Private Prisons
For-profit prisons have been proven to be a dangerous and corrupt part of the PIC that can exert massive influence public policy, sentencing, and treatment of inmates. After facing similar concerns, many other countries have rejected, dismantled, or transferred control of private facilities back to the government.
Describing his decision to oppose the first ever private prison in his own country, Dorit Beinisch, President of Israel’s Supreme Court wrote “Israel’s basic legal principles hold that the right to use force in general, and the right to enforce criminal law by putting people behind bars in particular, is one of the most fundamental and one of the most invasive powers in the state’s jurisdiction. Thus when the power to incarcerate is transferred to a private corporation whose purpose is making money, the act of depriving a person of [their] liberty loses much of its legitimacy. Because of this loss of legitimacy, the violation of the prisoner’s right to liberty goes beyond the violation entailed in the incarceration itself.”
Similarly, countries like Australia and New Zealand have begun experimenting with contracts that provide bonuses for reducing recidivism and improving conditions. While there are currently no contracts that serve this purpose here in the US, some states have begun looking into them and analysis of the results in Australia and New Zealand is being conducted.
Education and Job Training in Prisons
As mentioned earlier, much of the power that private prisons have lies in increasing rates of recidivism, which keeps their beds full and their revenue high. One of the most efficient ways to combat recidivism is by using prisons for their actual intended purpose: reform. Educational programs in prisons that are designed to help people reenter the workforce have been extremely effective. Overall, each $1 invested into these programs has saved between $4 and $5 on recidivism costs within the first three years of release. These programs total only about $1400 to $1700 per inmate, which correlates to $8700 to $9700 saved per inmate on reincarceration.
Investing in Alternatives to Prisons and Police
Preventing the cycle of incarceration and recidivism begins with investing in people. Crime rates have a very clear, positive correlation with poverty and desperation, which means that addressing the needs of communities can improve the quality of life of the entire nation. Some of the programs that have been shown to reduce incarceration include mental health and substance abuse services, Medicaid, public benefits, and community health centers. These tactics are frequently dismissed as a “waste of money” but in reality, we can reinvest the money that we typically spend on incarcerating people and instead allow them to be more productive members of society. It is not an unnecessary expense, but rather a shift of funds that can improve the prosperity of everyone across the country.
By far the most effective investment has been found to be education, especially at a young age. By closing education gaps between poorer and wealthier communities, we can give everyone the same chances to succeed and make the entire country safer as a result. Right now, the leading cause of educational inequality is the fact that public schools are funded by property taxes in the region, meaning students in areas with lower valued homes will not have access to the same resources. This has been shown to lead to higher rates of crime in the areas that have worse education, and can limit the success of millions of students across the country while providing others with an unfair advantage.
Opportunities for Formerly Incarcerated People
Finally, setting up a support system for formerly incarcerated individuals would be a huge step in dismantling the prison-industrial complex. Recidivism is a national problem because there are very few opportunities available to people after they leave prison and have to begin checking a box on job and housing applications. Studies have shown that returning to prison is much less likely when people have a source of income, but the unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated individuals is between 60 and 75 percent in their first year after release. This contrasts heavily with the many studies that have found that people with criminal records make hardworking and loyal employees, who are less likely to leave their job voluntarily and no more likely to be terminated. For more details on the improved performance of individuals with records, you can read our previous article here.
The Prison-Industrial Complex is a massive, complicated system that, in pursuit of profit for a handful of people, has already caused irreparable damage to the lives of hundreds of millions. Unfortunately I was only able to touch on a few of the many aspects of it, but it is evident that action needs to be taken soon to prevent any further harm. There isn’t a single solution that will fix every inequity and restore the lives of the tens of millions of people affected by it. Instead, consistent reform is needed in dozens of fields and industries to refocus the current system on rehabilitation instead of punishment and profit.
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