The New Jim Crow: Private Prisons in the Wake of the War on Drugs
The Status of Modern Prisons and Incrimination
By Catherine Zhao
The Progressive Teen Contributor
REEVES COUNTY IN WEST TEXAS is home to the largest private prison in the world. The facility is owned and operated by GEO group, one of the most prominent prison operators running over ten different facilities in Texas alone.
Over 60,000 inmates are held in custody by the corporation, which boasts a slew of problems in inmate care: rampant rape, murder, suicides, and death from inadequate medical attention. The lattermost incited the first riot at the Reeves complex in December of 2008, when Jesus Manuel Galindo, then 32, passed away in solitary confinement after being denied treatment for his epileptic seizures. In the vast majority of GEO’s prisons, most inmates are immigrants whose only crime was re-entering the United States after deportation. Such was the case with Galindo, whose death sparked a series of riots in which other prisoners demanded better living conditions, access to adequate medical attention, and food. This uproar was quickly cleared as negotiators promised to consider their objections, only to resurface again on January 31, 2009 after another prisoner, Ramon Garcia, was placed into solitary confinement after voicing concerns about his illness. The Reeves county complex is not an anomaly in the string of private facilities littering the United States — other corporations looking to contract cheap prison labor at the expense of the prisoners have been capitalizing on this gap in the criminal justice system since the late 1970s. The introduction of prison labor into the private sector has aided in the systematic exploitation of the incarcerated and the gradual degradation of their liberties and will to live, a trend that has only been exacerbated by the War on Drugs.
In this new age of “colorblindness,” the criminal justice system acts as a vehicle for the systematic exclusion and discrimination of black bodies; an institution diseased with racial bias continues to enshrine social stratification in the form of mass incarceration. Former felons are commonly denied the right to vote and are thus suspended from civil society while social stigmas foreclose the possibility of future employment and access to housing. The role race plays in mass incarceration is undeniable: the United States imprisons a larger portion of its black population than South Africa did at the peak of the apartheid. Almost every three out of four black men in Washington D.C. can be expected to be imprisoned within their lifetime, despite similar rates of illegal drug usage among white communities nearby. In urban environments wrecked by the drug crisis, up to 80 percent of young African American men have criminal records and are susceptible to an insidious stream of legalized discriminatory policies that may haunt them for the rest of their lives. The penal system has increasingly become a tool to control the populace, directly targeting ethnic minorities as a means of maintaining their status as a disadvantaged group. Those who find themselves financially secure are less inclined to commit crimes, while those who have already been branded as felons are likely to be incarcerated again. Mass incarceration is thus the worst manifestation of the prevailing racial bias in the United States today; the widespread faith in the idea of colorblindness has obscured the reality of a new race divide.
Framing the Problem: The Privatization of Prisons
Angela Davis characterizes the function of prisons best when she asserts they “do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings . . . the practice has literally become big business.” Prisons, which were previously under the jurisdiction of the state, are now operated by private corporations who generate profit from investments in what essentially constitutes a punishment industry.
Race-based assumptions about criminality feed sentencing and arrest patterns, creating an interdependence between the interests of private firms and the criminal justice system. The emergence of privately managed prisons was most prominent during the mid-1980s, when President Reagan in his inaugural address declared that government activities needed to be shifted to the private sector. While the incarceration rate remained relatively consistent from the 1900s to the 1970s, the era of Nixon heralded legislation to lengthen prison sentences, creating a substantial issue of overcrowding in state operated prisons. With prisons at the intersection of the food services, health care, drug treatment, and construction industries, companies hoping to explore growth opportunities were compelled to invest their multi-billion dollar profits into private facilities. As prisons continued to proliferate throughout the United States, construction companies have benefited from government contracts while architecture firms have been identified a new niche market: the design of prison facilities. Prisons have thus become a tool for the entrenchment of institutional racism and class prejudice; policymakers and politicians are complicit in ignoring the need for education, employment, and health services in enabling the expansion of the prison industrial complex to continue.
The preeminent leaders in the private prison industry, Corrections Corporations of America (CCA) and GEO Group, have a perverse incentive to discourage prisoner rehabilitation. To fill their empty beds, private prison corporations send lobbyists to the government at the state and national level to ensure that incarceration rates remain stable, while simultaneously structuring their facilities so that the rehabilitation of prisoners will inevitably fail, thereby generating explosive rates of recidivism. Prisons represent a microcosm of society, which has served to systematically devalue women, poor people, and people of color behind a glorified banner of equality and democratic ideals. As the federal government continues to spend on the expansion of prisons, budgets for education programs, crime prevention, and community organization are withdrawn to fund the construction and maintenance of prison facilities. This misplaced spending has played a critical role in the construction of a cycle of racial violence, poverty, gender inequality, criminalization, and recurring incarceration.
