The Prison Industrial Complex: racial injustice, social media, and work labor
In most eyes, the prison industrial complex was the best way to get a grip on society’s criminals, but there is an abundance of shortcomings within the system. Mainstream media, politics, racial injustice, and large franchises make it very easy to think that the prison system and its prisoners are all doing the right thing to make society a better place. But really, the life of a prisoner is the exact opposite. The prison system is taking in innocent people, traumatizing them, and giving them crappy pay for countless hours of work. Later on, you will see how these four factors make the prison system one of the most crooked organizations in the United States.
One of the biggest problems with the prison industrial complex is how biased politics are. Politics make the views that citizens within the country see, and they’ve taken over the biggest platforms we have ever seen; mainstream media. Huge news channels, TV shows, and social media have made the world think that the prison system is keeping prisoners safe, paying them good money for labor, and helping them with any mental problems they may have, but it is the exact opposite. The resources given to prisoners for mental health aren’t plentiful, or enough to be beneficial, and they show the world that they treat each prisoner in need of medicine when they aren’t. In the past several big-name pharmaceutical companies used prisoners to test medicines and products before coming out with them. These resources make it so easy to believe since you don’t truly see the real prison system yourself, so you have no other option but to take the information seen, and believe it. With these channels and social media, citizens see the best outcome of the prison industrial complex, but politics isn’t the only thing that isn’t true with this system; prison labor also has a false view.
Prison labor is another huge problem within the prison industrial complex that isn’t seen by citizens. The injustice of labor is probably the most concerning problem for a prisoner, dealing with the abundance of work hours, lack of pay, and being used by fortune 500 companies. So many fortune 500 companies have and still do use prisoners as cheap labor workers to produce their products. Victoria Secret, one of the biggest companies in the world, has used prison labor as a way to cheaply pay their employees(prisoners) to sew their products into completion. Another huge company that uses prisoners is Starbucks. Starbucks doesn’t use prisoners year-round like Victoria Secret, but they use prisoners during the winter season to produce seasonal cups, covers, and decorations. Prisoners are used by these companies, and work endless hours and are paid only nineteen cents an hour. And we think our minimum wage is low. Physical labor isn’t the only way prisoners are abused inside the prison industrial complex. They have also been used as social, and medical experiments for large pharmaceutical companies. During the huge pharmaceutical opioid crisis, pharmacy companies, “conducted hundreds of experiments on the men housed in Holmesburg Prison and, in the process, trained many researchers to use what was later recognized as unethical research methods’’(Davis, p. 38). These companies have caused much more pain than they know. Those prisoners being tested on could have come back with an addiction, or a physical or mental problem that could ruin their lives forever. Also, it’s not only the prisoner they’re affecting, these people have families that have to deal with the consequences of these tests and experiments. Knowing this, you can see that the prison labor laws and respect is given to prisoners are extremely low, because the only way companies and the government looks at them is as heartless criminals. After criminal labor abuse, the last factor that is a false view is the racial injustice that has been going on for almost 40 years.
Prison systems and the United States have dealt with this recurring problem for a very long time, and it still hasn’t gone away. Dealing with racism and stereotypes in our country has put hundreds of thousands of wrongfully accused people in the prison system. Minorities like Hispanics, African Americans, and others have stereotypes placed on their head wherever they go, just based on the color of their skin. These stereotypes of an African American murdering or raping people is ridiculous, one man shouldn’t be judged off of his actions just because it has happened before. This is the same for Hispanics, the stereotype of all Hispanics being illegal immigrants is so harsh and inhumane. A group of people having legal problems shouldn’t prove that the whole ethnic group is a bunch of illegal immigrants. Because of corrupt police officers, we have had in our country so many African Americans and Hispanics have been murdered or incarcerated, and the state system hasn’t done anything about it because they’re part of the problem. To put this into perspective, “According to a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice between 1974 and 2001, “about 1 in 3 black males, 1 in 6 Hispanic males, and 1 in 17 white males are expected to go to prison during their lifetime if current incarceration rates remain unchanged”(Cohen). With this information, you can see that the probability of African American and Hispanic males are a lot higher than a white male, and this is because of stereotypes assumed with those ethnicities.
Knowing this information, you can see how the prison industrial complex has corrupted the United States more than it has offered. The news channels give out false information, keeping the country from actually knowing what is going on in federal prisons. Social media have also taught the youth and middle-aged American’s that there is only good coming from prisons. Finally, pharmaceutical companies abusing prisoners is a major factor, because that doesn’t just affect their physical outcome but their mental as well. Those testings and experiments can ruin a person’s life forever, and companies are taking advantage of people who have made mistakes in their lives. To conclude, the prison system has made the country worse by traumatizing people, wrongfully accusing them, and paying prisoners less than a dollar an hour for countless hours of work.
