The Prison-Industrial Complex

Many people find economics depressing because the economic model of human behavior assumes all people are rational maximizers of their own interests. Seen in the worst light, Homo Economicus is selfish and callous, grimly pursuing his own interests while happliy sacrificing the welfare of all others.

I find people depressing because the economic model is so often right.

Lindsay Beyerstein points to an article by Harvey Silverglate and Kyle Smeallie in The Boston Phoenix about the prison-industrial complex, which is similar to the military-industrial complex, President Dwight Eisenhower’s term for an unholy confluence of interests between the military and their suppliers that would lead to destructive amounts of defense spending.

Almost a half-century later, that mindset has extended to both the local and federal law-and-order sectors, which have argued for, and experienced, virtually unabated growth. Today, law-enforcement groups regularly lobby against criminal-punishment reforms, and for the creation of new criminal statutes and overly harsh prison sentences. While these efforts are cloaked as calls for public safety, they are essentially creating more business for themselves.

Part of the problem lies with the public employee unions:

The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), a 325,000 member national organization that bills itself as “the voice of our nations’ law-enforcement officers,” also spent $550,000 lobbying Congress over the past three years. Among their interests: stopping the Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act, along with promoting a litany of other Draconian measures.

And part of the problem is the private prison corporations:

It is, of course, in these private prisons’ economic interests to see more people in prison serving longer sentences. And with current facilities bursting at the seams, times for this burgeoning industry are good. The country’s largest private prison provider, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws. Last year alone, the company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, generated $133 million in net income.

Criminal justice really only works as a function of government. When some non-governmental organization starts to do it, the result combines the brutal force of government with the self-interest of the market, and all hell breaks loose.

The CCA has been involved in numerous wrongful-death lawsuits, and it has been a constant target of prison-reform groups who claim the private facilities are understaffed and their detainees abused.

Yet another private prison provider, the GEO Group, which has annual revenue topping $1 billion, has come under intense scrutiny for dozens — if not hundreds — of inmate deaths in the past decade.

…

Nonetheless, states facing prison overcrowding turn to these corporations to outsource inmates. California, for example, has commissioned the CCA to ship convicts as far away as Tennessee (where financially strapped relatives and friends frequently cannot visit). The CCA has exported nearly 4000 California prisoners to states across the country under a $115 million contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Over the next three years, 8000 more are planned to be shipped out of the Golden State.

I know none of this should surprise me, but the callousness of shipping prisoners so far away from their families is just astonishing.

(For that matter, how is it even legal for one group of people in Tennessee to hold another group of people in Tennessee as prisoners just because a court in California has ordered it? I’m sure the legal issues have all been addressed, perhaps with hefty payoffs to the Tennessee legislature, but shouldn’t the inmates be able to file habeas petitions or something in Tennessee courts? Obviously, I don’t have a clue here.)

The results of all this are well-known and perverse:

The United States — “land of the free” — has five percent of the world’s population, but it also, thanks to the lobbyists and officiants behind the prison-industrial complex, shamefully holds 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated. It has a higher rate of imprisonment than the planet’s most notorious despotisms. One in 100 Americans is in jail.

It takes a special kind of inhumanity to lobby to put people in a cage just so you can be paid to guard them.