By Danny Mack
Cold War defence contracts have been replaced by Crime War prison contracts. The US needs an enemy, and with the worldwide fall of communism we have turned our anger and aggression inward, declaring war on our own people.
With 1.6 million people behind bars and over 5 million under the control of the justice machine (on parole, probation or bail), the US is by far the world leader in locking up its own citizens.
Ten per cent of the US population owns 90% of the riches. The government is charged with protecting this very rich minority from the rest of us, and the threat of imprisonment is a very effective tool for keeping the huddled masses in line. The national debt is blamed on welfare mothers, violent crime on the very young and the drug problem on poor blacks.
The solution, according to the ruling class, is to lock them up and throw away the key. Never mind that it would cost less to house, feed, clothe and send them to college.
As programs and entitlements are cut, Oregon, like many other states, has seen an explosion in the number of homeless teens on its cities' streets. The state legislature's response to this sign of poverty was to pass Measure 11, which went into effect on April 1, 1995.
This draconian measure allows 15-yer-olds to be prosecuted as adults, and 16-year-olds to be placed in adult prisons. It also mandates very long sentences, even for first-timers. Days after it went into effect, a Portland youth was charged with kidnapping, for pushing an acquaintance out the front door of a friend's home and punching him in the nose.
The sexual-abuse section of the statute says that a 15-year-old who touches the buttocks of a 12-year-old, even with consent, must be sentenced to 8½ years in prison, 7½ years of which could be served in an adult prison. Just imagine the 23-year-olds we'll get out of that deal!
As a result of Measure 11, Oregon needs 10 new prisons. California is also in the middle of a prison-building spree after the passage of its "Three Strikes You're Out" law, under which the theft of a 50 cent slice of pizza can get you 30 years in that state's brutal corrections system. The object is obviously not to reduce crime (in fact, it turns misguided youths and petty crooks into full blown sociopaths), but to build prisons.
Growth industry
The prison business is the fastest-growing industry in the country. More people are employed in the prison industries than in any Fortune 500 company except General Motors.
A large majority of prison guards are young men and women fresh out of the military. Ninety-five per cent of these are recruited by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) before they are discharged. Few of these recruits have skills that would be marketable in the civilian workplace.
Small, depressed rural communities are targeted for prison construction because the money that prisons bring with them outweighs the usual fears. Many people are put to work immediately upon the approval of a new prison site. Draughtsmen, architects, engineers, construction workers and material suppliers all benefit.
After construction is completed, literally thousands of people will become dependent on the prison for their livelihoods. The BOP has a policy of hiring 60% of its total staff from the local communities.
Not only do local businesses share in this new-found wealth, but a new breed of entrepreneur has emerged, offering mail-order gifts, quasi-legal services for prisoners and transportation/lodging for visitors. Another advantage to a small community is that prisoners can be counted as citizens in a census. With the population increasing by one or two thousand overnight, government allocations for sewer, water treatment and road maintenance also increase.
This economic well-being induces a political shift to the right in those affected. What prison guard or support staff would ever oppose a bill that would lock up more people for greater lengths of time? How could a business owner who depended on this prison-generated income vote in favour of programs designed to decrease recidivism?
Prisons for profit
The private sector has not ignored the big bucks in the prison business. Wackenhut Corrections and Corrections Corporation of America, the two industry leaders, make a profit by housing prisoners for the federal government. Both trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
Corrections Corporation, a 13-year-old company based in Nashville, Tennessee, employs many former government officials, including, as director of strategic planning, Michael Quinlan, who directed the BOP during the Bush administration. Wackenhut has as its director Norman A. Carlson, who preceded Quinlan as director of the BOP. Benjamin R. Civiletti, a former attorney general, also works for Wackenhut.
In 1993 the Donald A. Wyatt Detention Facility was opened in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Wyatt is owned and operated by Cornell Corrections, a private company.
The facility had 300 beds and a contract with the federal government for $85 a day per prisoner, but no inmates. "Build it and they will come" seemed to be the philosophy at Cornell, and when they didn't come, it was quite an embarrassment.
The prison's financial backers mounted a vigorous lobbying campaign to divert prisoners from other states. Cornell Corrections turned to a lawyer who specialised in brokering prisoners for private prisons. He was paid an undisclosed sum when 232 prisoners were moved from North Carolina to Rhode Island soon afterward.
When Wall Street analysts and brokers, lawyers, corporate CEOs and rich investors stand to profit from locking people up, you can bet that they will be throwing large amounts of money at politicians who favour the imprisonment of an ever growing segment of the population. Can we be far from the days of the debtors' prison?
Slavery '96
Contrary to what we learned in primary school, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution did not abolish slavery in 1865. The purpose of this amendment was to limit slavery to those who had been convicted of crimes.
Great numbers of newly freed blacks were then "convicted" and forced to work without pay in state prisons. This simply transferred the ownership of slaves from private parties to the state. Today, with the advent of private prisons and joint-venture prison factories, this ownership is shifting back to the private sector.
UNICOR, the prison manufacturing industry of the BOP, and by far the largest slaveholder in the US, makes a wide range of products for sale to other government agencies and contractors.
UNICOR operates 90 prison factories and is rapidly expanding. The products range from office and dormitory furniture to electronics.
Individual states have modelled their prison factories after the federal example, with one dangerous difference: they market their products to the private sector. San Quentin inmates enter computer data for Bank of America, Chevron and Macy's. Prisoners in New Mexico take hotel reservations by phone. Hawaiian convicts package golf balls for Spaulding, and at Folsom they manufacture stainless steel vats for beer brewers.
Businesses all over the country are jumping at the chance to hire prisoners, and why not? There is no unemployment insurance to pay, no health benefits, vacation, sick leave or payroll taxes. It is estimated that total prison sales will reach $8.9 billion by the year 1999.
And how about prison labour for strike breaking? It's certainly nothing new. In 1891 in Briceville, Tennessee, mine owners attempted to break the miners' union by using prison labourers. In what is now known as the Coal Creek Rebellion, union workers took over the mine and freed all of the prisoners, thus temporarily ending prison labour in Tennessee.
More recently, young inmates at the Ventura Youth Facility in California made flight reservations by telephone for TWA while unionised flight attendants were on strike. The company then transferred ticket agents to flight attendant jobs.
What will happen to all workers who are displaced by the slave labour of the '90s is the most depressing thing of all. After their unemployment insurance runs out, and they discover that retraining is of no use when there are no jobs, they will become members of the group most likely to end up in prison: the poor.
At a January 1996 meeting in New Hampshire where Senator Phil Gramm was campaigning for the Republican primary, he pitched a proposal that would require all prisoners to work six days a week for sub-minimum wages manufacturing consumer goods in private no-frills prison "enterprise zones". A woman in the crowd was heard to shout, "In order to get a job, an American is going to have to commit a crime!".
[Danny Mack is currently an inmate in a US prison. This article is abridged from the Loompanics Unlimited Spring 1997 supplement.]