The Prison State of America
"Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout the society."

The Prison Boom Comes Home to Roost

by James Carroll

Will the fiscal collapse that has laid bare gross inequalities in the US economic system lead to meaningful reforms toward a more just society? One answer is suggested by the bursting of what might be called the “other housing bubble,’’ for these two years have also brought to crisis the three-decade-long frenzy of mass imprisonment. If there was a bailout for bankers, can there be one for inmates?

It is commonly observed now that, beginning about 1981, during the Reagan administration, the wealth of a tiny percentage of top-tier earners sky-rocketed, while the wages of the vast majority of Americans went flat. A rapid escalation in the illusory value of homeownership soon followed. But an unseen boom began then, too — in American rates of incarceration, the housing bubble in prisons. A recent issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, lays it out. In 1975, there were fewer than 400,000 people locked up in the United States. By 2000, that had grown to 2 million, and by this year to nearly 2.5 million. As the social scientist Glenn C. Loury points out, with 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States imprisons 25 percent of all humans behind bars. This effectively created a vibrant shadow economy: American spending on the criminal justice system went from $33 billion in 1980 to $216 billion in 2010 — an increase of 660 percent. Criminal justice is the third largest employer in the country.

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Arizona's Draconian Immigration Law Is Great ... For Our Prison-Industrial Complex

Discussion about "racial profiling" isvmissing the larger point: what about all the business Arizona's sick, racist law will bring to the copper state?

All these liberals whining about “racial profiling” are missing the larger point. We’re in a recession here. Unemployment’s been hovering at ten percent. Perhaps the economy's turned a corner, but the American labor market hasn't.

Yet nobody’s really talking about how Arizona’s new immigration law is going to bring big business to the Copper State.

In 2006, when DHS only had 1.5 million people going through immigration proceedings, the Washington Post reported that ICE held "more detainees a night than Clarion Hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines."

Someone’s got to guard those detainees, clean those buses and fly those planes -- we’re talking about American jobs!

In addition to its own detention facilities -- they're not called "jails" because many of those held are never charged with a crime -- ICE leases thousands of beds in 312 county and city prisons.

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