PRIVATIZING PRISONERS
As I’m contemplating this, I know that I’m writing to an audience with diverse views. I think that is good. In my opinion the right to disagree is one of our countries greatest accomplishments. Before every great turning point in our history, it was preceded by conflict that begged to be resolved. Such as when 150 women and girls burned to death in the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in N.Y., the doors had been locked to keep them from leaving early. As a result of that tragedy, we all have safer working environments. The Children’s March on Alabama in 1963, directly brought about an end to segregation when 1000 brave school children marched peacefully despite high-pressure fire hoses, attacks by police dogs and beatings from billy clubs. Witnessing the televised atrocities, Americans woke to the injustice of segregation. President Kennedy signed The Civil Rights Act one month later. From unrest, the need for improvement is discovered and by coming together we gain wisdom born from common ground and understanding. However, we do not need to wait for more terrible events to occur before we start looking for solutions.
I am searching for answers and the deeper I go the more complex the situation seems to get. Perhaps it was just me being hopeful, but I really thought I might find a simple reason why our prison population has increased by 500% since the 1980s. These aren’t fuzzy numbers, you can check out the sources listed below. It seemed every time I followed up on a lead, it led me down another rabbit hole. Suddenly confronted by a series of contributing factors, I realized that my study was going to take a lot more looking into than I had originally planned. As respect for the readers of this site, I wouldn’t want to put out anything shoddy; so it looks like I’ll be doing some more research.
If you’re wondering, why the effort, well like many contributors and commentators, I have seen the effects of prison on people. Now stick with me, if you think I’m going to say that someone close to me was imprisoned, well you’re right. But, I also have a step-father and sister who worked in the penal system. All of them are amazing people and saw the good and the bad. But it is my brother that inspired this article. Unfortunately, he is gone now. As I try to understand his lost life, it frequently brings me back to the question of prison and its premise of rehabilitation.
It would be a mistake to say he didn’t deserve going. He definitely had done stupid things and had to pay the price. If we had to ascribe blame, I’d have to say that would be my biological father. He taught my brother that you resolved issues with your fists, usually his on my brother. I won’t bore you with the details; let’s just say we didn’t have a very good role model. I watched as an amazing person slowly lost his spirit as it was replaced with anger, bitterness and loss of hope. Resulting in a severely battered teen who stole a car and went to jail for it. With nothing to feed his mind or spirit, his anger grew, drugs and despair followed. You can imagine the rest.
We can’t go backwards, but we can certainly move forward. I have been lucky to be able to work with youth helping them raise their confidence and find better paths. Every time I help one, I’m very grateful for that opportunity. Yet for each I help, there are so many more that aren’t, and statistically will end up the same way my brother did. Seeing firsthand what happens when the odds are against you, my concern for their future is sincere. While child abuse seems initially to be a separate issue, according to research done by Ark of Hope for children and others indicates that 84% of all inmates were abused as children, and 65% of drug users were abused as well. Having been abused as a child will increase their chances of committing a violent crime by 38%. This is probably not a surprise, 82% of abuse victims not receiving help often become abusers themselves. According to this study, 80% of child abuse victims suffer from psychological disorders.
Although it may seem like I’ve gone off on a tangent, if those statistics were even close, the majority of prisoners were abused as children and just as likely to be suffering from mental health issues. So what does that mean for our prison system and for civilians once they are released? If even half of the prison population had previous mental health issues, are the prisons and the correctional officers prepared and set up to deal with those circumstances? If they are not, why are they warehousing them there?
If the recent incidents of mass shootings in the U.S. are an indication of unaddressed mental health issues, it should be a concern for everyone. What I can’t wrap my head around is why it isn’t a bigger concern? Why is it not foremost in the minds of those running this country? They must be aware of the correlation. I can understand why the average person wouldn’t know, why should they? Unless directly affected from either side of the equation, it would typically not be a topic that comes up in conversation. The only reason why I have started to discover more about it is because of my personal loss and quest to understand.
Naturally, when something is not addressed you have to surmise that the thing is serving some purpose. It can’t be that people don’t really care? Maybe I’m wrong, but as the rate of incarceration, recidivism and senseless mass shootings increase, at some point people will have to start questioning their cause. As the estimates for people going to prison increase, I have to believe it will catch up personally and for the population as a whole.
Mental health could be looked at as a separate issue, but if the majority of inmates suffer from psychological issues, how could it be? They have to go hand in hand and the majority of them are not being treated for it. They are doing time, that is all. It is kinda like keeping your car locked up in the garage because it needs to be repaired. But instead of taking it to the mechanic, you just hope it will get better on its own with time. Sorry for the bad analogy, I don’t mean disrespect to anyone especially those who suffer from mental health issues. However can we really not pay attention to the problem and expect it to go away all by itself? If there wasn’t some truth to it, why would Massachusetts get a failing grade from the Office of Research & Public Affairs? (Source listed below) But please, don’t take my word for it, investigate for yourself.
According to several sources, crime rates have actually decreased in the past two decades. Who knows, maybe that’s because they locked most of them up? However, if that were the case, why has the prison population skyrocketed as government statistics show that they do? Not only do we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world, even more than China though their population is higher. Inmates stay in prison longer as well. In some cases even for crimes that are not arrest-able offenses in some other countries. Statistically we have more people in prison for non-violent crimes and doing more time than ever before in our history, and all of this all since the 1980’s. Doesn’t make sense right? Logically, if we dig a little deeper it seems like we only have to look at what happened in the ‘80s to see what could have caused such a huge chain of events. OK, a quick google search and we get some interesting answers:
- “From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.” – * https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
- “The passage in 13 states of the “three strikes” laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.” – (*Global research, sourced above)
- “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.” (*Global Research)
- “The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in the 1990s under William Clinton. Clinton’s program for cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.” (*Global Research)
- “After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 – ending court supervision and decisions caused overcrowding ,violent, and unsafe conditions in federal prisons and increasing private prison corporations.” (*Global Research)
- “Two of the largest private companies now running prisons are the Correction Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group. There were no private prisons before 1984. From then until 2009, these two corporations increased their role to running 264 prisons with more than 100,000 prisoners. (“Prison Labor and Crime in the U.S.”) The CCA’s revenues increased 500 times in the last two decades.” (Mother Jones, Sept. 19, 2013)
- “The federal government is in on this, too. It owns Federal Prison Industries, operating in 83 federal prisons and employing more than 13,000 inmates at from $0.23 to $1.15 an hour. FPI collected more than $900 million in revenue in 2011. It produced more than $100 million in military uniforms in” 2012. (“More Jobs Lost as the Government Decides to Have Military Uniforms Made by Convicts,” Business Insider, Sept. 7, 2012)
- “The stocks of the two biggest private prison operators — CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corp. of America) and Geo Group — have doubled since Election Day. CoreCivic (CXW) is up 140% since Trump won in November; Geo Group (GEO) has risen 98%.” – http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/24/investing/private-prison-stocks-soar-trump/index.html
- “Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, caused a stir last month when he cancelled an Obama-era directive to phase out federal contracting with private prison companies, which expect bumper earnings under Donald Trump. The share price for CoreCivic, the rebranded name of the Corrections Corporation of America, shot up by 43% in a single day after Mr. Trump was elected, in anticipation of lucrative contracts to run immigration detention centres.” – https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-prisoners-roast-potatoes-kentucky-they-sell-cattle-prison-labour
- “At the federal level, the Bureau of Prisons operates a programme known as Federal Prison Industries that pays inmates roughly $0.90 an hour to produce everything from mattresses, spectacles, road signs and body armour for other government agencies, earning $500m in sales in fiscal 2016. Similar schemes exist at the state level as well, making the market of 61,000 captive labourers worth well over $1bn. California’s program expects to generate $232m in sales this year, much of it from construction and textiles, though $10m is also expected from meat-cutting. In Idaho, prisoners roast potatoes. In Kentucky, they sell $1m worth of cattle.” – https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21718897-idaho-prisoners-roast-potatoes-kentucky-they-sell-cattle-prison-labour
I know I’m not solving any of these problems here, but I hope that I am starting a constructive dialogue. Across the board, there are real lives, families, and communities that are affected. Is it wrong to question who benefits from the way things are going? Is there a conflict of interest when some American Corporations including privately held prisons are part of an organization called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) that lobbies for longer prison sentences and reduced government oversight over how they run their prisons? These organizations are experiencing banner years with profits that are going through the roof. Using inmate labor is effectively cutting down their labor, insurance and overhead costs. After all, they are not paying to keep the lights on, heat the buildings and pay for medical expenses, we are. Again, this stuff is all out there in black and white if you want to know. Sure, being made in America is a great thing, but on whose back? If inmates are the new labor pool, some being paid as little as $1.50 an hour, whose jobs are they replacing? I doubt you are seeing the benefit of those profit margins but you sure can bet that the stockholders are and the politicians whose campaigns they fund.
So back to my main question, why is this occurring? Is there an incentive for inmates to actually be rehabilitated and released? Statistically, that answer is clearly no. by DANIEL PIERCE
Companies implicated in exploiting prison labor
http://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/storage/documents/treat-or-repeat.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
Sources: