The Prison-Industrial Complex
The Lucrative Business of Incarceration is a Scourge on Criminal Justice
M. D. Kwak
THE PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX is not only the set of institutions and interest groups driving the insatiable momentum for prison construction and mass-incarceration; it’s more than the enterprises that proclaim to be the capitalist ‘panacea’ to inefficiency and overcrowding in the public system. Fundamentally, it’s a state of mind. The lure of large profits has corrupted notions of state obligations and criminal rehabilitation with a commercialisation of the human body. It has reduced crime to a solely criminal issue that requires the so-called moral bankruptcy of its perpetrators to be brutally punished, and it has refused to consider its social, economic, and physiological origins. Privatised prisons are far more ubiquitous than one may think. In the United States, around 10% of inmates are held in for-profit facilities. In Australia, that number is higher at 18%.
So, what exactly does this prison-industrial complex look like? At its core, it’s the confluence of capitalism (‘industrial’) and criminal justice (‘prison’). The most obvious manifestation is in various forms of private prison facilities, which states outsource the construction, operation, and servicing of prisons to. This system is interlocked in mutually reinforcing patterns where special-interest lobby groups such as police unions, private prison contractors and security companies increase in size and influence as incarceration increases. More broadly, it’s the vanguard of tough-on-crime politicians pushing punitive legislation and election-seeking district attorneys. It’s the financial machinations of Wall Street investment banks and rural economic developers deploying private equity into prison construction and lucrative employment packages that seek to make prisons the cornerstone of a rural county’s economy.
1) The prison-industrial complex is morally illegitimate.
The primary reason we permit the state to exercise its monopoly of violence and coercion over us is
because we can hold it to democratic accountability. It is for those reasons, that we trust the state to legislate us, police us and imprison certain members of society when they break our laws. When the prison-industrial complex supplants democracy with the forces of market capitalism, the exercise of violence becomes morally unacceptable, as imprisonment is now in the hands of a private corporation, beholden only to shareholder interests and company profits rather than a democratic mandate. Although some may point to the existence of competition in privatised prison markets, this is limited when the barrier to entry is high and information available to consumers is scarce or nil.
2) The prison-industrial complex increases rates of incarceration and recidivism.
At the point at which crime becomes a political selling point or dollars on a balance sheet, any incentive to rehabilitate inmates evaporates and mass-incarceration becomes a norm. Obviously, if for-profit prisons run their business model on the incarceration of criminals, there remains very little incentive to meaningfully ensure that these inmates don’t return to their facilities. Indeed, the 2008 kids for cash scandal in the US concerned two judges, Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella being bribed to impose harsh sentences in juvenile cases and increase occupancy at a private prison in Pennsylvania operated by PA Childcare. Perhaps more perniciously, the prison-industrial complex in politics manifests itself in punitive campaigns like the War on Drugs which leverages the frenzied craze of crime fearmongering to create a never-ending assembly line of human lives. When the War on Drugs has produced a perpetual cycle of drug-dealing and imprisonment rather than combating addiction, the prison-industrial complex can rely on a guarantee of future inmates to ensure the profitability of prison construction, operation, and political machinations. In the United States, about 66% of prisoners released across 24 states were rearrested within three years, and 82% were rearrested within 10 years (US Bureau of Justice 2021). Recidivism and the justice system’s failure of rehabilitation are the reasons for overcrowding and privatised prisons actively profit off the back of such devastating failures and human victims.
3) The prison-industrial complex worsens the quality of prison management.
One of the standard arguments for privatisation of public utilities is a theoretically-expected increase in efficiency. So, the argument goes, as corporations are motivated by profits unlike the government, they will engage in practices that are the most efficient and therefore bring down unit costs. I find this euphemistic and hollow. ‘Efficiency’ far too often looks like cutting corners in prison servicing: servicing woefully inadequate food and utilities or cutting funding for mental health services or job-training. It looks like exploiting prisoners’ labour in farms and factories and paying them a fraction of minimum wage to reap profits. These prisons may be cost-efficient but, in many cases, this comes at the cost of humane conditions and erring into the side of ruthless exploitation. Perhaps, contrary to what some politicians would like you to believe, I would prefer inefficiency any day.