Prison Industrial Complex Essay

The Prison Industrial Complex

With the emergence of the Private Prison Industry it brought together the economy and punishment. Due to the term “prison industrial complex” came about to explain the growth in the prison population. The Prison industrial complex can be traced to January 3, 1973 when Nelson Rockefeller, who was the governor of New York, gave a State of the State address and demanded that all drug dealers to must be given life in prison without the possibility of parole (Harcourt, 2011:236). He did not specifically say prison industrial complex but started the use of big business in the criminal justice system. The prison industrial complex is a term that is used to describe the interests of the government and the interests of

industries and how they started to overlap. It may also be called the correctional industrial complex or the penal industrial complex. It is used to show the rapid expansion of the criminal justice system and how prison construction started to turn into big business (Harcourt, 2011:236).

This term is used to describe when the penal system became big a business and big money in the criminal justice system that puts money ahead of everything else. This term started to become very popular when it was used by Eric Schlosser and he said The Prison Industrial Complex is “a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need” (Harcourt, 2011: 236). He also said that it is not a conspiracy as some have suggested by Loic Wacquant who said this term seemed too much like a conspiracy and overstating what was actually occurring (Harcourt, 2011: 236). Schlosser said “the prison industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation’s criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum” (Harcourt, 2011: 236). Using this term can be very helpful because the term”highlights the profitability of prison building and the employment boom associated with prison guard labor. There is no question that the prison expansion served the financial interests of large sectors of the

economy” (Harcourt, 2011: 236).
Keally McBride Book labor and profit
http://www.press.umich.edu/2397009/punishment_and_political_order/?s=look_inside
It was first used by scholars and activities to discredit the belief that there was an increase in the levels of crime and that was the cause of the growing prison population.

Therefore, they argued that the drive to fill new prisons with people were driven by the ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit and money (Davis). Also, the prison industrial complex states that punishment is the result of economic and political structures as well as ideologies instead of trying to deter crime (Davis). It was stated that many corporations with global markets actually rely on prisons as a source of profit, not only in the United States but also in Europe, South America and Australia. The prison industrial complex is fueled by privatization because of how much privatization has changed areas such as healthcare and education which in turn has increased the presence of private corporations in the prison economy which has lead to the existence of private prisons.The private prison trends are “reminiscent of the historical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry based on the new supply of “free” black laborers in the aftermath of the Civil War” (Davis,

93-94).
Theorists of the prison industrial complex believe that the key to prison privatization can be discovered in the relationships of business and government in the corrections sector. There was a survey done by the Council of State Government, that was given to 50 state public administrators where they found the reasons for privatizing states’ correctional services. The results were a “shortage of state personnel (50.7%), cost savings (36.6%), flexibility (27.1%), fast implementation (20.6%), increase of political support (13.5%), high quality service (12.5%), increase of innovation (9.5%), and other (14%)” (Kim). It was also found that the two major political reasons for prison privatization in the United States is conservative social control and economic neoliberalism (Jing).