There are three orienting facts that render mass incarceration in the United States an ethical problem worthy of our deep consideration. First, the rate of incarceration has grown dramatically over the last 40 years so that today there are 2.2 million people in prison or jail, and another 5 million on probation or parole. This means that 1/32 adults in the USA are under state supervision. Second, the application of incarceration is disproportionately applied to the poor, people of color, and other vulnerable populations. Research shows that 85-90% of those in the criminal justice system fall below the poverty line, and the experience of incarceration only impoverishes people further. The consequences of having a criminal record are harsh and debilitating, ranging from family disruption, social alienation, and disenfranchisement. In these ways and others, the current situation of crime and punishment represents a dramatic moral challenge. Finally, victims of crime are themselves poorly served by the current system, often ignored or sidelined in the machinery of punishment. This course seeks to discover alternatives to the current systems of crime and punishment in order to imagine a more inclusive, just and moral society.
Alex Friedmann: "From Mass Incarceration to For-Profit Prisons: Criminalization as Market Driver"
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Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration
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Criminalization: The Experience of Prison
This module looks more closely at the intimate details and experiences of criminalization and incarceration. We explore the experience of being charged with a crime, of going through the court system, and of finding oneself in prison. What is the experience of prison, both on those who find themselves inside and those who are the family and friends of the incarcerated?
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Graham ResideAssistant Professor
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
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What would be one thing you'd want us to know that we might not know about
the private prison industry that hasn't come up in our conversation so far?
>> There's a number of different things.
We touched briefly on transparency and the fact that getting information from private
prison companies, because they're private companies, is often extremely difficult.
We haven't really talked about, though,
the direct influence they exert on our political structure.
So like most industries or companies, the private prison firms are very political.
You kind of have to be political in their area
because around 99.9% of their revenue comes from the government.
Private prisons could not exist without the collusion of government agencies
that give them permission to exist.
You or I cannot just open up a prison and put a lot of people and
lock them up in our prison, as much as I'd like to in some cases.
Because that's illegal.
That's false imprisonment, and kidnapping, and
lots of other crimes if you would just make your own prison and lock people up.
So you can only lock people up, deprive them of one of their fundamental rights,
which is freedom and liberty, if the government gives you that permission.
So the private prison industry exists only because the government allows it to exist
and the government funds the private prison industry.
The contracts that they have to run prisons and jails and other facilities
are all government contracts, which are paid for by public taxpayer money.
So it's the taxpayers that are running this industry and funding it, basically.
And in return, private prison companies take some of that money, that public
taxpayer money from their contracts, and funnel it back to politicians, okay?
And they do that in the way of campaign donations and lobbying on the local,
state, and federal levels, and a couple of other ways.
But primarily, campaign donations of which CCA alone back in 2015,
which is the most recent year we have data available, spent about
three quarters of a million dollars on campaign contributions to politicians.
And spent about 1.5 million on lobbying cost on the state and
federal levels nationwide.
Now, I don't know about you, but
when I spend $1.5 million dollars, I want something in return.
People generally do not spend something unless they believe they're going to
receive a benefit in return.
If companies are spending millions of dollars, again that was just CCA.
Other GO and the other companies also spend an enormous amount of money on
campaign donations and lobbying.
If they're spending these millions of dollars,
then what are they getting in return?
And the answer is billions of dollars in government contracts.
So CCA and GO Group take in roughly $1.6 to
$1.7 billion a year in revenue each.
And that is what they get.
That's their return on their investment for spending this public
money that they're getting, taking a portion of it and funneling it back.
Basically in kickbacks, if you will.
Two, politicians, policymakers, lawmakers,
the ones who actually make the decisions on whether to privatize prisons or not.
>> That's a pretty thick irony, that my tax dollars, your tax dollars are being
used to lobby our politicians to support the private prison industry.
We've talked about the economics incentives and
the perverse economic incentives here.
And we've talked about the political reasons.
We did talk a little bit about the ethical dimensions here, and
you had some resistance to that.
You said policy makers are not moved by ethics.
But I do think that in the last analysis,
we make judgments about whether this is good for our society or not, and
we want our politicians to pursue policies that are good for our society.
What do you see as deleterious or not good?
What are some of the major factors of the private prison industry that
are working against the good of our society?
>> Well, first and foremost, it is commoditizing people.
It is reducing people to a certain amount of money that you make.
One adage I like to say is if you're in a state or
federal prison, you're a person with a number, they give you a number, right?
My number was 135616.
But if you're in a private prison, you have a number with a dollar sign in
front of it, which represents your value to that company for
each day that they lock you up.
So reducing people to commodities, to monetary units,
to widgets, if you will, to the hamburgers in the McDonald's analogy, I think,
is one of the worst aspects in the industry.
Every person that is locked up is a person, first and foremost.
They are somebody's son, daughter, or mother, or father, or brother, or sister.
They're a person.
And they have done bad things, in many cases, to be locked up,
but that doesn't mean you exploit them as a commodity.
You make money from them and that you have an industry designed to
make more money based upon the more people you lock up and the longer you keep them.
It really warps the incentives for why we have a criminal justices in
the first place, which at least in theory is to punish people for
committing crimes and to house them for a certain period of time,
away from society until they're not a danger to other people.
And to ensure that when they get out, they are less likely to come back.
We don't want them to come back.
Otherwise, it's pointless.
Otherwise, we're not solving any problem.
We're simply postponing the problem to the next generation to deal with.
And our correction system doesn't do any of that as it currently exists, and
the private prison industry is one part of that problem.
And I should emphasize, it's only a part.
Mass incarceration in the United States is the larger problem.
If we really want to solve the private prison problem,
deal with that egregious industry.
Then we have to also deal with a larger issue of mass incarceration.
The way to end the private prisons is to reduce and eliminate,
eventually, the need for private prisons.
So if we reduce our prison population, as a whole,
to a level where we have sufficient bed space nationwide, and we don't need
this excess bed space that private prisons provide, then the industry will collapse.
If there's no need for their beds anymore, then they will not exist.
We will not need to contract with them.
And yes, there's still some political and economic incentives to do it for
certain business, but once you reduce that prison population to a level that is
manageable with our existing public prisoners and
jails, that creates a disincentive to use private prisons anymore.
To do that, you have to deal with the larger issue of mass incarceration,
which is the millions of people who we're locking up, for
what reasons, and for how long.
>> And if we go back to the idea of the prison industrial complex, and
its forerunner,
the military industrial complex, I think it was Eisenhower's concern,
it is precisely the existence of this complex, the military industrial complex.
When the structure is there, it's in place, then we go looking for
wars to keep it alive.
Similarly, since we have this prison industrial complex,
we now look for criminals in order to fill it.
And this seems, to me, to be the ultimate irony or perversion of a system.
>> It is a perversion.
It's not just looking for criminals, in many cases, creating criminals.
So how do you create criminals?
Well, you pass laws that criminalize certain behavior that previously was
not a crime.
And by that way, you create new classes of criminals.
So I mean,
people may have heard that the number of federal crimes that are on the books
has increased to a level where nobody really knows what that number is anymore.
Even federal prosecutors have no idea.
Federal judges have no idea.
Members of congress have no idea.
There are thousands of laws in the books, everything from committing treason and
acts of war to assaulting a federal chicken inspector.
These are all federal crimes.
On the state level, of course,
it's even multiplied even more because we have 50 different states.
And lawmakers, because of this whole tough on crime, lock them up and
throw away the key mentality, that has been a mainstay in American politics for
decades, at least 30 or 40 years.
There are numerous laws now on the books criminalizing a wide variety of behavior.
So as I mentioned, mental health has been criminalized in many ways,
substance abuse has been criminalized.
But even if you just take, say, one specific instance,
looking at sex offenders.
Before we had sex offender registries in the United States,
the Adam Walsh Act, and requiring sex offenders to register,
which is a relatively recent phenomenon in our nation's criminal justice history,
there was no crime for, say, failing to register or being a sex offender and
living in certain areas within, say, 1000 feet of the school.
Those were not criminal offenses.
But once those laws were passed, it has now created new criminal classes.
If you're a sex offender, and you're living within 1,000 feet of the school,
that's a crime.
Or if you fail to register, that's a crime.
And we will lock you back up for that crime.
With over 700,000 sex offenders registered in the United States,
now we've created a much larger body of people that we can incarcerate or
re-incarcerate for violating criminal statutes that previously did not exist.
So that's just one small slice.
Obviously, that's not part of the much bigger picture of criminalizing certain
behaviors in people in the United States, but it's just one example.
>> But what I'm hearing you say is that the solution,
or a solution to the private prison industry is decriminalization.
>> Yes, in many ways, reducing our prison's population.
Sentencing reform to reduce criminal offenses,
the penalties for committing certain acts,
funneling substance abusers into treatment rather than prisons or jail.
Transferring mental health offenders, people who are mentally ill and
commit crimes, mostly low level status offenses,
out of the criminal justice system and more into the treatment arena.
It's a sad commentary that we have more mentally ill people locked up in
prisons and jails in the United States than we do in mental health facilities.
Prisons and jails are the de facto solution to mental
health problems in the United States, which is a tragedy.
But more broadly, I think it should be recognized that if you look at
the chicken and the egg, which came first, mass incarceration, private prisons.
In my view, and many other's views, prison privatization,
the private prison industry did not cause mass incarceration.
It was a result of mass incarceration.
It was because our policymakers began locking up so
many people that it created that market need, that niche that I mentioned,
for bed space, that caused the private prison industry to come into existence.
If you reduce, eliminate, that need for that bed space by decarcerating, or
reducing our nation's prison population, then that will remove that market need.
So yes, I would agree that the ultimate solution to the private prison problem
is our overall prison problem of mass incarceration.
>> Well, thank you very much for your time and your expertise.
>> Well, thank you, that you very much.
And if people do want more information, our website is prisonlegalnews.org.
That's prisonlegalnews, news is plural, .org.
And we've been publishing on criminal justice issues, both private prison and
public, more emphasis on public prisons for over 26 years.
>> All right, thank you.
>> Thank you.
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