Arbeitslosenselbsthilfe O l d e n b u r g
Kaiserstr. 19
D-26122 Oldenburg (Oldenburg)
Antwort in : /alt/activism/d Absender : ljanklip@concentric.net (Lara Johnson) Betreff : Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy Datum : Mo 13.07.98, 20:29 (erhalten: 14.07.98) Groesse : 22677 Bytes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ## Ursprung : /misc/activism/progressive
The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy by Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans http://www.amandla.org/osepp/prisoners/news/pinduscom.html
Over 1.8 million people are currently behind bars in the US. This represents the highest per capita incarceration rate in the history of the world. In 1995 alone, 150 new US prisons were built and filled.
This monumental commitment to lock up a sizeable percentage of the population is an integral part of the globalization of capital. Several strands converge -- the end of the Cold War, changing relations between labor and capital on an international scale, domestic economic decline, racism, the US role as policeman of the world, and growth of the international drug economy -- creating a booming prison/industrial complex. And the prison industrial complex is rapidly becoming an essential component of the US economy.
PRISONS ARE BIG BUSINESS
Like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex is an interweaving of private business and government interests. Its twofold purpose is profit and social control. Its public rationale is the fight against crime.
Not so long ago, communism was "the enemy" and communists were demonized as a way of justifying gargantuan military expenditures. Now, fear of crime and the demonization of criminals serve a similar ideological purpose: to justify the use of tax dollars for the repression and incarceration of a growing percentage of our population. The omnipresent media blitz about serial killers, missing children, and "random violence" feeds our fear. In reality, however, most of the "criminals" we lock up are poor people who commit nonviolent crimes out of economic need. Violence occurs in less than 14% of all reported crime, and injuries occur in just 3%. In California, the top three charges for entering prison are: possesion of a controlled substance for sale, possession of a controlled substance, and robbery. Violent crimes like murder, rape, manslaughter and kidnaping don't even make the top ten.
Like fear of communism during the Cold War, fear of crime is a great sales tool for a dubious product. As with the building and maintenance of weapons and armies, the building and maintenance of prisons are big business. Investment houses, construction companies, architects, and support services, such as food, medical, transportation and furniture, all stand to profit by prison expansion. A burgeoning "specialty item" industry sells fencing, handcuffs, drug detectors, productive vests, and other security devices to prisons.
As the cold war winds down and the Crime War heats up, defense industry
giants like Westinghouse are re-tooling and lobbying Washington for their
share of the domestic law enforcement market. "Night enforcer" goggles used
in the Gulf War, electronic "Hot Wire" fencing ("so hot NATO chose it for
high risk installations"), and other equipment once used by the military,
are now being marketed to the criminal justice system.
Communications companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI are getting into the act as well -- gouging prisoners with exorbitant rates for phone calls, often six times the normal long distance charge. Smaller firms like Correctional Communications Corp., dedicated solely to the prison phone business, provide computerized prison phone systems -- fully equipped for systematic surveillance. They win government contracts by offering to kick back some of the profits to government agency awarding the contract. These companies are reaping huge profits at the expense of prisoners and their families; prisoners are often effectively cut off from communication due to the excessive cost of phone calls.
One of the fastest growing sectors of the prison industrial complex is private corrections companies. Investment firm Smith Barney is a part owner of a prison in Florida. American Express and General Electric have invested in private prison construction in Oklahoma and Tennessee. Correctional Corporation Of America, one of the largest private prison owners, already operates internationally, with 48 facilities in 11 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Under contract by government to run jails and prisons, and paid a fixed sum per prisoner, the profit motive mandates that these firms operate as cheaply and efficiently as possible. This means lower wages for staff, no unions, and fewer services for prisoners. Private contracts also mean less public scrutiny. Prison owners are raking in billions by cutting corners which harm prisoners. Substandard diets, extreme overcrowding, and abuses by poorly trained personnel have all been documented and can be expected in these institutions which are unabashedly about making money.
Prisons are also a leading rural growth industry. With traditional agriculture being pushed aside by agribusiness, many rural American communities are facing hard times. Economically depressed areas are falling over each other to secure a prison facility of their own. Prisons are seen as a source of jobs -- in construction, local vendors and prison staff -- as well as a source of tax revenues. An average prisons has a staff of several hundred employees and an annual payroll of several million dollars
Like any industry, the prison economy needs raw materials. In this case the raw materials are prisoners! The prison industrial complex can grow only if more and more people are incarcerated for longer periods -- even if crime rates drop. "Three Strikes" and mandatory minimums (harsh, fixed sentences without parole) are two examples of the legal superstructure quickly being put in place to guarantee that the prison population will grow and grow and grow.
LABOR AND THE FLIGHT OF CAPITAL
The growth of the prison industrial complex is inextricably tied to the fortunes of labor. Ever since the onset of the Reagan-Bush years in 1980, workers in the US have been under siege. Aggressive union busting, corporate deregulation, and especially the flight of capital in search of cheaper labor markets, have been crucial factors in the downward plight of American workers.
One wave of capital flight occurred in the 1970s. Manufacturing such as textiles in the Northeast moved south to South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama -- non-union states where wages are low. During the 1980s, many more industries (steel, auto, etc.) closed up shop -- moving on to Mexico, Brazil, or Taiwan where wages were a mere fraction of those in the US and environmental, health and safety standards were much lower, allowing businesses to be "more competitive" -- that is, more profitable at the expense of both the areas abandoned and the areas entered. Most seriously hurg by these plant closures and layoffs were African-Americans and other semiskilled workers in urban centers who lost their decent paying industrial jobs.
Into the gaping economic hole left by the exodus of jobs from US cities has rushed another economy: the drug economy.
THE WAR ON DRUGS
The "War on Drugs," launched by President Reagan in the mid-eighties, has been fought on interlocking international and domestic fronts.
At the international level, the war on drugs has been both a cynical cover-up of US government involvement in the drug trade, as well as justification for US military intervention and control in the Third World.
Over the last 50 years, the primary avowed goal of US foreign policy (and the military industrial complex) has been "to fight communism" (and protect corporate interests). To this end, the US government has, with regularity, formed strategic alliances with drug dealers throughout the world. At the conclusion of World War II, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) allied itself with heroin traders on the docks of Marseilles in an effort to wrest power away from communist dock workers. During the Vietnam war, the CIA aided the heroin-producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle area. In return for their cooperation with the US governments war against the Vietnamese NLF and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of Southeast Asia into America. It's no accident that heroin addiction in the US rose exponentially in the 1960s.
Nor is it an accident that cocaine began to proliferate in the US during the 1980s. Central America is the strategic midpoint for air travel between Colombia and the US. The Contra War against the Sadinista Nicaragua, as well as the war against the national liberation forces in El Salvador, was largely about control of this critical area. When Congress cut off financial support for the Contras, Oliver North and Bill Casey found other ways to fund the Contra re-supply operations at Reagan and Bush's behest, in part through drug dealing. Planes loaded with arms for the Contras took-off from the souther US, offloaded their weapons on private landing trips in Honduras, then loaded up with cocaine for the return trip.
A 1996 expose by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News documented CIA involvement in a Nicaraguan drug ring which poured thousands of kilos of cocaine into LAs African American neighbourhoods in the 1980s. Drug boss Danilo Bandon, now an informant for the DEA, acknowledged under oath the drugs-for-weapons deals with the CIA-sponsored Contras. US military presence in Central and Latin America has not stopped drug traffic. But it has influenced aspects of the drug trade, and is a powerful force of social control in the region. US military intervention -- whether in propping up dictators or squashing peasant uprisings -- now operates under cover of the righteous "war against drugs and narcoterrorism," while the real narco-terrorists and narco-dictators operate with US protection.
In Mexico, for example, US military aid supposedly earmarked for the drug war is being used to arm Mexican troops in the southern part of the country. The drug trade, however (production transfer, and distribution points) is all in the north. The drug war money is being used primarily to fight against the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas who are demanding land reform and economic policy changes which are diametricaly opposed to the transnational corporate agenda.
In the Colombian jungles of Cartagena de Chaira, coca has become the only viable commercial crop. In 1996, 30,000 farmers blocked roads and airstrips to prevent crop spraying from aircraft. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), one of the oldest guerilla organizations in Latin America, held 60 government soldiers hostage for nine months demanding that the military leave the jungle, that social services be increased, and that alternative crops be made available to farmers. And given the notorious involvement of Colombia's highest officials with the powerful drug cartels, it is not surprising that most US "drug war" military aid actually goes to fighting the guerrillas.
One result of the international war on drugs has been the internationalization of the US prison population. For the most part, it's the low level 'mules' carrying drugs into this country who are captured and incarcerated in ever-increasing numbers. At least 25% of inmates in the federal prison system today will be subject to deportation when their sentences are completed.
Here at home, the war on drugs has been a war on poor people. Particularly poor, urban, African American men and women. It's well documented that police enforcement of the new, harsh drug laws have been focused on low-level dealers in communities of color. Arrests of African Americans have been about five times higher than arrests of whites, although whites and African Americans use drugs at about the same rate. And, African Americans have been imprisoned in numbers even more disproportionate than their relative arrest rates. It is estimated that in 1994, on any given day, one out of every 128 US adults was incarcerated, while one out of every 17 African American adult males was incarcerated.
The differential in sentencing for powder and crack cocaine is one glaring example of institutionalized racism. About 90% of crack arrests are of African-Americans, while 75% of powder cocaine are of whites. Under federal law, it takes only five grams to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence. But it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine -- 100 times as much -- to trigger this same sentence. This flagrant injustice was highlighted by a 1996 nationwide federal prison rebellion when Congress refused to enact changes in sentencing laws that would equalize penalties.
Statistics show that police repression and mass incarceration are not curbing the drug trade. Dealers are forced to move, turf is reshuffled, already vulnerable families broken up. But the demand for drugs still exists, as do huge profits for high-level dealers in this 50 billion-dollar international industry.
From one point of view, the war on drugs could actually be seen as a pre-emptive strike. The state's repressive apparatus working overtime. Put poor people away before they get angry. Incarcerate those at the bottom, the helpless, the hopeless, before they demand change. What drugs don't damage -- in terms of intact communities, the ability to take action, to organize -- the war on drugs and mass imprisonment aims to destroy.
The crack down on drugs has not stopped drug use on the streets or in the prisons. But it has taken thousands of unemployed (and potentially angry and rebellious) young men and women off the streets. And it has created a mushrooming prison population.
PRISON LABOR
An American worker who once upon a time made $8 an hour, loses his job when the company relocates to Thailand where workers are paid only $2 a day. Unemployed, and alienated from a society indifferent to his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison, and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents an hour.
From worker to unemployed to criminal to convict laborer, the cycle has come full circle. and the only victor is big business.
For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No unemployment insurance or worker's compensation to pay. No language or shipping problem, as in a foreign country. New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and even lingerie for Victoria's Secret. All at a fraction of the cost of "free labor."
Prisoners can be forced to work for pennies because they have no rights. Even the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which abolished slavery, excludes prisoners from its protections.
And, more and more, prisons are charging inmates for basic necessities, from medical care, to toilet paper, to use of the law library. Many states are now charging room and board. Berks county prison in PA is charging inmates $10 per day to be there. California has similar legislation pending. So, while government cannot (yet) actually require inmates to work at private industry jobs for less than minimum wage, they are forced to by necessity.
Some prison enterprises are state run. Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry corporation) make recycled furniture and work 40 hours a week for about $40 per month. The Oregon Prison Industries produces a line of "Prison Blues" blue jeans. An ad in their catalogue shows a handsome prison inmate saying, "I say we should make bell-bottoms. They say I'be been in here too long."
Bizarre, but true.
Prison industries are often directly competing with private industry. Small furniture manufacturers around the country complain that they are being driven out of business by UNICOR, which pays 23 cents an hour and has the inside track on government contracts. In another case, US Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150 workers unemployed. Six weeks later, the electronics plant reopened in a nearby prison.
WELCOME TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER
The proliferation of prisons in the US is one piece of a puzzle called the globalization of capital.
Since the end of the Cold War, capitalism has gone on an international business offensive. No longer impeded by an alternative nominally-socialist economy or by the threat of national liberation movements supported by the Soviet Union or China, transnational corporations see the world as their oyster. Agencies such as the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, bolstered by agreements like NAFTA and GATT are putting more and more power into the hands of transnational corporations by putting the squeeze on national governments. The primary mechanisms of controls is debt. For decades, developing countries have depended on foreign loans, resulting in increasing vulnerability to the transnational corporate strategy for the global economy. Access to international credit and aid is given only if governments agree to certain conditions known as "structural adjustment."
In a nutshell, structural adjustment requires cuts in social services, privatization of state-run industry, repeal of agreements with labor about working conditions and minimum wage, conversion of multi-use farm lands into cash crop agriculture for export, and the dismantling of trade laws which protect local economies. Under structural adjustment, police and military expenditures are the only government spending that is encourages. The sovereignty of nations is compromised when, as in the case of Vietnam, trade sanctions are threatened unless the government allows Camel cigarettes to litter the countryside with billboards, or promises to spend millions in the US-orchestrated crackdown on drugs.
The basic transnational corporate philosophy is this: the world is a single market; natural resources are to be exploited; people are consumers; anything which hinders profit is to be routed out and destroyed. The results of this philosophy in actions are that while economies are growing, so is poverty, so is ecological destruction, so are sweatshops and child labor. Across the globe, wages are plummeting, indigenous people are being forced off their lands, rivers are becoming industrial dumping grounds, and forests are being obliterated. Massive regional starvation and "World Bank riots" are becoming more frequent throughout the Third World.
All over the world, more and more people are being forced into illegal activity for their own survival as traditional cultures and social structures are destroyed. Inevitably, crime and imprisonment rates are on the rise. And the US law enforcement establishment is in the forefront, domestically and internationally, in providing state-of-the-art repression.
Within the US, structural adjustment (sometimes known as either Contract With America or Clintonomics) takes the form of welfare and social services cuts, continued massive military spending, and skyrocketing prison spending. Walk through any poor urban neighbourhood: school systems are crumbling, after-school programs, libraries, parks and drug treatment centers are closed. But you will see more police stations and more cops. Often, the only "social service" available to poor young people is jail.
The dismantling of social programs, and the growing dominance of the right-wing agenda in US politics has been made possible, at least in part, by the successful repression of the civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s and '70's. Many of the leaders -- Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and many others -- were assassinated. Others, like Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt), Leonard Peltier, and Mumia Abu Jamal, have been locked up. Over 150 political leaders from the black liberation struggle, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and other resistance efforts are still in prison. Many are serving sentences ranging from 40 to 90 or more years. Oppressed communities have been robbed of vital radical political leadership which might have led an opposition movement. We are reaping the results.
The number of people in US prisons has more than tripled in the past 17 years, from 500,000 in 1980 to 1.8 million in 1997. Today, more than five million people are behind bars, on parole, probation, or under other supervision by the criminal justice system. The state of California now spends more on prisons than on higher education, and over the past decade has built 19 prisons and only one branch university.
Add to this, the fact that increasing numbers of women are being locked up. Between 1980 and 1994, the number of women in prison increased five-fold. Many of these women are mothers, leaving future generations growing up in foster homes or on the streets.
Welcome to the New World Order.
[Excerpt from TURNING THE TIDE -- Journal of Anti-Racist Activism, Research
and Education. Volume 11, Number 2. Summer 1998. To subscribe write to:
PART (People Against Racist Terror), P O Box 1055, Culver City CA
90232-1055. $15 regular, $25 institutional or foreign, $50 sustaining.]
>> Amandla Awethu" <<>> Power to the People <<
+------------------------------------------------------+
|>> http://www.amandla.org << ljohnson@amandla.org |
+------------------------------------------------------+
| MASAKHANE - South African 'Nation Building' |
| JERICHO'98 - Amnesty of Political Prisoners |
| OSEPP-Org' for Sensible & Effective Prison Policy |
| SACOPS - SA Communities Organizing for Public Safety |
|GMPPJ-Grassroots Movements Promoting Peace and Justice|
+------------------------------------------------------+
+-+ sent by the Prison Activist List prisonact-list@igc.org +-+ See the Prison Issues Desk webpage at http://www.igc.org/prisons .
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@igc.org with this text in the body: unsubscribe prisonact-list
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
Index of Welfare-Workfare-State Archives
Last Modified: October 1998