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WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : The Brutal Society
Prisons: a booming industry in the US and Europe
By Joseph Delius
5 June 2000
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For some years now, within the economically advanced countries two parallel
developments have been proceeding at an increasing pace, and in reverse
proportion to each other: the dismantling of social welfare systems and the
expansion of the prison system. The customary justification for the billions of
dollars being spent on the construction of new prisons, increases in the scope
and severity of criminal justice and the introduction of new forms of
punishment is that all this "serves to protect the public from violent crime".
Yet most crime statistics show conclusively that the violent crime rate has
declined, or at least stagnated, over the past few years. As opposed to this,
the number of prison inmates who committed offences in no way violent, but
intrinsically linked to poverty and social inequality, has increased
dramatically. Government plans and "prison reforms" are all based on the
assumption that this development will continue at an even greater pace and
become a permanent feature of society. Thus, preparations are being made to
accommodate a growing percentage of the population that will, at least
temporarily, find itself behind prison bars.
This process is becoming more and more apparent in Europe. For instance, in
Germany 2.5 billion marks ($US1.25 billion) have just been allocated for the
expansion of the prison system, for construction work alone (i.e., not
including overhead, administrative, personnel or other operational costs). The
objective is to increase prison capacity by up to 50 percent in the eastern
German states, and by about 25 percent in several of the western German states.
The same trend is evident in other European countries as well, particularly in
Britain where current planning will require the construction of at least two
dozen new prisons over the next 10 years. In France the Minister of Justice
recently announced that seven new prisons will be built, and five of the
largest existing prisons modernized at a total construction cost of 5.5 billion
francs ($US800 million).
Noteworthy as these figures are, the growth of the prison systems in Europe is
still far behind that of the "world leader" in incarceration, the United
States, where approximately two million people are now in prison. In other
words, a country whose population makes up only 5 percent of the world's
population now accounts for one quarter of all prison inmates worldwide. The
prison population of the US has increased by 61 percent over the past 10 years,
and is still growing.
Some US states are already spending considerably more on their prison systems
than on higher education. California has the highest incarceration rate in the
world with over 626 prison inmates per 100,000 state residents. (By comparison,
the incarceration rate in Indonesia is 21 per 100,000 inhabitants; Germany, 81;
France, 84; and Britain, 94). Recent official statistics and independent
studies show that California spends a total of roughly $5.6 billion dollars per
year (all costs included) on its prison system, but only $4.3 billion on its
schools and universities.
Not that this ominous "model" has damped the fervor with which European
governments and established parties are pursuing their "get tough on crime"
policies. On the contrary: The competition for recognition as the harshest
propagator of repressive criminal law is being fought out among them with the
same intensity as their vying for acclaim as the best representative of big
business interests.
Crime and society
In an article published May 4 in the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung,
journalist Heribert Prantl asked Christian Pfeiffer, the director of the KFN (
Kriminologisches Forschungsinstitut Niedersachsen) crime research institute,
what he saw as the underlying reasons for the expansion of the prison system in
Germany. Pfeiffer's conclusions are in striking contrast to official
justifications.
The criminologist stated that the increase in the number of prison inmates had
nothing to do with an increase in crime, but was rather a result of changes in
criminal law practice. He pointed out four essential aspects of this: To begin
with, the law courts had taken a much tougher approach in the second half of
the 1990s. Secondly, more and more people were being incarcerated because they
were not able to pay fines. This was due to the fact that courts were taking
less and less account of people's financial situation, sending out court orders
after the most superficial inquiries, instead of arranging for oral hearings to
establish offenders' personal circumstances.
The judicial system is truly blind in this respect, said Pfeiffer, only
noticing when it's too late that "they've ordered an unemployed person to pay a
four thousand mark fine". The third aspect Pfeiffer sees is that not only is
prison "input" on the increase, but fewer inmates are being granted early
release—so more people are being put into jail, and fewer are getting out. The
fourth reason for the growing prison population, according to Pfeiffer, is that
"immigrants are being punished more severely for the same crimes than Germans
are".
It can come as no surprise that this kind of critical analysis meets with
vehement rejection, or is completely ignored by the governments and responsible
authorities and politicians in the involved countries. Otherwise they would
have to admit that they themselves are responsible for the overcrowded prisons
they publicly deplore.
The ruthless dismantling of social welfare systems and the effects of global
capitalism have dramatically changed the lives of millions of people. Many who
previously just managed to get by on the fringes of the "social network" are
now faced with destitution. But even layers of the population who in the past
were able to make a fairly secure living are now confronted with financial
difficulties that were previously quite alien to them. There is an explosive
potential for social unrest in this, and the ruling class is aware of it. The
shocking realization of how easy it is to land in jail these days is thus
something which can be put to use as a means of disciplining the population.
Also, constant emphasis of the danger posed by crime is used to direct the
anxieties of people disturbed and confused at the way society is evolving
towards the support of repressive policies, including those involving attitudes
towards foreigners and ethnic minorities.
But the risk of falling victim to a crime does not diminish with the increase
in the number of prison cells, as all crime statistics show. It increases with
the demise of social cohesion, of available income, of employment and social
perspectives, of the prospect of a life worth leading. It is thus directly
linked to the growth of social inequality.
Organized crime, another phenomenon often cited by the proponents of "law and
order", also needs to be seen in this context. Both historically and in present
times, its roots lie in the ruins of collapsed social structures, where it
constantly emerges anew. As long as those preconditions exist, no manner of
prison capacity increase will curtail the activities of these ruthlessly
organized, maximum-profit-oriented criminal corporations whose structures reach
far into the inner workings of prison life—and whose connections often enough
extend to the upper echelons of the legal power elite.
However, such root causes and consequences are not the subject of today's
official debates on legal and prison reform. The main topic there is how to
organize the growing prison world better—and, above all, how to finance it. For
all the differences of opinion on how this can be best achieved, there is
general agreement that the solution must be in line with the principles of the
market economy, through increased exploitation of prison labor and more
privatisation of the prison world.
The prison industry
The prison industry has become a multibillion-dollar business that directly
affects regional economy structures and labor conditions. In the US, the stocks
of successful companies in this field of activity such as C.C.A. (Correction
Corporation of America) have been regarded as a "sure-fire" long-term
investment for some time now.
Apart from supplying prisons with food, installations and equipment, the three
core profit areas for companies active in the prison industry are the
construction of new prisons, the management of private prisons and the economic
exploitation of prison labor. The business advantages of these sectors are
obvious: prison construction is one of the few boom sectors with steady growth
rates and great prospects for the future in the otherwise crisis-beset building
industry. Contracts that include the installation of surveillance and other
security systems offer profit rates that go far beyond the norm.
The operation of privately owned prisons also has a high profit potential.
Above all, it is a secure source of income, since the operators receive a
guaranteed amount of money per inmate from the authorities. Which is why, a few
years ago, the US business newsletter Cabot Market Letter compared C.C.A.
(which also has branches in England, Australia and Puerto Rico) with a "hotel
that is permanently booked up"—for years in advance.
Profits are even better if staff requirements are reduced through the use of
video cameras, "panoptical transparence" and other techniques. In the words of
C.C.A. spokesman Russel Boraas, "the trick is to have a minimum number of
personnel observing a maximum number of prisoners". In one of the newest
prisons in Britain, for instance, "Her Majesty's Prison Park" in Wales, there
are only 13 guards in the control room. One guard can supervise 75 prisoners
from the control console, speaking to them without ever being physically in
their presence, opening or closing every door electronically.
But the sector with the highest earnings potential is prison work, a veritable
paradise for the profitable exploitation of human labor. Largely freed of
expenses such as health insurance, welfare benefits and safety requirements,
companies can have products manufactured here that now go far beyond the former
traditional range of prison goods at wage lavels that essentially amount to
indentured slavery. A typical example: D.N, a prisoner serving time in a
"medium security" prison in California a few years ago, sewed working apparel.
His net earnings after all deductions for a full month of nine-hour working
days were roughly $60. With that kind of profit rate, it is little wonder that
the number of inmates working in the US prison industry increased by 358
percent from 1980 to 1994 alone. And that was only the beginning.
Initially, prison labor was attractive mainly for mid-scale companies that
couldn't afford to relocate their production facilities to low-wage countries.
But now more and more large companies in industries such as semiconductors,
telecommunications, store chains and fashionwear have discovered the benefits
of this form of exploitation. The effect on local labor markets is immediate.
Prisons now move to the front as "unbeatable" wage competitors of workers in
the involved industries and regions. And companies enter into wage negotiations
with a form of "implicit leverage" that everyone involved is aware of. This
also reveals the hyprocrisy of claims that prison labor results in the
"rehabilitation" of inmates, providing them with working skills that help to
"re-integrate them into a normal working life". In reality, they are only
interesting as workers as long as they manufacture products for the lowest
wages possible.
It would be quite mistaken to imagine that such conditions could not spread to
the formerly welfare-oriented societies of Europe. In actual fact, this process
is already in full swing there, with Britain taking the lead and other
countries such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain rapidly catching up. It is
in this context that "reforms" such as the use of “electronic shackles” or
demands for community work as an alternative form of punishment must be seen.
The official rationale for these projects—such as German Minister of Justice
Däubler-Gmelin's demands for more sentencing to enforced community work
modelled on recent practice in Austria—is that they take the load off prisons
and provide better re-integration of offenders into society. But taking into
account the overall development, the inevitable conclusion is that it is the
prison system itself which is being integrated into society as a whole, not the
inmates of that system.
Copyright 1998-2000
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : The Brutal Society
Prison labor on the rise in US
By Alan Whyte and Jamie Baker
8 May 2000
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US trade union officials have repeatedly denounced China for its use of prison
labor, as part of the AFL-CIO's campaign against the normalization of trade
relations with China. At the same time, however, the union officials have
virtually been silent about the huge growth of prison labor in the United
States.
There are presently 80,000 inmates in the US employed in commercial activity,
some earning as little as 21 cents an hour. The US government program Federal
Prison Industries (FPI) currently employs 21,000 inmates, an increase of 14
percent in the last two years alone. FPI inmates make a wide variety of
products—such as clothing, file cabinets, electronic equipment and military
helmets—which are sold to federal agencies and private companies. FPI sales are
$600 million annually and rising, with over $37 million in profits.
In addition, during the last 20 years more than 30 states have passed laws
permitting the use of convict labor by commercial enterprises. These programs
now exist in 36 states.
Prisoners now manufacture everything from blue jeans, to auto parts, to
electronics and furniture. Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same
work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do. Konica has used
prisoners to repair copiers for less than 50 cents an hour. Toys R Us used
prisoners to restock shelves, and Microsoft to pack and ship software. Clothing
made in California and Oregon prisons competes so successfully with apparel
made in Latin America and Asia that it is exported to other countries.
Inmates are also employed in a wide variety of service jobs as well. TWA has
used prisoners to handle reservations, while AT&T has used prison labor for
telemarketing. In Oregon, prisoners do all the data entry and record keeping in
the Secretary of State's corporation division. Other jobs include desktop
publishing, digital mapping and computer-aided design work.
US employers have pointed to the tight labor market for their interest in
employing prisoners. But the other advantages, though not stated publicly, are
obvious. The prison system can provide an “ideal” workforce: employers do not
have to pay health or unemployment insurance, vacation time, sick leave or
overtime. They can hire, fire or reassign inmates as they so desire, and can
pay the workers as little as 21 cents an hour. The inmates cannot respond with
a strike, file a grievance, or threaten to leave and get a better job.
Prisoners who refuse to work under these conditions are labeled “uncooperative”
and risk losing time off for “good behavior,” as well as privileges such as
library access and recreation. In one case, two prisoners at California's
Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility were put in solitary confinement after
a local television station broadcast their complaints about working for C.M.T.,
a T-shirt manufacturer that required them to put in 60 days of unpaid
“training.”
The growth of prison labor has directly led to the destruction of other
workers' jobs. For example, Lockhart Technologies, Inc. closed its plant in
Austin, Texas, dismissing its 150 workers so that it could open shop in a state
prison in Lockhart. The prisoners assemble circuit boards for industrial giants
such as IBM, Compaq and Dell. Lockhart is not required to pay for health or any
other benefits. The company must pay the prison the federal minimum wage for
each laborer, but the inmates get to keep only 20 percent of that.
Linen service workers have lost their jobs when their employer contracted with
the prison laundry to do the work. Recycling plant workers have lost their jobs
when prisoners were brought in to sort through hazardous waste, often without
proper protective gear. Construction workers have lost their jobs when the
contractors were assigned to build an expansion of their own prison—essentially
making the chains that bind them.
In 1990, California voters approved a change in the state's constitution
allowing the operation of private enterprise in the prisons if the governor
will assure that no civilian jobs will be lost. According to the law, companies
that are about to begin using prison labor are obligated to notify the state's
AFL-CIO, but in reality they rarely do.
In 1994, Oregon residents voted overwhelmingly for a constitutional amendment
mandating that all prisoners work 40 hours a week. As a result, thousands of
public sector jobs have been lost to convict labor, and thousands of private
sector jobs have been lost as a result of firms that now utilize prison labor.
The struggle over prison labor has a long history in the US. In the early
1800s, group workshops in prisons replaced solitary handicrafts, and the
increased efficiency allowed prisons to be self-supporting. Entire prisons were
leased out to private contractors, who literally worked hundreds of prisoners
to death. Manufacturers who lost work to prison contractors opposed the leasing
system, but only with the growth of the union movement came effective
opposition to prison labor. One of the most famous clashes, the Coal Creek
Rebellion of 1891, took place when the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad locked
out their workers and replaced them with convicts. The miners stormed the
prison and freed 400 prisoners, and when the company filled up work with more
prisoners, the miners burned the prison down.
The prison leasing system was disbanded in Tennessee shortly thereafter, but
remained in many states until the rise of the CIO and industrial unionism in
the 1930s. As a result of this mass movement of workers, Congress passed the
1935 Ashurst-Sumners Act, making it illegal to transport prison-made goods
across state lines. However, under the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter,
Congress passed the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, which granted
exemptions from Ashurst-Sumners for seven “Prison Industry Enhancement” pilot
projects. Congress has since granted exemptions to all 50 state prison systems.
Although prison labor is today in its infancy, it could become one of America's
most important growth industries. Over the last decade, the prison population
has increased by 840,000, many of these prisoners having been convicted of
nonviolent crimes. With the use of tough-on-crime mandatory sentencing laws,
the prison population continues to grow. Some experts believe that the number
of people locked up in the US could double in the next 10 years. The expansion
of the number of prisoners will not only increase the pool of slave labor
available for commercial profit, but also will help pay for the costs of
incarceration.
With 2 million inmates, the US already has the largest prison population in the
world. China, which the AFL-CIO consistently condemns as anti-worker and
totalitarian, has a half-million fewer prisoners. With only 5 percent of the
world's population the United States has a quarter of the world's 8 million
prisoners.
Proponents of prison labor have argued that the employment of labor for profit
has a rehabilitative effect. Expenditures for education and training of
prisoners, meanwhile, have been declining.
Nevertheless, the use of right-wing propaganda made possible a situation in
Oregon where 70 percent of voters, including many union members, approved the
use of prison labor. Today, many of these same voters say they were fooled by
the original media campaign advocating prison labor, which maintained that its
essential purpose was to teach inmates proper discipline and prepare them to be
good citizens when they were released.
Today, the AFL-CIO in Oregon is split on the issue. The Teamsters and the
building trades unions and the American Federation of State, County, and
Municipal Employees (AFSCME) now officially stand for the repeal of the prison
labor laws because their implementation has already resulted in the loss of
dues-paying union members. However, corrections officers who are AFSCME members
support prison labor because it makes their jobs a lot easier; they say that
the commercial work keeps the prisoners both occupied and exhausted, and
therefore easier to control.
In 1997, the Tennessee AFL-CIO supported proposals to privatize the state's
prison system, having struck a deal with Corrections Corporation of America
(CCA) to represent the workers. Private, for-profit prisons such as those run
by CCA and Wackenhut have become the modern-day version of the nineteenth
century leased prisons. Brutal treatment of prisoners is commonplace, as the
for-profit entrepreneurs seek to reduce the expense of food and housing in
order to add to the profits from running commercial industries.
Perhaps more significantly, the unions tend to portray inmates as the ones who
should be blamed for the loss of union members' jobs. They depict prisoners as
bad seeds wholly responsible for their own incarceration, rather than the
victims of a system based on the exploitation of workers' labor-power. Unions
have expressed the idea that giving inmates hard work is good because it will
help discipline and rehabilitate them. This ideological outlook turns the
prisoner into the enemy of organized labor, as well as civilized society. This
conception also makes it possible to deflect responsibility from the
corporations that pushed for prison labor, and who are now profiting handsomely
from its use.
One step towards organizing an effective response to the growth of prison labor
is to clarify what is really behind the law-and-order mentally that is being
pushed by both major parties in the US. This would involve examining the
relationship of crime to the growth of poverty, social and economic inequality,
the decline of real career and growth opportunities for millions of people, the
crumbling of schools, the impact of racism and bigotry, and so on.
The labor bureaucracy is incapable of doing this as this would threaten the
privileged position that it enjoys in a system based on the exploitation and
oppression of the working class. It is for this reason that union officials
share and promulgate to their membership the same ideological outlook of the
corporations, which essentially blames the working class for the social
problems that it confronts.
The role of the union bureaucracy can be clearly seen in the political
maneuvers taking place in Washington DC concerning the issue of using inmates
as laborers. Officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons are pushing for
legislation that would expand the use of prison labor. There are now two
competing bills in Congress that would accomplish just that. Representative
Pete Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, is offering one of the bills that would
compel prison labor in state prisons to compete with private enterprise. This
is an absurd attempt to claim that somehow free labor can successfully compete
with the slave-labor conditions in the prisons. Significantly, this bill has
the support of both the United States Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO.
The other bill proposed by Representative Bill McCollum, a Republican from
Florida, would greatly expand the program but allow the inmates to earn a
paltry $1.15 an hour instead of the current 21 cents an hour. This bill also
contains a provision that would prohibit existing jobs from being lost as a
result of the expanded use of convict labor. However, the experience in
California shows that such guarantees are not worth the paper they're printed
on.
There has been discussion about merging the two bills. This demonstrates the
real dangers posed to workers and prisoners alike as both the labor bureaucracy
and the organized voice of big business in America work together to enlarge the
scope of prison labor.
Copyright 1998-2000
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
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