Ted, you make a crucial distinction that is often overlooked (or just unknown) 
by many who are outraged by the relationship between the private sector and the 
(white supremacist) carceral state. The vast majority (more than 90%) of all 
people locked up in the US are in wholly state-managed facilities. Most of 
those held in corporate-managed facilities are in federal custody, and many of 
those are held in “immigrant detention” facilities (may of which are 
managed by non-profit orgs).

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-prisons-united-states/

As you point out, US prisons are currently more a form of wealth extraction 
than labor extraction--a form of gross redistribution of both what little 
wealth the poor have and the vast resources of the state (aka tax dollars).
Of course, this is simply an updated political economy founded on forced labor 
camps (aka plantations) and the exponential growth of the racist carceral state 
following emancipation and the successes of white supremacy in fighting any 
potential Reconstruction might have had.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520250031/emancipation-betrayed

The private sector may collect, but it’s the state that (still) provides 
pretext and enforcement. 
https://www.propublica.org/article/digital-jail-how-electronic-monitoring-drives-defendants-into-debt
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-small-debts-matter-so-much-to-black-lives

Best,
Ryan


> On Dec 5, 2019, at 5:00 AM, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:
> 
> The bad news: There's a difference, which gets lost in the outrage of 
> this Hyperallergic piece, between prisons and the services they rely on: 
> construction, infrastructure maintenance, healthcare, food, etc. Huge 

<....>




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Reply via email to