Masked Racism: Reflections On The Prison Industrial Complex
By Angela Y. Davis
(This article appears in the Fall 1998 issue of ColorLines, a new
quarterly magazine devoted to Race, Culture & Action.
Subscriptions are $15 for six issues and are available at
http://www.arc.org/Pages/ArcColorLines.html)
Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far
too many of the social problems that burden people who are
ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being
conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by
the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of
color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental
illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that
disappear from public view when the human beings contending with
them are relegated to cages.
Prisons thus perform a feat of magic. Or rather the people
who continually vote in new prison bonds and tacitly assent to a
proliferating network of prisons and jails have been tricked into
believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not
disappear problems, they disappear human beings. And the practice
of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant, and
racially marginalized communities has literally become big
business.
The seeming effortlessness of magic always conceals an
enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work. When prisons disappear
human beings in order to convey the illusion of solving social
problems, penal infrastructures must be created to accommodate a
rapidly swelling population of caged people. Goods and services
must be provided to keep imprisoned populations alive. Sometimes
these populations must be kept busy and at other times -
particularly in repressive super-maximum prisons and in INS
detention centers - they must be deprived of virtually all
meaningful activity. Vast numbers of handcuffed and shackled
people are moved across state borders as they are transferred
from one state or federal prison to another.
All this work, which used to be the primary province of
government, is now also performed by private corporations, whose
links to government in the field of what is euphemistically
called "corrections" resonate dangerously with the military
industrial complex. The dividends that accrue from investment in
the punishment industry, like those that accrue from investment
in weapons production, only amount to social destruction. Taking
into account the structural similarities and profitability of
business-government linkages in the realms of military production
and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be
characterized as a "prison industrial complex".
The Color Of Imprisonment
Almost two million people are currently locked up in the
immense network of U.S. prisons and jails. More than 70 percent
of the imprisoned population are people of color. It is rarely
acknowledged that the fastest growing group of prisoners are
black women and that Native American prisoners are the largest
group per capita. Approximately five million people - including
those on probation and parole - are directly under the
surveillance of the criminal justice system.
Three decades ago, the imprisoned population was
approximately one-eighth its current size. While women still
constitute a relatively small percentage of people behind bars,
today the number of incarcerated women in California alone is
almost twice what the nationwide women's prison population was in
1970. According to Elliott Currie, "[t]he prison has become a
looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our
history - or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of
major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly
implemented government social program of our time."
To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the
political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of
criminality - such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing
criminal children - and on racist practices in arrest,
conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute
the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear
the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is
stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is
racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist
profit. The prison industrial system materially and morally
impoverishes its inhabitants and devours the social wealth needed
to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers
of prisoners.
As prisons take up more and more space on the social
landscape, other government programs that have previously sought
to respond to social needs - such as Temporary Assistance to
Needy Families - are being squeezed out of existence. The
deterioration of public education, including prioritizing
discipline and security over learning in public schools located
in poor communities, is directly related to the prison
"solution".
Profiting From Prisoners
As prisons proliferate in U.S. society, private capital has
become enmeshed in the punishment industry. And precisely because
of their profit potential, prisons are becoming increasingly
important to the U.S. economy. If the notion of punishment as a
source of potentially stupendous profits is disturbing by itself,
then the strategic dependence on racist structures and ideologies
to render mass punishment palatable and profitable is even more
troubling.
Prison privatization is the most obvious instance of
capital's current movement toward the prison industry. While
government-run prisons are often in gross violation of
international human rights standards, private prisons are even
less accountable. In March of this year, the Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA), the largest U.S. private prison
company, claimed 54,944 beds in 68 facilities under contract or
development in the U.S., Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom, and
Australia. Following the global trend of subjecting more women to
public punishment, CCA recently opened a women's prison outside
Melbourne. The company recently identified California as its "new
frontier".
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC), the second largest
U.S. prison company, claimed contracts and awards to manage 46
facilities in North America, U.K., and Australia. It boasts a
total of 30,424 beds as well as contracts for prisoner health
care services, transportation, and security.
Currently, the stocks of both CCA and WCC are doing
extremely well. Between 1996 and 1997, CCA's revenues increased
by 58 percent, from $293 million to $462 million. Its net profit
grew from $30.9 million to $53.9 million. WCC raised its revenues
from $138 million in 1996 to $210 million in 1997. Unlike public
correctional facilities, the vast profits of these private
facilities rely on the employment of non-union labor.
The Prison Industrial Complex
But private prison companies are only the most visible
component of the increasing corporatization of punishment.
Government contracts to build prisons have bolstered the
construction industry. The architectural community has identified
prison design as a major new niche. Technology developed for the
military by companies like Westinghouse are being marketed for
use in law enforcement and punishment.
Moreover, corporations that appear to be far removed from
the business of punishment are intimately involved in the
expansion of the prison industrial complex. Prison construction
bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for
leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners
and their families outrageous prices for the precious telephone
calls which are often the only contact prisoners have with the
free world.
Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis
have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as
third world labor power exploited by U.S.-based global
corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to
joblessness and many even wind up in prison. Some of the
companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas
Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only
the hi-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor.
Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as
"Prison Blues," as well as t-shirts and jackets made in Oregon
prisons. The advertising slogan for these clothes is "made on the
inside to be worn on the outside." Maryland prisoners inspect
glass bottles and jars used by Revlon and Pierre Cardin, and
schools throughout the world buy graduation caps and gowns made
by South Carolina prisoners.
"For private business," write Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans
(a political prisoner inside the Federal Correctional Institution
at Dublin, California) "prison labor is like a pot of gold. No
strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment
insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers,
as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on
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 lingerie for Victoria's Secret - all at a fraction
of the cost of 'free labor.'"
Devouring The Social Wealth
Although prison labor - which ultimately is compensated at a
rate far below the minimum wage - is hugely profitable for the
private companies that use it, the penal system as a whole does
not produce wealth. It devours the social wealth that could be
used to subsidize housing for the homeless, to ameliorate public
education for poor and racially marginalized communities, to open
free drug rehabilitation programs for people who wish to kick
their habits, to create a national health care system, to expand
programs to combat HIV, to eradicate domestic abuse - and, in the
process, to create well-paying jobs for the unemployed.
Since 1984 more than twenty new prisons have opened in
California, while only one new campus was added to the California
State University system and none to the University of California
system. In 1996-97, higher education received only 8.7 percent of
the State's General Fund while corrections received 9.6 percent.
Now that affirmative action has been declared illegal in
California, it is obvious that education is increasingly reserved
for certain people, while prisons are reserved for others. Five
times as many black men are presently in prison as in four year
colleges and universities. This new segregation has dangerous
implications for the entire country.
By segregating people labeled as criminals, prison
simultaneously fortifies and conceals the structural racism of
the U.S. economy. Claims of low unemployment rates - even in
black communities - make sense only if one assumes that the vast
numbers of people in prison have really disappeared and thus have
no legitimate claims to jobs. The numbers of black and Latino men
currently incarcerated amount to two percent of the male labor
force. According to criminologist David Downes, "[t]reating
incarceration as a type of hidden unemployment may raise the
jobless rate for men by about one-third, to 8 percent. The effect
on the black labor force is greater still, raising the [black]
male unemployment rate from 11 percent to 19 percent."
Hidden Agenda
Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is
it a solution to the vast array of social problems that are
hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons and jails.
However, the great majority of people have been tricked into
believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the
historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work.
Racism has undermined our ability to create a popular critical
discourse to contest the ideological trickery that posits
imprisonment as key to public safety. The focus of state policy
is rapidly shifting from social welfare to social control.
Black, Latino, Native American, and many Asian youth are
portrayed as the purveyors of violence, traffickers of drugs, and
as envious of commodities that they have no right to possess.
Young black and Latina women are represented as sexually
promiscuous and as indiscriminately propagating babies and
poverty. Criminality and deviance are racialized. Surveillance is
thus focused on communities of color, immigrants, the unemployed,
the undereducated, the homeless, and in general on those who have
a diminishing claim to social resources. Their claim to social
resources continues to diminish in large part because law
enforcement and penal measures increasingly devour these
resources. The prison industrial complex has thus created a
vicious cycle of punishment which only further impoverishes those
whose impoverishment is supposedly "solved" by imprisonment.
Therefore, as the emphasis of government policy shifts from
social welfare to crime control, racism sinks more deeply into
the economic and ideological structures of U.S. society.
Meanwhile, conservative crusaders against affirmative action and
bilingual education proclaim the end of racism, while their
opponents suggest that racism's remnants can be dispelled through
dialogue and conversation. But conversations about "race
relations" will hardly dismantle a prison industrial complex that
thrives on and nourishes the racism hidden within the deep
structures of our society.
The emergence of a U.S. prison industrial complex within a
context of cascading conservatism marks a new historical moment,
whose dangers are unprecedented. But so are its opportunities.
Considering the impressive number of grassroots projects that
continue to resist the expansion of the punishment industry, it
ought to be possible to bring these efforts together to create
radical and nationally visible movements that can legitimize
anti-capitalist critiques of the prison industrial complex. It
ought to be possible to build movements in defense of prisoners'
human rights and movements that persuasively argue that what we
need is not new prisons, but new health care, housing, education,
drug programs, jobs, and education. To safeguard a democratic
future, it is possible and necessary to weave together the many
and increasing strands of resistance to the prison industrial
complex into a powerful movement for social transformation.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Arm The Spirit is an autonomist/anti-imperialist information
collective based in Toronto, Canada. Our focus includes a wide
variety of material, including political prisoners, national
liberation struggles, armed communist resistance, anti-fascism,
the fight against patriarchy, and more. We regularly publish our
writings, research, and translation materials on our listserv
called ATS-L. For more information, contact:
Arm The Spirit
P.O. Box 6326, Stn. A
Toronto, Ontario
M5W 1P7 Canada
E-mail: ats@etext.org
WWW: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~ats/
ATS-L Archives: http://burn.ucsd.edu/archives/ats-l
-----------------------------------------------------------------
(
geocities.com/CapitolHill)