The New Colossus: The Prison Industry and America’s Age of Prisons (by Allen Tuazon)

8/8/2019 The New Colossus: The Prison Industry and Americas Age of Prisons (by Allen Tuazon)

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The New Colossus:The Prison Industry and Americas Age of Prisons

Allen Tuazon


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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flameIs the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she

With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

- Emma Lazarus,The New Colossus


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Introduction

Engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty is Emma Lazaruss famous poem, The

New Colossus, inviting the huddled masses yearning to break free to America, where Liberty

herself lifts her lamp beside the golden door. In the context of todays prison crisis, however,

that invitation can only be read with the steepest irony; now imprisoning more inmates than

many developed nations combined, the American government defines itself as much by

incarceration as by justice. It is, apparently, the age of prisons; more and more, the vaunted

golden door opens into a cell. The seemingly inevitable progression of this age both staggers

and disturbs the imagination.

The etiology of the age of prisons is complex, having its roots in the convoluted interplay

of political, historical, ideological, and social currents. This essay will examine why so many

Americans are experiencing prisonto begin, a brief survey of prison statistics will set the

background; next, the periodic shifts in American and Western penal philosophy will be

chronicled; third, the political imperatives fueling the prison push will be discussed; and, finally,

the history, formation, and growth of the prison industry will be explored. Ultimately, the essay

will conclude with a succinct, research-based projection of how the prison boom will affect

American society.

Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Break Free: American Prison Statistics

The dimensions of the prison boom cannot be overstated. On February 29, 2008,

Americans retrieving their morning news on the Internet were greeted by a shocking headline:


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More than One in 100 Adults Are Behind Bars (Warren 2008). By the next morning, this

statistic had been reiterated, reprinted, and recited in newspapers and television news programs

all over the nation. If authorities desired to replicate this total of 2,319,258 prisoners (Warren

2008, p. 5), they would need to simultaneously arrest every single man, woman, and child in the

states of Hawaii, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia (Census 2007). As Elsner (2004)

notes, there are more Americans behind bars than the combined populations of metropolitan

Boston, San Francisco and Washington D.C. (p. 12).

What scandalized the public, however, has been known to criminological scholars for

some time. The systemic analyses calculated by prison experts send the mind spinning: Walker

(2006) reveals that, during what he calls an imprisonment orgy beginning in the 1970s, the

number of prisoners has increased sevenfold, with the rate of imprisonment shooting

exponentially from 96 to over 700 per 100,000 (p. 13; cf. Elsner 2004, p. 17). In the same

period, the population of jails more than doubled, the number of convicts on probation tripled,

and the number of adults on parole quadrupled (Walker 2006, p. 14). More than 100,000

juveniles are also in juvenile facilities and lockups around the country (Elsner 2004, p. 12).

When the lens pans out to create a global context, the numbers are magnifiedthe American

incarceration rate (over 700 per 100,000) dwarfs those of the repressive regimes in Russia (628

per 100,000), Thailand (401 per 100,000), South Africa (400 per 100,000), and even Iran (229

per 100,000; Elsner 2004, p. 17). The Peoples Republic of China, widely viewed as one of the

most oppressive nations on Earth, imprisons only 1.5 million people from its massive total

population of 1.3 billion (Warren 2008, p. 5). All in all, the United States imprisons more

individuals than the combined prison populations of twenty-six European nations (Warren 2008,

p. 35).


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Deeper examination of the prison population yields even more appalling dataindeed,

the crisis of captivity is compounded by the tragedy of racial fissure. According to Elsner

(2004), African Americans [account] for more than 40 percent of prison and jail inmates,

although they make up only about 12 percent of the total U.S. population almost one in every

thee black men and almost one in every five Hispanic men can expect to spend time in prison

during his lifetime (p. 13; cf. Cole 2004). This new recalibration in the scales of blind Justice

condemns more and more people according to the color of their skin; as Walker (2006) notes,

74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug offenses are African Americans (p. 15)

Davis (2004) concurs, noting that in the state of California Latinos, who are now in the

majority, account for 35.2 percent [of the prison population]; African Americans 30 percent; and

white prisoners 29.2 percent (p. 13). According to Dyer (2000), the incarceration of blacks in

all state prisons combined was 7.66 times that of whites (p. 183). Strikingly, minorities made

up about one-third of the juvenile population nationwide but accounted for nearly two-thirds of

the detained and committed population in secure juvenile facilities (OJJDP 1999). The same

report (OJJDP 1999) goes on to reveal that, while about one-third of cases at court concern

African American youths, these youths make up four out of ten residents in juvenile detention

facilities.

To house the rising number of prisoners, great penitentiaries now share the skyline in

many parts of America. For example, in California alone, there are now thirty-three prisons,

thirty-eight camps, sixteen community correctional facilities, and five tiny prisoner mother

facilities (Davis 2003, p. 13). Maintaining this network of prisons costs California taxpayers a

whopping 8.8 billion dollars annuallyapproximately nine percent of its total state budget

(Warren 2008, p. 30). While the mean national percentage of state workers employed in


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corrections hovers near eleven percent, in some stateslike Texas and Georgiaapproximately

one out of five state employees works in, with, or for a prison (Warren 2008, p. 33). Twenty

years ago, nation-wide spending on corrections totaled approximately 10.6 billion dollars;

currently, spending has quadrupled to 44 billion dollars a year (Warren 2008, p. 32).

Yet, this ripe market is not attended exclusively by the government; private corporations,

building and running private prisons, currently control some 5 percent of all U.S. prison beds

(Parenti 2000, p. 218). These for-profit firms, like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)

and Wackenhut, have gained nicely from the prison boomCCA has capitalized at $3.5

billion, with Wackenhuts stock price catapulting 800 percent (Parenti 2000, p. 219).

According to Dyer (2000), market analysts believe that the revenues derived from private

incarceration will surpass $5 billion (p. 18). The high number of guards and other employees

on private and public prison payrolls roots the influence of the correctional dollar deep in the

American economy.

The prison crisis, with its broad economic, social, and historical implications, has clearly

reached a critical point in the new century. In order to understand these great changes, however,

the history of and the periodic shifts in American penal philosophy must be examined.

Body, Mind, & Soul: Penal Perspectives throughout Western & American History

The place, stature, and value of incarceration in societyand the rationale used to justify

imprisonment -- have varied greatly throughout history. Due to their wide variance, a heuristic

device is necessary in order to compare the different penal perspectives of different times

indeed, the general progression of penal philosophy would best be viewed in the context of body,


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mind, and soul, which paradigm has been basically intact since the time of Aristotle (Couliano

1987). This section will use the (necessarily oversimplified) heuristic scheme of body, mind,

and soul to evaluate the penal perspectives of Medieval and Renaissance Europe; Europe in the

age of Enlightenment after the Reformation; the Modern West; and finally the penal perspective

of contemporary America, which is the ideological framework of the prison boom.

After the disintegration of the Roman Empire at the end of the first millennium, a

growing Christian civilization gradually spread through Europe. Its social and theological

cornerstone was the Latin Church, which served as a nexus between the diverse cultures,

linguistic groups, and ethnic identities spread across the European continent. While it

accomplished this through the diplomatic, ecclesiastical, and scholarly tongue of Latin, the social

organization of the Church served as a template for the growing legal infrastructure of European

states. The Church was a driving force in the creation of laws; as Peters (1995) notes, the

writings of individual churchmen and respected individual bishops, particularly those of the city

of Rome, also contained advisory and legislative acts that were accepted throughout most of the

Christian world (p. 25). Church and theology were central. The Christian cycle of

punishment/redemption -- which plays a major part both in the story of Jesus of Nazareth as well

as in Christian theology at large (Le Goff 1981) -- was therefore established at the core of

European legal and penal philosophy at the outset of Western civilization.

For Medieval Christians, punishment was understood in terms of body and soul: the soul

because of its eternal value and place in the divine order, and the body because of the bodys

overall importance in the eschatological sequence of resurrection, which is, in the twelfth

century, the regurgitation or reassemblage of exactly the body we possess on earth (Bynum

1995, p. 186). The two were essentially united; acts committed by the body had a direct bearing


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on the condition of the soul, and according to the state of the soul, ones body would appear

either in radiance or in utter degradation at the end of time. Le Goff (1981) lends clarification:

the Churchs attitude toward the dead at the beginning of the twelfth century was this: after

the Last Judgment men will be grouped for all eternity into two classes, the saved and the

damned. A mans fate will be determined essentially by his behavior in life: faith and good

works militate in favor of salvation, impiety and criminal sins consign the soul to hell (p. 133).

Sins and crimes that tarnished the soul and body had to be worked out by the soul and body

during lifethis process of penitence (the true root of the word penitentiary) was the direct

object of ecclesiastical strictures and was governed by the Church: in the name of God, bishops

were expected to determine the nature of spiritual offenses and to apply the appropriate penances

so that a sinner might be corrected and led to salvation by a combination of discipline,

correction, and mercy (Peters 1995, p. 25).

At this point in the development of Western penal philosophy, punishment and

imprisonment were seen as ways to navigate the path between condemnation and salvation

simultaneously, repairing ones relationship with God also restored one to acceptance in the

community. The offender had to be punished in the name of the Law and also for the salvation

of his or her soul (Garland 1990, p. 207). Peters (1995), for example, tells the story of a nun

who, impregnated by her clerical paramour, is chained by fetters on each leg and placed in a

cell with only bread and water to live on after her sin is expiated through the castration of her

lover, however, her chains and fetters fall off (p. 27). It is interesting to note that this

theological rehabilitation of the nuns soul also includes a simultaneous miracle in the nuns

body: all signs of her pregnancy vanish, and she is restored to her previous ecclesiastical status.

Indeed, for medieval Christian theologians, repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole


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life an end of sin at the same time it entails the desire and resolution to change ones life

(CCC 1994, v. 1431, p. 399)a set of goals basically equal, loosely speaking, to the modern

concept of rehabilitation.

The most potent analogy to jail and prison available to the Medieval Christian was the

concept of Purgatory, where the soul, confined, was tried in various torments for the sake of

repentance; as described by Dante, who brought Purgatory to its full theological and artistic

flower, Purgatory is that second kingdom given / the soul of man wherein to purge its guilt / and

so grow worthy to ascend to heaven (1.4-6; Le Goff 1981, p. 338). The comparison is clear:

repentance, proper punishment, mercy, and justice all play a role in the stories of sinners,

criminals, and prisoners. Though secular punishment existed in the Middle Ages and

Renaissance, most secular crimes and their punishments were nevertheless interpreted in the

broader context of reform leading to eventual salvation (Peters 1995). Indeed, criminals were

understood and addressed through the mental categories provided by theology individual

offenders were viewed as sinners whose evil actions bore witness to an individual failure of will

but also to the wretchedness of the human condition (Garland 1990, p. 207). These ideas had an

impact far beyond religious faith; according to Le Goff (1981), the growth of judicial

infrastructure, the development of legal ideas, and the refinement of justice (though still crude by

modern standards) all were undergoing considerable change precisely at a point when

Purgatory was a major focal interest of theologians and scholars (p. 211).

Though the Reformation would, generally speaking, reject the doctrine of Purgatory, the

social and ecclesiastical conventions of Protestant communities nevertheless replicated the

Purgatorial spirit: as MacCulloch (2003) notes, sinners and criminals were forced through an

ordeal of repentance that included the pain of public humiliation; this ceremony remained


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common through the medieval centuries and was reaffirmed at the Council of Trent [in the

16th

century] (p. 597). MacCulloch (2003) goes on to relay the long process of public

redemption experienced by the sinner working his or her way back to public and spiritual

concord; after publically declaring the guilt of their souls, criminals and sinners only gradually

and with great fanfare, bodily mortification and ritualwere allowed to rejoin their

communities. At its most elaborate this was literally an exercise in what anthropologists would

call reducing liminality (p. 598). This process, uniting both body and soul, seems to presage

what would later be called restorative justice (cf. Braithwaite 1998); like later rehabilitative

programs and interventions, the permanent reform of the offender was the goaland, ultimately,

rates of reoffending were low (MacCulloch 2003, p. 599).

The seed of the Reformation, however, would gradually unravel the body-soul axis of the

Western penal philosophy. Theodore Beza, pupil of John Calvin and one of the great (and, for

some sects, greatly despised) reformers of the 16th century, developed a strain of thought that

vastly diminished the role of penance while magnifying the omniscient and omnipotent

capacities of God: this view, the doctrine of predestination, held that even before Adam and Eve

had committed sin by disobeying God God had drawn up his complete scheme of the damned

and the saved in the human race (MacCulloch 2003, p. 374). So, while every souls ultimate

destiny remained fixed from time immemorial, there was no way to divine to which group

saved or damnedone belonged. Weber (1959), in his classic workThe Protestant Work Ethic

and the Spirit of Capitalism, argues that Calvinists, in large part, began to view work and

prosperity as the only perceivable signs of divine approval. Interestingly, the effects of the

Calvinist perspective would have consequences not only for the economy, as Weber envisioned,

but for penal philosophy: the doctrine of predestination made penance, pain, and punishment


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irrelevant to the souls salvation, thus unfettering consideration of the soul from penal processes.

Thus divorced, the state of the soul would never return to its seat in the penal paradigm. At the

same timethough the seam is obviously not historically definitethe weaning of justice from

concepts of the soul enlarged the rights of the secular state to punish the bodies of criminals;

simultaneously, ecclesiastical jurisdiction diminished, with the state absorbing many

ecclesiastical styles of punishment: the types of punishment invoked by religious courts

eventually spread to the secular realm (Spierenberg 1995, p. 46).

Without the soul, the human person consists of a body and its essential characteristics and

inclinationsthat is, a mind. In the Enlightenment that (roughly) followed the Reformation,

penal philosophy centered on the confinement of bodies for the purpose of reforming the mind, a

movement driven by several major social and cultural processes including privatization, the

development of new attitudes toward the body, and the changing character of the family

(Spierenberg 1995, p. 47). It is interesting to note that Spierenberg (1995), who chronicles the

shift in penal philosophy following the Reformation, finds the earliest instance of a habit-

changing, mentally-reforming workhouse in the Netherlands, a Calvinist strongholdthese

workhouses are the conceptual ancestors of the correctional facility; as Spierenberg (1995)

notes, the transformation of their prison workhouses into penal institutions went smoothly

these facilities did not evolve into exclusively criminal prisons, but convicts made up most of

their population by the eighteenth century (p. 66-67). Garland (1990) concurs, noting that a

fundamental change of attitudes seems to have occurred in the Netherlands and elsewhere the

shift accelerated to form what is recognizably our own sensibility towards violence, suffering,

and the fate of others (p. 227). The Enlightenment penal spirit, it seems, born in the Calvinist

Dutch Republic, was at work.


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The ostensible goal of the post-Reformation, Enlightenment-era prison was the

realignment of the mind through a program of interventions focused on the body, including, by

necessity, confinement. This required a reinvention of prisons; McGowen (1995), for example,

notes that during the 18th

century, jails were generally chaotic, filled with non-criminal debtors,

passively administered by self-employed jailers, with inmates passing their time begging, in

games, gambling, and drunkenness. Jailers tolerated the almost unrestricted admission of friends

and the curious life in an eighteenth century prison could be tumultuous (p. 75). In England,

Jonas Hanway and John Howard explicitly laid out prison regimes --based on religion, work,

[and] severity (McGowen 1995, p. 78) -- that would reform prisoners and thus dovetail nicely

with Enlightenment ideals. For Howard, discipline was a key component of reformin order to

advance the rehabilitation of inmates, prisons would stand as a counterpoint to the disorder

from which crime sprang (McGowen 1995, p. 80). Strict regimens, cleanness of speech, and

general solemnityindeed, stricture of mind and body -- wereparts of Howards vision.

Howards dreams apparently nestled aboard a trans-Atlantic schooner, hibernated through

Americas infancy, and finally found a place to sprout: Pennsylvania, in the year 1829, where

authorities suffused with Enlightenment ideals (Abramsky 2002, p. 23) had contracted to

construct the Eastern Penitentiary, called Cherry Hill for its bucolic location. Abramsky

(2002) notes that the Eastern Penitentiary had been designed to ensure that its inhabitants were

kept in conditions of maximum isolation, and that a regimen of austere, practically religious,

solitude could most be easily enforced only in such conditions could model citizens be

molded out of the unfortunate prison inmates (p. 21). Here, at Cherry Hill, the isolation of the

body could open the gates of the personality for rehabilitation; silence served the purpose of

immersing an inmate in his own mind, quarantining his thoughts from the words of others. The


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elders of Philadelphia who had approved the project believed they were on the cusp of an era in

which criminals, monitored within the close confines of the penitentiary, could be cured of their

wayward behaviors (Abramsky 2002, p. 27). Cherry Hilland other penitentiaries like it in

New Jersey, Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennesseewere soon the pride of the country and an

international sensation; in fact, by the 1830s, these centers of detention had become famed the

world over (Abramsky 2002, p. 26). Luminaries like Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles

Dickens, as well as many interested American tourists, visited these prisons to view the

Enlightenment in silentbut allegedly powerful and reformingaction on bodies and minds.

In an ill omen for Americas new silent rehabilitative prisons, however, Charles Dickens

rejected what he saw. After being allowed to speak to the prisoners of Cherry Hilla rare

suspension of the rules for such a distinguished guest (Abramsky 2002, p. 27) Dickens was

horrified: the inmates had been buried alive; to be dug out in the slow round of years; and in the

meantime dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair (Friedman 1993).

Nearly a century after Cherry Hill established its curriculum, the Eastern Penitentiary was closed

in 1913with it, solitude and silence had been thoroughly discredited as penal interventions

(Abramsky 2002, p. 27). Nevertheless, though methodologies changed, the essential goal of

reform remained the same all over the nation; as Abramsky (2002) notes, like the state

penitentiaries at Cherry Hill and Auburn, the federal prison system began its life as a child of

reform (p. 77). The body-mind rehabilitative paradigm persisted into the mid- to late-20th

centuryin 1971, for example, Abramsky (2002) documents the overall philosophy of the

California Rehabilitation Center, a small prison for minor criminals committed to the best

rehabilitation ideals of the age each day, [residents] had to spend four hours either working,

taking part in job training activities, or attending high-school or college-level classes. On top of


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this, they had to spend another four hours in group therapy, in cleaning up their dormitories, and

in recreational activity (p. 165).

The honeymoon with rehabilitation, however, would not last; public opinion -- exhausted

with the coddling of criminals and the debacle of highly educated inmate lawyers (Abramsky

2002, p. 44)combined with political ambitions to slowly turn the wheel against the reformation

of body and mind. This movement found its academic flower in the work of Martinson (1978),

who announced in the academic world what the public had been feeling for a long time: of all

rehabilitation strategies, nothing works. If the attitudes and habits of inmates could not be

changed, then the mindthe repository of character and impulseswas essentially irrelevant to

the penal process.

Thus, in contemporary America, penal philosophy is focused exclusively on the

imprisonment of the body, without concern for the condition of soul or mind; this period is

marked by the ascendancy of political platforms that make promises of effective crime

reduction by means of increased severity of punishment, by capital punishment, by the

lengthening of prison terms, and by assurances that condign incarcerative punishment will be

imposed on all criminals (Morris 1995, p. 230). In this sense, the highly deterrent penal

spectacle examined by Foucault (1977) and Spierenberg (1995) was simply removed from the

scaffold and relocated to the inside of a prison; the over-arching modern penal perspective is not

concerned with reforming or rehabilitating offenders, but simply with punishing and detaining

them. Indeed, a crescendo of pitched political rhetoric marks this transition; in 1993, Pete

Wilson, then the governor of California, roared there is such a thing as a career criminal I

say, lets give em a new line of work. Lets make em career inmates (Abramsky 2002, p. 61).

Worse, offenders are effectively demoted from full participation in the human community


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Mike Reynolds, a proponent of the Three Strikes movement, articulated the widespread feeling

that offenders occupied an ontologically lower status (Katz 1988, p. 36): unfortunately,

claimed Reynolds, these people have given up their dues cards in the human race theyre

little more than animals. They look like people, but theyre not. And the unfortunate thing is

theyre preying on us. And we have to get them out so the rest of us can go on living our lives

(Abramsky 2002, p. 112). These inmates are the captured combatants in the war on crime

(Walker 2006, p. 13)they are the enemy. The powerful combined metaphors of hunter, prey,

animal, savage, human, enemy, and war evoke immediately what dangerous beasts, predators,

and martial aggressors have deserved since the beginning of time: confinement in cages, and,

perhaps, death (cf. Katz 1988).

For Zimbardo (2007), dehumanization typically facilitates abusive and destructive

actions toward those so objectified (p. 223). This objectification of criminals as brutes enables

an increasingly vicious set of criminal injunctions and penal sanctions, transforming the prison

from a center of human intervention to a pen and slaughterhousein Parentis (2000)

terminology, an abattoir (p. 170). In the modern era, public attitudes about crime and

criminals became increasingly punitive (Walker 2006, p. 14). Criminal convictions therefore

deprive individuals of their minds and souls, limiting them to their punished bodies and expelling

them from the human community at large. Yet, shifts in philosophy are not solely to blame for

the prison boom. Vast, abstract political forces also fed these shifts and contributed to the

massive cell block exodus.

Mother of Exiles: the Political Forces behind the Prison Boom


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Rendering people as brutes has created a vast herd of cast-off men and women who are

exiled to prisons and harnessed for political capital by politicians of both parties. Yet as

Abramsky (2002) is careful to point out, neither Mike Reynolds nor Pete Wilsonor any

politician like them -- acted with malice alone; unaware that they would victimize hundreds

then thousandsof petty criminals, they were driven forward, rather, by the vast pull of

irresistible political currents. These currents, set into motion by tectonic shifts in social and

penal philosophy, are a key element in the prison boom.

The first current flows from the economic interests greasing the gears of the massive

American economical engine. Located in the hearts of the nations cities, this enginelike any

enginecreates kinetic energy while working catastrophic pollution in the environment. In

urban terms, this pollution manifests as skid rows, located in the heart of civilization (Bittner

1967, p. 704), the central islands of despair that are the direct consequence of industrial efforts.

Skid row is the economys rotten heart, for poverty is produced organically by capitalist crisis

(Parenti 2000, p. 90). Ironically, however, as Parenti (2000) points out, capitalism creates and

needs poverty, yet is simultaneously threatened by the poor snidely, he goes on to note that

as an abstract force, poverty is very useful but actual groups of poor people in real spaces

can cause great trouble for the business classes (p. 90). Indeed, the modern post-industrial

workforce requires specialized urban work spaces, living quarters, and highly designed, hyper-

anesthetized play zones (Parenti 2000, p. 91). In order to operate at optimal levels, the

contemporary economy needs secure, peaceful cities, freeas much as possiblefrom visible

poverty and the economic interference precipitated by poverty-driven crime. As such, these

imperatives demanded that urban centers be disinfected of the poor and working classes

(particularly the darker-skinned poor) who occupied valuable downtown land [in order] to


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create safe non-Blackcordons sanitairesaround core business districts (Parenti 2000, p. 92).

In order to execute these imperatives, police officers follow the rubric of who needs to be

arrested (Bittner 1967, p. 710), instead of interpreting statutory law in the traditional manner.

This purging manifests benignly as the urban renewals, urban beautification projects, or

urban renaissances of the late twentieth century -- as if in portent to this urban vision,

Katharine Lee Bates, the lyricist of America the Beautiful, praises the United States: Thine

alabaster cities gleam, / undimmed by human tears! (ln. 21-22). For Parenti (2000), Elsner

(2004), Davis (2003), and Dyer (2000), however, the process is, at its root, the sinister and mass

relocation of poor, ethnic, and disruptive elementsthrough aggressive zero-tolerance or

quality-of-life policing (cf. Greene 1999) -- to prisons and jails.

The second current is driven by the mass media. Despite Americas vast cultural, ethnic,

economic, and social diversity, the general populace is united by the single vision projected from

their television screens; after all, as Dyer (2000) notes, prior to 1950, less than 10 percent of

American homes had a television by 1985, the number with TV was 98 percent (p. 85). This

common reference frame has effectively homogenized Americas ideological topography;

television has literally become a centralized system that creates a shared consciousness (Dyer

2000, p. 85). Such centralization, in theory, might prove to be a unifying force; by creating a

vast common repository of images, themes, and experiences, television might help to bridge the

essential differences between Americas citizens. Unfortunately, this shared consciousness

channels a distorted sense of reality that exaggerates certain social facts while downplaying

others.

One exaggerated social fact is the latent potential for cataclysmic crime and violence in

everyday life. In recent years, news and entertainment programs have drastically increased


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reporting and portrayal of violent crimes; as Dyer (2000) notes, as long ago as 1995 coverage of

crime on all three networks news programs ... tripled from 571 crime stories to 1,632. Between

1993 and 1995, the number of violent scenes and sequences in entertainment programming rose

by a mind-blowing 74 percent (Dyer 2000, p. 56). Strikingly, violence now [in 1998]

constitutes 43 percent of local news content indeed, considering the brief duration of most

local news programs, these programming patterns create a numbing pastiche of violent crime and

consumer advertising (p. 55). Sardonically, however, even advertising is not free of violence

violence in TV commercials soared in the mid-90s, and in 1995 there were 948 scenes of

violence in commercials[emphasis added] on one average day of television (Dyer 2000, p. 56).

In 1995, a study noted nearly 2,605 acts of violence during one random day of television

viewing (Dyer 2000, p. 57). For Abramsky (2002), the index case of this epidemic of violent

entertainment was the sensational, gory coverage of the Polly Klaas murder in northern

California, a spate of tourist killings in Florida, and the Long Island Railroad massacre, all of

which took place in 1993 by January 1994, 31 percent of respondents named crime as the

nations top problem (p. 69).

Now, around a decade after these statistics were recorded, there is no reason to believe

that violent programming has in any way decreased. Contemporary media philosophy has

crowned TV personalities like the incendiary Nancy Grace, whose daily programs exclusive

object is to frighten suburban housewives with grim tales of abduction and murder (for histrionic

effect, Grace accepts only the most hysterical calls from her audience, and ends each show with a

brief memorial to a soldier or policeman killed by terrorists or gang members). In non-election

years, even so cutesy a journalist as Anderson Cooper is forced to make a living by documenting

both domestic and international misery (cf. White 2008); sensational coverage of violent crime


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and tragedy is a staple for TV network programmers (Dyer 2000). This glut of crime- and

violence-oriented programming persists despite the fact that, for the most part, crime was

actually declining (Dyer 2000, p. 27) as Walker (2006) reports in the opening line of his

seminal Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs, crime in America hit a 30-year low in

2003 (p. 3). It seems, then, that the media has openly disposed of journalistic objectivity in

favor of ratings-driven blood, body-bags, and pre-packaged conflict sequences (Dyer 2000, p.

55).

Though it is not clear whether or not entertainment violence directly causes crime in

everyday life (Van Voorhis 2004), it certainly affects public perception of crime. The media-

cultivated gap (Dyer 2000, p. 27) between crime reality and the perceived frequency of crime

fuels the prison boom. Given the almost universal television audience, given the pervasiveness

of violence in daily programming, and given the fact that television images are now accepted as

firsthand experience (Dyer 2000, p. 86), it is easy to see why the public generally believes

crime is on the rise. In the big picture, asserts Dyer (2000), todays media saturation with

sensational-crime content conveys the overall false message that crime is more violent and more

pervasive now than ever before (p. 87). As a consequence, fear of crime has risen, along with

the general belief that crime is the most extreme of Americas troubles; by 1992, an incredible

41 percent of Americans believed that they were unsafe in their own neighborhoods one

poll found that an incredible 79 percent of the U.S. population now believes that crime is one of

the biggest problems (Dyer 2000, p. 28). In the 1990s, people continued to believe that crime

was rising, even though it was actually falling dramatically (Walker 2006, p. 11). Indeed,

repeated exposure to media violence makes us more susceptible to hard-on-crime political

messages, whether its the labeling of judges as soft on crime, declaring wars on crime or


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drugs, or calling for an increase in the use of capital punishment as a means of enhancing our

security (Dyer 2000, p. 110). As a result, the American populace now clamors for additional

safety, demanding safer streets and more law enforcement despite the fact that, crime, for the

most part, has significantly declined in the last decade.

Ultimately, these cumulative forces drive the last current, which tears through legislatures

and the national government: politicians, so sensitive to the mass media, to terrified constituents,

to self-reinforcing polls (Dyer 2000), and to economic interests, are compelled to support harsher

and harsher legislation that is tougher and tougher on crime and those convicted of it. This anti-

crime impulse unites the parties in a categorical, nonsensical, illogical war on crime that is

now approaching its fiftieth year (Walker 2006, p. 13).

The wars on crime have their origin in the instability and upheaval of the late sixties,

when hundreds of riots ravaged American cities between 1965 and 1968 (Parenti 2000, p.

5). In a response to the civic unrest convulsing the nations metropoleis, President Lyndon

Johnson a liberal Democratfirst declared war on crime in 1965, with President Richard

Nixona wire-tapping Republican -- preaching his own crusade in 1969 (Walker 2006, p. 13);

their stated objective was the reconstruction of law and order amongst the rubble of turbulent

urban centers. Later, the battlefront divided, and under President Reagan the anti-crime army

flanked to engage narcotics in the opening salvos ofthe war on drugs (Parenti 2000, p. 47; cf.

Walker 2006, p. 13). Among their many consequences, the wars on crime and drugs can include

Three Strikes sentencing, mandatory minimum sentences, and the surge in incarceration (Parenti

2000; Abramsky 2002).

These aggressive battlefield tactics, according to Parenti (2000) and Abramsky (2002),

did not stem from a budding sense of civic duty and the social contract; rather, they were


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motivated by political infighting and the necessities of election-year oratory. This political

current pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other in a continuously escalating game

of Texas Hold Em, where the stakes were elected seats the ante, unfortunately, was toughness

on crime. Playing on public fears of crime was a sure way to secure votes. For example, Pete

Wilson, in a hotly contested race for the California governors mansion against Dianne Feinstein,

knew his best shot would be to tie himself to anticrime policies, and to portray his opponent

as being the kind of waffly liberal that America had shown so much contempt for in 1988

(Abramsky 2002, p. 49). Not to be undone, however, Feinstein reiterated that she, too, favored

executing murderers (Abramsky 2002, p. 49), attempting to meet Wilson tit-for-tat in a policy

boxing match that, oddly enough, united their positions despite their different party affiliations.

Eventually, however, Wilsons harder-on-crime stance delivered political gold; according to

Abramsky (2002), Wilson successfully appealed to the electorates fear of crime to build

himself a majority in the polling booths (p. 50). Wilson would go on to carry a victorious 49

percent of the California vote. Wilson preserved this strategy throughout his career, harnessing

the latent political capital in the Three Strikes movement and the murder of Polly Klaas to bolster

his reelection efforts (Abramsky 2002, p. 62). Similarly, Nelson Rockefeller, then governor of

New York, urgently needed to throw a sop to the Republican Partys right wing (Abramsky

2002, p. 67) to bolster his hopes for a presidential nomination; in this spirit, the erstwhile

moderate Rockefeller played up public fears of crime, championed harsh anti-drug legislation,

and nicely endeared himself to his constituency.

This dynamic plays out even at the national level. Indeed, public fear of some invisible

enemybe it criminals, gangs, drug addicts, or, more recently, Al-Qaeda terroristscan score

candidates a political bonanza in clinch elections. During the 1988 presidential race, GOP


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candidate George Bush had his democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis,

on the ropes, pounding him as an ineffectual, crime-friendly wimp (Parenti 2000, p. 60).

Abramsky (2002) notes that Bush had destroyed Michael Dukakiss presidential hopes through

portraying him as soft on crime a label with phallic insinuations of impotence, deviance, and

effeminacy; politicians of all persuasions since then, the author continues, had been doing

everything in their power to avoid Dukakiss fate (p. 6). Parenti (2000) skewers the liberal

Bill Clinton for mandating an additional 100,000 more police officers, and for -- in a typical

show of election year theatrics --presiding over the lethal-injection execution of Ricky Ray

Rector, a brain-damaged African American inmate (p. 64). This dialectic has played out in the

2008 Election season as well, with Senator Hilary Clinton of New York (the wife of the

aforementioned Bill Clinton), Senator John McCain of Arizona, and Senator Barack Obama of

Illinois trading acrimonious jabs using the keywords national security. Interestingly, Senator

Clinton allegedly pulled off a last-minute win in crucial Ohio and Texas by playing on public

fears through a slick, innuendo-rich TV ad about terrorism (Cillizza 2008).

In brief, the incarceration binge is simply the policy by-product of electoral rhetoric

(Parenti 2000, p. 168)this rhetoric builds upon and feeds public fear, and is facilitated by the

demands of urban economies. More sinister, however, is the idea that these currents, empowered

by the shifts in penal philosophy previously discussed, combine into a maelstrom that has driven

the exponential growth of prison populations all over the nation. This maelstromthe prison-

industrial complexwill be examined in the next section.

Conquering Limbs astride from Land to Land: the Prison-Industrial Complex


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The end result of the paradigm shifts and social currents described above is a seamless

continuum of fear, television programming, profit, and legislation: this is the prison-industrial

complex, a fearsome amalgam of public drives and private enterprise built on the backs of more

than two million incarcerated individuals.

For Davis (2004), the notion of the prison industrial complex was introduced to

contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison

populations. Rather,the author argues, prison construction [has] been driven by ideologies of

racism and the pursuit of profit (p. 84). That is, powerful private corporations have a

categorical stake in the prison status quo.

This complex, innocently enough, presents itself as the hope of economic revitalization

for areas of the United States devastated by market recalibrations and the vast emigration of jobs

and industry to the developing world. Parenti (2000) chronicles the story of Crescent City,

Californias poorest county, reeling from the combined effects of a local recession and a

natural disaster (p. 211). Yearning to resurrect their local economy, Crescent Citys elders

clinched a deal with the CDC by offering up a piece of cheap unincorporated land for

correctional use (Parenti 2000, p. 212) -- that land was destined for the $277.5 million Pelican

Bay State Prison, one of the newest, meanest super-max lockups in the system (Parenti 2000, p.

212). The prison is the city and countys largest employer, funding 1,500 jobs, an annual

payroll of $50 million, and a budget of over $90 million indirectly, the prison has created

work in nearly every industry, injecting a desperately needed cash transfusion into the citys

economic veins (Parenti 2002, p. 212). With the move towards prosperity, Crescent Citys

population also soared, with national firms investing in Crescent Citys storefronts; as a side


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note, the inmate population also works on public infrastructure, thereby improving Crescent

Citys schools,roads, and bridges at no cost to the citys budget.

Elsner (2004) documents similar prison-driven renaissances all over the nation, from

Colorado and Arizona to Mississippi, Virginia, and Kentucky. Everywhere, these prisons help

buoy sagging local industries; Kentucky built nine prisons, for example, partially replacing the

collapsing coal mining industry (Elsner 2004, p. 205). Everywhere, the contributions made by

prisons to local economies are widely appreciated; as Elsner (2004) points out, local civic

leaders as well as state authorities were pleased (p. 205) one highly agreeable official in Texas

recites a little hymn to the prison industry: there are a lot of economic pluses to prisons

prison jobs seem to be pretty recession-proof we havent experienced any negatives at all; if

we got the chance, wed try to get more prisons out here (p. 203). Everywhere, it seems,

prisons are reigniting the smoldering ember of the American dream. Parenti (2000) concurs,

quipping little town and big prison: it is a marriage that has been replicated scores of times

economically battered towns are rolling over for new prisons (p. 213).

Enriching the lifestyle of some citizens at the cost of the freedom of yet other citizens, of

course, would not be ethically justifiable to Americans without the objectification of convicts as

beasts, described above. Nevertheless, in addition to concerned ethicists, some economists doubt

the supposedly beneficial impact of prisons for their local communities. According to one study

cited by Elsner (2004), there is little discernable difference in unemployment rates or per capita

income between cities with prisons and comparable cities without them; after all, most of the

best jobs within prisons tended tobe filled by people who lived outside the host community,

and the free labor offered by inmates can often push local low-wage workers out of viability (p.


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206). Reservations aside, however, there is no doubt that there is big money to be made in

prisons (Elsner 2004, p. 206).

The promise of lucre has lured private firms like CCA and Wackenhut into the prison

business. Indeed, states have begin to show a preference for private prisons; for, as Holmes

(2003) reveals, financing new prisons most often requires the issuance of bond debt

legislators are often reluctant to invoke this mechanism. Private prison contracts become

particularly attractive alternatives to major prison construction programs (p. 12). As Davis

(2004) remarks, this is symptomatic of a wide government attitude that looks to private

management for savings, privatization patterns that, it will be recalled, have also drastically

transformed health care, education, and other areas of our lives (p. 93). Private prisons have,

for the most part, promised to cut down on the costs associated with imprisonment, thereby

offering the state a net savingsit is suggested that private prisons cost taxpayers much less to

operate than their public counterparts (Dyer 2000, p. 223; cf. Tabarrok 2003).

Dyer (2000) contests this idea, citing several studies that point out that there are no cost

savings associated with prison privatization (p. 229). In a comprehensive study by the General

Accounting Office, presented to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Crime, analysts

found that although private prisons are touted as a way to save money, the five studies we

reviewed provide no evidence that they save money (Dyer 2000, p. 229). Thomas (2003)

concurs, noting that achieving many of the potential benefits of privatization will be

impossible (p. 86): it is not clear at all whether governmental bureaucracy would be reduced by

the privatization of prisonsor, indeed, of any industry; as Dyer (2000) notes, the corporate

assertion that privatizing our prisons will save money by lessening bureaucracy flies in the face

of past experiences as well (p. 231), citing the twenty to thirty billion dollar outlay needed for


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additional oversight in the privatized defense industry. Furthermore, Dyer (2000) argues, the

low wages paid by private prison firmsin an attempt to lower their bottom line and raise profit

result in a substantial loss in state and federal income taxes (p. 232), thereby draining the

national economy of much-needed public revenue.

If no net savings can be demonstrated, it is incredible to consider how private prisons

continue to persist and flourish. Indeed, given the decline of crime, it is also incredible to

consider how public prisons continue to fill with increasing numbers of American citizens. This

grim economy can be easily explained: prisons are fueled by the menacing embrace of prisons

and profit (Davis 2004, p. 99).

Massive multinational corporations now have a stake in the prison industry, adding their

profit margins to the entire complex. Dyer (2000), in an independent financial experiment,

invested in several firms utilizing prison labor: his final portfolio included shares in Disney,

General Electric, American Express, AT&T, Proctor and Gamble, Microsoft, and TWA (p. 22).

Parenti (2000) reports that a company called Exmark uses prison labor to package everything

from Windows 95 to Starbucks Coffee products to JanSport gear subcontractors for Eddie

Bauer and Victorias Secret have also used inmate workers (p. 230). Likewise, Davis (2004)

reveals that many corporations have tapped correctional facilities to drive up their revenue;

among the many businesses that advertise in the yellow pages on the corrections.com website

are Archer Daniel Midlands, Nestle Food Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard

Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech (p. 99). Dyer (2000) concurs, noting that the variety

of corporations making money from prisons is truly dizzying, ranging from Dial Soap to Famous

Amos cookies the wide range of products consumed by prisons includes leather restraints,

computer programs, and razor wire (p. 14). Grimly, Davis (2004) observes that private prisons


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are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but public prisons have become so

thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations that

the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect (p. 100). Elsner (2004) notes that

while states struggled, thousands of businesses got fat off supplying prisons (p. 29).

These economic interests translate directly to political incentives; as prisons and

corporations push the levers of the economy in the rush for profit, they likewise cast their eyes

on the hidden switches of American legislative politics. In order to keep the prison industrial

complex thriving, those companies court the state within and outside the United States for the

purpose of obtaining prison contracts and to protect their latent investmentsin Americas

prisons (Davis 2004, p. 98). The massive media conglomerates that own a majority of American

news stations, in the interest of profits, gradually increase rations in the American visual diet of

crime and violence (Dyer 2000). A Wackenhut spokesman, recorded by Elsner (2004), gloated

in the ever-expanding prison market, declaring that it is inconceivable that anyone could pick

up a newspaper or watch a television today and believe that private prison operators need to

work at increasing demand for their services the market continued to develop and grow (p.

213). Furthermore, the corporations that spin as cogs in the perpetual prisoner machine are not

idle in their pursuit of additional influence in legislation; as Dyer (2000) notes, private prison

companies, media corporations and corporations that profit from the prison population in a

myriad of ways are all funneling money to politicians who are in a position to make decisions

about whether their ability to profit will be enhanced or diminished (p. 142-143).

Likewise, with 2.3 million people engaged in catching criminals and putting and

keeping them behind bars, accounting for a monthly payroll of $8.1 billion, the corrections

industry had become one of the largest sectors of the U.S. economy (Elsner 2004, p. 29). These


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workers are affiliated with powerful unions like the California Correctional Peace Officers

Association (CCPOA), which, in order to secure congenial legislation and legislators, lavished

lawmakers with cash, giving former California governor Pete Wilson almost $1 million to win

the election in 1990 (p. 226)the influence of the CCPOA can be paramount in elections

Elsner 2004, p. 29). The same lobby dedicated more than $100,000 to the passage of

Californias Three Strikes law under Wilson, thereby enlarging their jailhouse patrimony; the

CCPOA and unions like it have been instrumental in creating and shaping the prison industrial

complex by bolstering hawkish anti-crime politicians and lobbying for get-tough legislation

(Parenti 2000, p. 229).

Here, at the junction of public and private action, the great self-perpetuating perpetual

prisoner machine engorges itself and builds itself up with political acquiescence, profit margins,

and the ever-present fuel of cash. As in Marxs vision, the prison industrial complex manifests

as a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demon power, at first

veiled under the slow and measured motions of his giant limbs, at length breaks out into the fast

and furious whirl of his countless working organs (Antonio 2003, p. 145). The constant

machination of the prison industrial complex -- driven and empowered by shifts in penal

philosophy and nourished by complex political and economic currentsis the reason why so

many Americans are experiencing prison today.

The Brazen Giant: the Future of America behind Bars


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If one in one hundred Americans is currently behind bars, the prison boom can be viewed

as a kind of epidemic; like an epidemic, it has grave implications for the future. Examining the

consequences of the prison binge -- while horrible at first to contemplate -- can inspire action.

One of the gravest consequences of the prison-industrial complex is the ballooning prison

budget. As the economic interest groups invested in corrections continue to affect public policy,

it is unlikely that either the public or for-profit firms will relent in their constant push for

imprisonment (Dyer 2000); as such, it seems inevitable that correctional budgets everywhere will

continue to swell. Coupled with a lurking economic crisis promising a dearth of tax dollars, this

movement represents a direct disinvestment in the future; instead of funding public programs,

social services, and education, tax dollars are poured into prisons and into the pockets of prison-

related firms. As Walker (2006) notes, the enormous cost of the war on crime has drained tax

dollars from other social needs, such as education, public health, and the economic infrastructure

of roads and bridges (p. 16). As of 2008, for every dollar spent nationwide on higher education,

sixty cents were spent on corrections; catastrophically, in Massachusetts, Delaware, California,

Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, spending on higher education and prisons are equivalent (Warren

2008, p. 31). In budgetary dilemmas between education and corrections, politicians have been

more than happy to choose the latter. With this ratio unlikely to decrease, educational systems in

every state are in peril.

The siphoning of tax dollars away from schools, colleges, and universities all over the

nation bodes ill for Americas young people. Indeed, this may lead to a general stupefaction of

Americas youth, who will be forced to endure poorer and poorer public schools. Van Voorhis

(2004) notes, too, that low levels of education lead to joblessness, a key crimogenic factor that

leads to deviance and to re-offending (p. 136). The budgetary amputation of the American


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educational system would lead, ironically, to higher incarceration rates. As this process

continues, the crop of human souls destined for confinement in prisons would grow every year.

Prisons are also a wound on the face of racial relations, causing a continuous hemorrhage

in the delicate tissue that constitutes American racial equality; this effectively counteracts

policies and legislation enacted at the national level . Tonry (1994) asserts that it should go

without saying in the late 20th century that governments detest racial injustice and desire racial

justice (p. 25). Despite this idealistic view, the grim fact remains that African Americans and

Latino Americans are the primary victims in what Walker (2006) refers to as a racially biased

assault on crime, drugs, and inner-city communities (p. 15). Without considering whether or

not arrests are racially motivated (Pope & Snyder 2003), it is clear that, within prisons

themselves, racial relations are highly polarized, volatile, and violent. Elsner (2004) observes

that race permeates every aspect of prison life, and prison authorities take great care to keep

ethnic groups apart to avoid bloodshed (p. 40); this effective segregation of inmatesostensibly

for their own protection -- leads to a toxic intra-racial cohesion process that manifests, finally, in

the creation and sustenance of street- and prison-gangs: a prison subculture divided by race has

also become a world dominated by prison gangs (Elsner 2004, p. 41). Organized by ethnicity,

these gangs exist in a brutal lattice of allegiances, trade, and arbitrary rivalries that spur decades-

long wars; as Elsner (2004) notes, the artificial rancor betweenLa Nuestra Familia and the

Mexican Mafiabased entirely on a kind of geographic caprice,La Familia being from

Northern California and the Mexican Mafia being from Southern Californiahas erupted into

open war, and has claimed scores of lives and still rages with undiminished ferocity (p. 41).

These open conflicts are not restricted to the insides of prisons; released inmates carry

their gang loyalties and racial prejudices with them to the outside world. Powerful gang leaders,


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even from within locked penitentiary cells, manage to maintain precise control over other gang

members, simply by using the mail or by picking up the telephone (Elsner 2004, p. 46).

Beyond this, the racial hatred learned in prison can have tragic consequences: John William

King, convicted of murdering an African American man by dragging him with a pickup truck for

miles, was motivated by the white-supremacist attitude he acquired in prison. As White (1999)

notes, Americas overflowing prisons are a breeding ground for the white supremacist elements

with whom King began to associate (p. 1). In addition, because gangs are the production lone

for the next generation of prison inmates (Elsner 2004, p. 228), racist attitudes permeate the

generational barrierprisons facilitate this diffusion by hosting gangs, whose primary impact is

to promulgate racism, fear, and hatred among prisoners (Parenti 2000, p. 195). Even worse,

some prison guards go on to adopt and openly use racial slurs, thus extending the infection of

racism to correctional staff (Elser 2004, p. 57). Parenti (2000) confirms that prisons racial

poison is by no means confined to the ranks of convicts: the other side of the gunrail is also

infected (p. 206). Thus, as America struggles to move towards further racial equality, its efforts

are undermined by the virulent bigotry promulgated and cultivated in prisons and prison cells.

In a grim corollary to the racial turmoil described above, another grave consequence of

the prison industrial complex is the growing body of citizensprimarily African American and

Latino American citizenswho have been stripped of their right to vote and therefore have no

public voice. Virtually every state strips a convicted felon of the right to vote, explains Walker

(2006), and the impact on the African American community is enormous about 4.7 million

Americans could not vote because of a felony conviction at some point in their lives (p. 15).

That disenfranchised group of nearly 5 million citizens could easily have changed the voting

results of the last few elections. Even beyond national concerns, those parts of the nation that are


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felon-richwhich are also likely to be poor, colored, and socially isolated (Walker 2006)have

a limited voice in state and local elections. This vitiation of their democratic power denies their

essential right to elect representatives who will champion their interests. As such, whole

populations would be reduced to silence in the national dialogues that determine American

policy.

Finally, besides the obvious strain on the criminal justice system posed by overflowing

prisons, the prison industrial complex may, over time, seriously wound the integrity of the

American judiciary and the law it protects. Nagin (1998) asserts that the collective actions of

the criminal justice system exert a very substantial deterrent effect (p. 3) -- when prison

becomes a common experience, its deterrent effect is diluted (cf. Gendreau et al. 2000); as Elsner

(2004) confirms, for many black men, prison is their college serving that first stretch has

become a twisted rite of passage some even look forward to and welcome (p. 13). While

specific deterrence may not be a valid criminological concept from the standpoint of research

(Lynch 1999), a general cynicism regarding prisons may have terrible consequences for

American life as the authority, prestige, and good standing of the state are erodedindeed, this

crisis may spill over into police, thus negatively affecting police legitimacy. Additionally, when

the public disagrees with the application of police coercion, police legitimacy loses its splendor

(Parenti 2000). Unfortunately, this sense of legitimacy gives police much of their power, and its

breakdown could lead to a rise in crime and social unrest manifesting, cyclically, as a higher

incarceration rate.

Conclusion


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Ultimately, the confluence of shifting ideological preferences, economic interests,

political action, and widespread fear has given birth to the prison-industrial complex.

Considering the general forces at work in corrections, the national prognosisin terms of

society, equality, democratic ideals, and the judicial systemseems dire indeed. For the

foreseeable future, the powers set into motion by the prison boom will continue to reinforce

themselves, leading more and more citizens to prison. It is, as Davis (2004) remarks, high time

to create a new conceptual terrain for imagining alternatives to imprisonment (p. 112).

This vision, however, is still far off. The famous illusionist David Copperfield, briefly,

before a stunned live television audience, caused the Statue of Libertythat monument which

Emma Lazarus called The New Colossus -- to vanish (vide Copperfield 2008). This

impressive feat, accomplished in the year 1983, crowned his career. A quarter of a century later,

America is witnessing the same trick carried out on the level of national policy: the new

millenniums own New Colossus, the prison-industrial complex, has disappeared from

meaningful public political discourse. Previously, crime and prison were core issues at the heart

of every election; in contrast, however, the presidential candidates for the 2008 electionwhich

include, ironically, one senator who has actually been held captive and tortured as a prisoner-of-

war, and another senator who is African Americanhave not discussed crime or incarceration

even once.

For many Americans, restoring and maintaining national security is now the decisive,

definitive issue of the age. It is interesting to note, however, that, according to the Center for

Disease Control, the odds of suffering from a terrorist attack are approximately one in 88,000

(Friedman 2005). To date, billionsand, soon more than trillionsof dollars will have been

spent to lower this probability. In contrast, however, the odds of an African American man


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spending time in prison are approximately one in three; for Hispanic Americans, the odds are

one in five (Elsner 2004, p. 13). Strangely, billions of dollars will have been spent to ensure

that this probability rises (Dyer 2000).

Prison is an infinitely more plausible menace than terrorism. In prison, men and women

are nearly guaranteed to experience rape, violence, physical and psychological torment, and -- at

the very leastopen exposure to the social forces that will prisonize (Latessa 2003, p. 103)

their minds, chaining them to an endless cycle of recidivism and incarceration. As Parenti

(2000) notes, hundreds of thousands of men and women alike suffer horrible physical and

emotional tortures as an unwritten part of their sentences (p. 184). For certain segments of the

population, prisonand its long-term effectspose a far more serious threat to quality of life, to

length of life, and, indeed, to life itself, than any radical Islamic sect. It is time, therefore, for

political candidates at every level to return to their senses, refocus their eyes away from the

desert horizon of Mesopotamia, and engage the more pressing problem of crime and prisons that

America now faces.

A solution need not be as radical as Daviss (2004) recommendation of total abolition

(p. 107)indeed, taking on these problems is not necessarily as impossible a task as it seems.

Research has shown that prison abuses can be greatly mitigated; after all, as Zimbardo (2007)

points out, the re-evaluation and enactment of effective practices in Iraqs Abu Ghraib prison

(after an international scandal) led to no abuses since these rules have been put in place (p.

442). Cogent, coherent and competent leadership dedicated to the principles of safety, legality,

and ethicality can have enormous, reverberating effects on any command structure (Zimbardo

2007, p. 440; cf. Stojkovic et al. 2008). Beyond this, revisiting rehabilitation shows promise: for

Smith et al. (2004), the average reduction in recidivism consequent to rehabilitative strategies is


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approximately 10 percent (p. 286). Furthermore, programs that share certain ideal featuresi.e.,

that follow the principles of effective intervention (Latessa 2003)can reduce recidivism by

approximately 25 to 30 percent (Andrews & Bonta 2003). While decreasing abuse and returning

to rehabilitation may not dismantle the entire prison-industrial complex at once, these strategies

may, at least, gradually short-circuit the self-perpetuating cyclical flow of recidivist inmates out

of and back into correctional facilities. This improvement alone would have significant impact

on many communities and lives all over the nation. Elsner (2004) concurs on this point, noting

that rehabilitation and the reduction of abuse would begin to put the brakes on the unbridled

growth of the prison population and they would lessen the abuse and suffering visited on those

within the system (p. 241). These goals are realistic, attainable, and desirable.

In the end, politicians and candidates have an opportunity before them which should not

be squandered. While David Copperfields ruse was simply an illusion, the new, impending

administrationunder whichever candidate -- can create real change simply by choosing a

correct, coherent, and evidence-based approach to corrections: instead of merely returning the

New Colossus to its pedestal, new policies can work to transform it, slowly and from the base

upwards, until finally, once again, Americas golden door opens to justice.


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Documents

The New Colossus: The Prison Industry and America’s Age of Prisons (by Allen Tuazon)