Prison–industrial complex

Early American jails were largely privately managed, holding both criminals awaiting trial and debtors awaiting repayment, and charging holding fees to local governments and creditors. After the first publicly-run prison was established in 1790 in Pennsylvania, private business involvement in corrections largely diminished to providing contracted services, such as food preparation, medical care, and transportation. The major 19th-century exception to the relative separation between public punishment and private industry was the convict lease system in the American South, in which private parties paid public prisons for forced prisoner labor. During the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, business leaders and unions successfully pressured the federal government to prohibit private corporations from contracting cheap prison labor and undercutting competition. In 1930, the federal government established Federal Prison Industries, a prison labor program to produce goods and services for the public sector. Many scholars and activists argue that the contemporary prison–industrial complex has its origins in the war on drugs, a legislative campaign orchestrated by the U.S. federal government since the early 1970s aimed at criminalizing and punishing drug trafficking and use. Following tougher anti-drug legislation and harsher sentencing standards under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, incarceration increasingly became the standard punishment for non-violent offenses. As the overall incarcerated population dramatically increased, new correctional facilities needed to be built, staffed, and maintained, and private-sector prisons began to emerge as cost-effective solutions. In May 2021 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed 46.3 percent of federal inmates as incarcerated because of drug convictions. 1970s In 1973, following the lead of President Nixon, New York State passed the Rockefeller Drug Laws, establishing mandatory minimum prison sentences for small-scale drug possession. Although not as harsh as Governor Nelson Rockefeller had originally called for, these laws inspired other states to enact similarly strict punishments for drug offenses, including mandatory minimum sentences in almost every instance. Also in 1973, conservative businesses and tough-on-crime politicians came together to establish the influential lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union restricted prisoners’ First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, and prohibited them from organizing labor unions. In 1979, inspired by legislation proposed by ALEC, the U.S. Congress overturned the New Deal–era legislation against for-profit prison labor by establishing the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE). Intended to allow inmates to contribute to society, offset the cost of their incarceration, reduce idleness, cultivate job skills, and improve the rates of successful transition back into their communities after release, the PIE program created a cheap captive domestic labor market, which set the stage for the adoption and expansion of private-sector labor in public prisons. 1980s President Ronald Reagan's 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act further accelerated mass incarceration. Very shortly many state prisons were experiencing unprecedented overcrowding. Meanwhile, in 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was founded by Nashville businessmen who claimed they could build and operate state and federal prisons with the same quality of service provided by government prisons, but at a lower cost. As of 2012, the multibillion-dollar corporation, now known as CoreCivic, manages over 65 correctional facilities and boasts an annual revenue exceeding $1.7 billion. In 1988, the now-second-largest for-profit private prison corporation, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) was established as a subsidiary of The Wackenhut Corporation. The WCC is now known as GEO Group, and as of 2017, their U.S. Corrections and Detention division manages 70 correctional and detention facilities. Between 1980 and 1989, the total U.S. prison population increased by 115%, from 329,821 to 710,054 people. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in U.S. history, which directly allotted a $9.7 billion funding increase to prisons and introduced the three-strikes law, assigning unprecedentedly long sentences (25 year to life minimum) to third-time convicts. As the prison population continued to grow steeply throughout the 1990s, the profit margins of private prison corporations such as CCA and GeoGroup continued to increase. In 1995, Congress passed another piece of ALEC-influenced legislation, the Prison Industries Act, allowing corporations to pay prison laborers less than the federal minimum wage and divert the difference to constructing facilities for further prison labor. This included 71,206 prisoners held in privately operated facilities, accounting for 5.5% of state and 2.8% of federal prisoners. 2010s In 2016, President Barack Obama issued an executive policy to reduce the number of private federal prison contracts, and the United States Justice Department began developing a plan to phase out its use of private prisons. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates rationalized this decision: "Private prisons simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department's Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security." Both GEO Group and CoreCivic donated heavily to the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016 and inaugural committee in 2017, and following his election, their stock prices skyrocketed: CoreCivic by 140% and GEO Group by 98%. By the end of 2019, the U.S. incarcerated population had dropped to 2,068,800 people, its lowest level since 2003. The incarceration rate had dropped to the same rate as 1995 (810 per 100,000 adult U.S. residents), with 11% of federal and 7.6% of state prisoners incarcerated in for-profit facilities. == Structure ==

The prison–industrial complex is an example of a complex system, comprising many institutions interacting in mutually reinforcing patterns. Minimal definitions of the system focus on the relationships between the federal and state criminal justice system; the for-profit companies that build, operate, and service public and private prisons; and the special interest groups that grow in size and influence as incarceration increases. These groups include ICE, police unions, correctional officers unions, More expansive definitions often include as elements of the system tough-on-crime politicians and district attorneys seeking office, conservative political lobbies and legislatures passing punitive laws, and investment banks and rural economic developers leveraging public debt into private profit through prison construction and employment contracts. The widest definitions of the prison–industrial complex include even larger and more abstract institutions and processes, such as the news media sensationalizing crime and influencing public perception, gentrification disrupting urban environments and displacing precarious residents, and public schools increasingly subjecting students to police oversight and legal punishment since the 1980s. The war on drugs Marc Mauer, executive director of the criminal justice reform group The Sentencing Project, has argued that the growth and expansion of the prison–industrial complex since the 1970s has its roots in the war on drugs, which, rather than suppressing the illegal drug trade, has produced a perpetual cycle of drug dealing and imprisonment. This he attributes to a structural feature of the drug trade, a market with perpetually high demand and lucrative potential profits. has argued that while some appear to believe that the prison industrial complex is taking the space once filled by the military industrial complex, the aftermath of the war on terror shows how the links between the military, corporations, and government are growing even stronger. The relationship between these complexes, Davis suggests, shows they are symbiotic, because they mutually support and promote each other, even sharing some technologies. Further, they also share important structural features, both generating immense profits from processes of "social destruction" Statistics show that incarceration and unemployment are correlated, Nevertheless, such a high rate of recidivism can be attributed in part to the difficulty formerly incarcerated people encounter in finding stable employment. The Evidence-Based Professionals Society suggests two reasons for this difficulty: "First, most of the offenders may simply lack the necessary job skills for specific positions, keeping them from those usually higher paid and more stable jobs. Second, many employers are reluctant to hire these people due to the stigma imposed by their previous criminal records." School-to-prison pipeline Scholars and critics describe the existence of a "school-to-prison pipeline", a system in which public school policies contribute to funneling urban students of color into the prison–industrial complex. Students at urban schools and other schools with high percentages of minority students are more likely to experience out-of-school suspensions and academic failure, which have been correlated to a higher likelihood of incarceration after leaving school. Race The war on drugs has disproportionately impacted African Americans. Although African Americans use drugs at similar rates to Americans from other demographic groups, they are prosecuted at much higher rates. ==Economics==

In the decades following World War II, the American domestic economy was characterized by growth, but also by deindustrialization, the decline of the labor movement, austerity and the privatization of government services, the transformation of welfare to workfare policies, and suburbanization, including white flight from city centers. These large-scale transformations had particularly damaging effects on the economic activity of large American cities, generally increasing urban unemployment and exacerbating income and racial inequality. Statistics have shown that the unemployment rate is correlated to the incarceration rate, and American historians such as Heather Ann Thompson and Alex Lichtenstein have argued that mass incarceration has accompanied the public-sector abandonment of former urban industrial cores, and contributed to the rise of the Sun Belt as an important economic region. In this view, the prison–industrial complex is not simply the cumulative effect of decades of increasingly punitive legislation, but is an integral sector in the neoliberal national economy, with the largest and fastest-growing states—like Florida, California, and Texas ("Flocatex")—also leading the country in number of inmates and prison privatization. • "Correctional industry" jobs in the government-run prison factories launched in the 1930s. These jobs account for nearly 5% of state and federal prisoner employment, with prisoners producing a wide range of goods and services for sale to other government agencies, including library, school, and office furniture; uniforms, linens, and mattresses for prisons; metal grills and wooden benches for public parks; body armor for the military and police; road signs and license plates for transportation departments; doing data entry and staffing call centers. In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, state prisoners earn no wages for such labor but, on average, state and federal prisoners earn $0.33–$1.41 an hour for this work, reaching as high as $5.15 in Nevada, where the pay starts at $0.25 an hour. • Jobs outside of prisons and jails through various inmate labor programs. These work-release programs, outside work crews, and work camps are more common than public and private industry jobs, but less common than facility maintenance. This category of labor is various, with prisoners performing "community services" like cleaning parks, or clearing homeless encampments, or fighting wildfires in California. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) serves as a federal tax credit that grants employers $2,400 for every work-release employed inmate. Advocates of prison labor argue that rehabilitation is promoted through discipline, a strong work ethic, and providing inmates with valuable skills to be used upon release. Gina Honeycutt, executive director of the National Correctional Industries Association, stated in 2015 that moreover, "in recent years, the focus of many work programs has shifted to concentrate even more on effective rehabilitation of inmates. The transition in the last five years has been away from producing a product to producing a successful offender as our product." Indeed, studies have shown that participants in prison labor programs often have a lower risk of recidivism; these studies may be misleading, however, as it is often only obedient and industrious inmates who are allowed to participate in prison labor in the first place. Activists Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans (writing while incarcerated in California) explain that For private business, 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.'" These scholars all cite the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing the institution of slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Private prisons In a Bureau of Prisons (BOP)–funded study, privatized prisons were compared side-to-side with the public prisons on economic performance, and quality of life. The study found that in a trade-off for allowing prisons to be more cheaply run and operated, the degree to which prisoners are reformed goes down. Because the privatized prisons are so much larger than the public-run prisons, they were subject to economies of scale, allowing for a more efficient, lower-cost alternative to government spending on incarceration. In 2011, The Vera Institute of Justice surveyed 40 state correction departments to gather data on what the true cost of prisons were. Their reports showed that most states had additional costs ranging from one percent to thirty-four percent outside of what their original budget was for that year. John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute asserts that "Prison privatization simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism." Whitehead argues that it characterizes an increasingly inverted justice system dependent upon an advancement in power and wealth of the corporate state. ==Immigration–industrial complex==

As of 2000, funding of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had been increasing as about a total of $4.27 billion was allotted to the INS in the 2000 fiscal budget. This was 8% more than in the 1999 fiscal budget. This expansion, experts claim, has been too rapid and thus has led to an increased chance on the part of faculty for negligence and abuse. Lucas Guttengag, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project stated that, "immigrants awaiting administrative hearings are being detained in conditions that would be unacceptable at prisons for criminal offenders." They also claim that despite having the incarceration rate grow "10 times what it was prior to 1970,... it has not made this country any safer." Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have nearly doubled from 2003 to 2008, with CBP's budget increasing from $5.8 billion to $10.1 billion and ICE from $3.2 billion to $5 billion and even so there has been no significant decrease in immigrant population. Over half of the prison industry's yearly revenue comes from immigrant detention centers. For some small communities in the Southwestern United States, these facilities serve as an integral part of the economy. According to Chris Kirkham in 2012, this constitutes part of a growing immigration industrial complex: "Companies dependent upon continued growth in the numbers of undocumented immigrants detained have exerted themselves in the nation's capital and in small, rural communities to create incentives that reinforce that growth." In 2009, University of Kansas professor Tanya Golash-Boza coined the term, "Immigration Industrial Complex", defining it as "the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of 'anti-illegal' rhetoric," in her paper "The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce Immigration Policies Destined to Fail". In 2009, congressional immigration detention policies required that ICE maintain 34,000 immigration detention beds daily. This immigration bed quota has steadily increased with each passing year, and as of 2017 costing ICE around $159 to detain one individual for one day. In 2010, immigration detention policies implemented by ICE benefited the two major private prison corporations CCA and GeoGroup, increasing their share of immigrant detention beds by 13%. Compared to data from 2009, the percentage of ICE immigrant detention beds in the United States are owned and operated by private for-profit prison corporations has increased by 49%, with CCA and GeoGroup operating 8 out of 10 of the largest facilities. In May 2025, the WSJ reported how the second Trump administration had already spent 50% more on immigration removals and detention than in 2024. == Impact and response ==

Women In 1994, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women was released which stated that "Among many other abuses women prisoners have identified, are pat searches (male guards pat searching and groping women), illegal strip searches (male guards observing strip searches of women), constant lewd comments and gestures, violations of their right to privacy (male guards watching women in showers and toilets), and in some instances, sexual assault and rape." International human rights standards reinforce this by stating "the rape of a woman in custody is an act of torture." In addition, some prisons fail to meet women's needs with providing basic hygiene and reproductive health products. In regards to women and the prison–industrial complex, Angela Davis stated that "State-sanctioned punishment is informed by patriarchal structures and ideologies that have tended to produce historical assumptions of female criminality linked to ideas about the violation of social norms defining a 'woman’s place'. Considering the fact that as many as half of all women are assaulted by their husbands or partners combined with dramatically rising numbers of women sentenced to prison, it may be argued that women in general are subjected to a far greater magnitude of punishment than men." She also suggested that the "historical and philosophical connections between domestic violence and imprisonment [comprise] two modes of gendered punishment – one located in the private realm, the other in the public realm." Davis continues: Due to a variety of factors, different ethnic groups have different rates of offending, arrest, prosecution, conviction and incarceration. In terms of percentage of ethnic populations, in descending order, the U.S. incarcerates more Native Americans, African Americans, followed by Hispanics, Whites, and finally Asians. Native Americans are the largest group incarcerated per capita. Response A 2014 report by the American Friends Service Committee, Grassroots Leadership, and the Southern Center for Human Rights claims that recent reductions in the number of people incarcerated has pushed the prison industry into areas previously served by non-profit behavioral health and treatment-oriented agencies, referring to it as the "Treatment Industrial Complex", which "has the potential to ensnare more individuals, under increased levels of supervision and surveillance, for increasing lengths of time – in some cases, for the rest of a person's life." Sociologist Nancy A. Heitzeg and activist Kay Whitlock claim that contemporary bipartisan reforms being proposed "are predicated on privatization schemes, dominated by the anti-government right and neoliberal interests that more completely merge for-profit medical treatment and other human needs supports with the prison-industrial complex." Sociologist Loïc Wacquant of UC Berkeley is also dismissive of the term for sounding too conspiratorial and for overstating its scope and effect. However Bernard Harcourt, Professor of Law at Columbia University, considers the term useful insofar as "it highlights the profitability of prison building and the employment boom associated with prison guard labor. There is no question that the prison expansion served the financial interests of large sectors of the economy." == Reform ==

Prison abolition movement A response to the prison industrial complex is the prison abolition movement. The goal of prison abolition is to end the prison industrial complex by eliminating prisons. Prison abolitionists aim to do this by changing the socioeconomic conditions of the communities that are affected the most by the prison–industrial complex. Abolitionists propose reallocating funds to social programs such as education, mental healthcare, housing, and non-armed dispute forces. The purpose of abolition is not necessarily to dismantle, but to revise. Angela Davis, a known political activist and co-founder of Critical Resistance describes the purpose of abolition, "All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety." Alternatives to detention Due to the overcrowding in prisons and detention centers by for-profit corporations, organizations such as Amnesty International, propose using alternatives such as reporting requirements, bonds, or the use of monitoring technologies. a relatively low price in comparison to the reported average cost of incarceration in the U.S., which has been priced at roughly $87.61 per day. Despite the relative efficiency and effectiveness of alternative to detention, there is still much debate that these alternatives will not change the dynamics of incarceration. This argument lies in the fact that major corporations such as the GEO Group and Corrections Corporations of America will still be profiting by simply re-branding and moving towards rehabilitation services and monitoring technologies. Rather than effectively ending and finding a solution to the PIC, more people will simply find themselves imprisoned by another system. Critical Resistance The movement gained momentum in 1997, when a group of prison abolition activists, scholars, and former prisoners collaborated to organize a three-day conference to examine the prison–industrial complex in the U.S. The founders of Critical Resistance include Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Rose Braz. The conference, Critical Resistance to the prison–industrial complex, was held in September 1998 at the University of California, Berkeley and was attended by over 3,500 people of diverse academic, socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. Two years after the conference, a political grassroots organization was founded bearing the same name with the mission to challenge and dismantle the prison–industrial complex. In 2001, the organization adopted a national structure with local chapters in Portland, Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York City to develop campaigns and projects working towards abolishing the prison industrial complex. Currently, the cause has shifted towards supporting efforts towards resisting state repression and developing tools to re-imagine life without the prison industrial complex. Following the forum, the rise of Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted People's Movement helped to incorporate abolition into other movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the Movement for Black Lives. 68% of state prisoners had not completed high school in 1997, including 70 percent of women state prisoners. Suspension, expulsion, and being held back during middle school years are the largest predictors of arrest for adolescent women. The school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately affects young black men with an overall incarceration risk that is six to eight times higher than young whites. Black male high school dropouts experienced a 60% risk of imprisonment as of 1999. There is a recent trend of authors describing the school-to-prison pipeline as feeding into the prison–industrial complex. Since the shortcomings of zero-tolerance discipline have grown very clear, there has been a widespread movement to support reform across school districts and states. Growing research that shows suspensions, especially for minor infractions and misbehavior, are a flawed disciplinary response has encouraged many districts to adopt new disciplinary alternatives. In 2015, mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio joined with the Department of Education to address school discipline in a campaign to tweak the old policies. De Blasio also spearheaded a leadership team on school climate and discipline to take recommendations and craft the foundations for more substantive policy. The team released recommendations that work towards reducing the racial disparity in suspension and discussing the underlying root cause of disciplinary infractions through restorative justice. ==See also==