James Nachtwey / VII
February 6, 2012
For anyone paying attention, there is no
shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral
infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under
the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the
amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated
correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected.
The United States of America has long
held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other
nation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently,
the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a
number exceeding
the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at
any point in its history.
While miserable statistics illustrate some
measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers inside
the land of the free, only a partial
picture of the broader situation is painted. While the country faces an
unprecedented economic and financial crisis, business is booming in other
fields – namely, the private prison industry. Like any other business, these
institutions are run for the purpose of turning a profit. State and federal
prisons are contracted out to private companies who are paid a fixed amount to
house each prisoner per day. Their profits result from spending the minimum
amount of state or federal funds on each inmate, only to pocket the remaining
capital. For the corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity depends on
housing the maximum numbers of inmates for the longest potential time - as
inexpensively as possible.
By allowing a profit-driven
capitalist-enterprise model to operate over institutions that should rightfully
be focused on rehabilitation, America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex. Under the promise
of maintaining correctional facilities at a lower cost due to market
competition, state and federal governments contract privately run companies to
manage and staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design and construct
facilities. The
private prison industry is primarily led by two morally deficient entities, the
Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation). These companies amassed a combined revenue of over $2.9
billion in 2010, not without situating themselves in the center of
political influence.
"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected
by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole
standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain
activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance,
any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal
immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and
sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to
house them. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower
minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible
for early release based on good behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives under
consideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitoring
who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates or
resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in
arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional
facilities."
Considering today’s
private prison population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decades
earlier, the malleability of the judicial system under corporate influence
is clear. The Corrections Corporation of America is the first and largest
private prison company in the US, cofounded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, former
Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. The CCA entered the market and
overtly exploited Beasley’s political connections in an attempt to exert
control over the entire prison system of Tennessee. Today, the company operates
over sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the US Marshal Service,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The GEO
Group operates 118 detention centers throughout the United States, South
Africa, UK, Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name, the Wackenhut
Corrections Corporation was synonymous for the
sadistic abuse of prisoners in its facilities, resulting in the termination
of several contracts in 1999.
Perhaps
the most disturbing aspect of this obstinate moral predicament presents itself
in the private
contracting of prisoners and their role in assembling vast quantities of
military and commercial equipment. While the United States plunges itself into
each new manufactured conflict under a wide range of fraudulent pretenses, it
is interesting to note that all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof
vests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other equipment used by military
occupation forces are produced
by inmates in federal prisons across the US. Giant multinational
conglomerates and weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon
Corporation employ federal prison labor to cheaply assemble weapons components,
only to sell them to the Pentagon at premium
prices. At the lowest, Prisoners earn 17 cents an hour to assemble high-tech
electronic components for guided missile systems needed to produce Patriot
Advanced Capability 3 missiles and anti-tank projectiles.
In the
past, political mouthpieces of the United States have criticized countries such
as China and North Korea for their role in exploiting prisoner labor to create
commodity products such as women’s bras and artificial flowers for export.
Evidently, outsourcing the construction of the military equipment responsible
for innumerable civilian causalities to the prisons of America warrants no such
criticism from the military industrial establishment. In utter derision toward the integrity
of the common worker, prison inmates are exposed to toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium
dust and other chemicals when contracted
to clean and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat.
Prison laborers receive no union protection, benefits or health and safety protection
when made to work in electronic recycling factories where inmates are regularly
exposed to lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.
In addition to performing tasks that can
result in detrimental illnesses, prison labor produces other military utilities
such as night-vision goggles, body armor, radio and communication devices, components
for battleship anti-aircraft guns, land mine sweepers and electro-optical
equipment. While this abundant source of low-cost manpower fosters greater incentives
for corporate stockholders to impose draconian legislation on the majority of
Americans who commit nonviolent offenses, it’s hard to imagine such an innately
colossal contradiction to the nation’s official rhetoric, i.e. American values.
Furthermore, prison labor is employed not only in the assembly
of complex components used in F-15 fighter jets and Cobra helicopters, it
also supplies 98% of the entire market for equipment
assembly services, with similar statistics in regard to products such as
paints, stoves, office furniture, headphones, and speakers.
It is some twisted irony that large
sections of the workforce in America’s alleged free-market are shackled in chains. Weapons manufactured in the
isolation of America’s prisons are the source of an exploitative cycle, which
leaves allied NATO member countries indebted to a multibillion-dollar weapons
industry at the behest of the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Complete
with its own trade exhibitions, mail-order catalogs and investment houses on
Wall Street, the eminence of the private prison industry solidifies the ongoing
corrosion of American principles – principles that seem more abstract now, than
the day they were written.
Predictably, the potential profit of the
prison labor boom has encouraged the foundations
of US corporate society to move their production forces into American prisons.
Conglomerates such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless,
Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent
Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's,
Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret, and Target have all begun mounting production
operations in US prisons. Many of these Fortune 500 conglomerates are corporate
members of civil society groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)
and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). These think tanks are critical
toward influencing American foreign policy. Under the guise of democracy
promotion, these civil societies fund opposition movements and train dissent
groups in countries around the world in the interest of pro-US regime change. With
naked insincerity, the same companies that outsource the production of their
products to American prisons simultaneously
sponsor civil societies that demanded the release of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi
from house arrest – an
overly political effort in the on-going attempts to install a compliant regime
in that country.
The concept of privatizing prisons to
reduce expenses comes at great cost to the inmates detained, who are subjected
to living in increasingly squalid conditions in jail cells across America. In 2007, the Texas Youth
Commission (TYC) was sent to a West Texas juvenile prison run by GEO Group for
the purpose of monitoring its quality standards. The monitors sent by the TYC were
subsequently fired for failing to report the sordid conditions they witnessed
in the facility while they awarded the GEO Group with an overall compliance
score of nearly 100%. Independent auditors later visited the facility and
discovered that inmates were forced to urinate or defecate in small containers due
to a lack of toilets in some of the cells. The independent commission also
noted in their
list of reported findings that the facility racially segregated prisoners
and disciplined Hispanics for speaking Spanish by denying their access to
layers and medical treatment. It was later discovered that the TYC
monitors were employed by the GEO Group. Troublingly, the Walnut Grove
Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF) operated by the GEO Group in Mississippi
has been subject to a class-action lawsuit after
reports that staff members were complicit in the beating and stabbing of a prisoner who consequently
incurred permanent brain damage. The official
compliant authored by the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center also
highlights cases where the administration turned a blind eye to brutal cases of
rape and torture within the facility.
The first private prison models were
introduced following the abolishment of slavery after the American Civil War from
1861 to 1865, which saw expansive prison farms replace slave plantations. Prisons
of the day contracted
groups of predominately African-American inmates to pick cotton and construct
railroads principally in southern states such as Alabama, Georgia and
Mississippi. In 2012, there are more African-Americans engrossed in the criminal-justice
system than any point during slavery. Throughout its history, the American
prison system has shared little with the concept of rehabilitation. Like the
post-Civil War prison farms, today’s system functions to purport required
labor, largely on a racially specific basis. African-Americans consist of 40% of the prison
population
and are incarcerated seven
times more often than whites, despite the fact that African-Americans make up only 12% of the national population. Once released, former
inmates are barred from voting
in elections, denied educational opportunities and are legally discriminated
against in their efforts to find employment and housing. Few can deny the
targeting of underprivileged urban communities of color in America’s failed War
on Drugs. This phenomenon can largely be contributed to the stipulations of its
anti-drug legislation, which
commanded maximum sentencing for possession of minute amounts of rock cocaine,
a substance that floods poor inner-city black communities.
Unbeknown to the vast majority
of Americans, the US government has been actively taking steps to modify the
legal infrastructure of the country to allow for a dramatic expansion of the
domestic prison system at the expense of civil rights. On December 31st,
2011, Barack
Obama signed into law the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) H.R. 1540. Emulating the rouge military
dictatorships the US Government has long condemned in its rhetoric, the NDAA
introduces a vaguely worded legislation that allows for US citizens to be
arbitrarily detained in military detention without due process - might they be predictably deemed radical, conspiratorial or suspected of terrorism. In a climate of
rising public discontent, the establishment media has steadfastly worked to
blur the line between public activism and domestic extremism. In addition to the world’s largest network of
prison facilities, over
800 located detainment camps exist in all regions of the United States with
varying maximum capacities.
This legislation becomes increasingly more
dangerous as citizens can be labeled domestic extremists based on their
constitutionally protected activism or personal political leanings. In January 2006, a contract to
construct detention
facilities for the Department of Homeland Security worth a maximum of $385
million was awarded to KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton. Following the
signing of NDAA earlier in 2012, leaked documents reveal that KBR
is now seeking to staff its detention centers and award contracts for
services such as catering, temporary fencing and barricades, laundry and medical services, power
generation, and refuse collection. It would be reasonable to assume that these
facilities could be managed in partnership with private corporations such as the GEO Group or the CCA, as many federal and state penitentiaries privatize
sections of their facilities to privately owned companies. Declassified
US Army documents originally drafted in 1997 divulge the existence of
inmate labor camps inside US military installations. It is all but unexpected
that the relationship between the upper echelons of government and the private
prison enterprise will grow increasingly more intimate in the current climate
of prison industrial legislation.
The partnership between the United States
government and its corporate associates spans various industries however, they
all seek the common pursuit of profit irrespective of the moral and ethical
consequence – the human consequence.
The increasing influence of the Prison Industrial Complex towards official
legislation and economic undertakings signifies a reprehensible threat to basic
human rights. Perhaps the issuance of government legislation that leads offenders
into detainment for the benefit of private shareholders is the purest
embodiment of fascism, as cited in Mussolini’s vision of a Corporate State. Perhaps we all (this author
included) fail to grasp the seriousness of these legislations and their implications
on our lives.
Mumia
Abu-Jamal has spent over three decades on death row in the throngs of the
American prison system. Prior to his conviction in 1981 for the murder of a white
police officer, Jamal was a political activist and President of the Philadelphia
Association of Black Journalists. Critical evidence vindicating Jamal was withheld
from the trial prior to the issuance of the death penalty. Forensic experts believe
he was denied a fair trial. On December 7, 2011, the Philadelphia District Attorney announced
that prosecutors would no longer seek the death penalty for Jamal. He remains
imprisoned for life without parole and continues his work as a journalist from
his jail cell in Pennsylvania.
Note: The figure of six million people
cited in the first paragraph of this article represents all people in juvenile detention
and adult facilities, in addition to those who have passed through the prison
system and are now being subjected to some form of parole or probation, i.e. correctional
supervision.
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