Over the past decades of our nation’s history there has been much scholarship about what president Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex (now the military-industrial newstainment complex). Much to the chagrin of the military brass and the defense industry it was one of the earliest warnings of a twisted economic engine that terribly needs reform still. Yet, there are other industrial complexes prevalent in our society today. Namely right here in New York it is the prison-industrial complex. I begin this dialogue by prefacing two questions; why are municipalities clamoring for jails in order to sustain their local economies and collect tax revenue? Is this the only way?

For many rural areas now devoid of traditional economic drivers like agriculture, a prison is one of the few ways of creating jobs. It is true that if we were to make a new state from everything above Rockland County it would fail miserably to survive. These are the underlying factors driving the want for prisons. Sadly, the dysfunctional upstate economy is not being addressed; therefore you see correctional facilities springing up to accommodate the ever expanding behemoth of the correctional leviathan in this state.

Here in New York the prison-industrial complex is fueled by draconian measures like the Rockefeller drug laws. In other states you have “three strikes” laws. The goal is clear, keep the convicts coming into the system by any means necessary. Instead of looking at ways to prevent people, young and old, living in poverty from being either locked up or worse, it is unequivocal that the ultimate goal is to sustain this factory of imprisonment. It is these conditions bred from issues of class and institutional racism that we must address. We can no longer afford to ignore the reality. Where have we gone as a society when we require a substantial percentage of our population to be locked up in order to have a functioning economy? Don’t get me wrong, the correctional system is needed, but is it correcting anything? Far too long has it been since the idea of a correctional system was associated with rehabilitation. These facilities are simply nothing more than holding pens now.

There is no question prisons are a very big business. The privatizing of the corrections system has been going on for quite some time. When a prison is run for profit through companies like Wackenhut, you are bound to hear stories of prisoner abuse at the hands of guards, prisoners escaping and more. As a state we need to take back our correctional system and walk away from the neo-liberal view of privatization of institutions that should always be run publicly.

Besides Wackenhut there are many “Halliburtons” of the prison-industrial complex. You have phone companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI making tens of thousands of dollars a year from installing pay phones within these jails. You have private specialty firms offering internal communication and security systems to prisons as well.

We must find a way to stop profit making and profit taking at the expense of human suffering; be it through war making or putting people in jail. After WWII there was another direction we could have went to plan the national economy instead of through flooding the defense department with tax dollars, then in turn them using that funding to create new weapons and technologies, which in turn was turned over to the private corporations to turn a profit. This essentially robbed us of our tax dollars when we should have benefited from the sales not the corporations. The parallel is that there is another direction we can go other than feeding the prison industrial complex. The answer for turning away from both beasts I mentioned is to build schools!

Reference:

http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-goldberg.html

http://www.eyeonwackenhut.com/

http://www.droptherock.org/