The Industry of Mass Incarceration (original) (raw)

On the Business of Incarceration

Commune, 2019

Review of American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment that argues that the book's popularity among US liberals & liberal media (NY Times, NPR, Barak Obama) is largely because of a faulty reliance on simplistic notions of profit to explain the US carceral state. The demonization of private prisons obscures the massively larger role of public cages & absolves public sector unions who represent prison workers.

Prisons Profits and Principles

Prison for Profits and Principles, 2014

This paper examines prisons and cost reduction affecting government budgets as well as income and profit for corporate run facilities. It will also address some issues of increasing budgetary concerns regarding the management of prison and jail facilities, the problems with escalating costs, budget constraints and overcrowding, an ethical concern, as presented by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Included, is an example of one of the pioneering companies to provide contractual services in a for-profit operation. The Corrections Corporation of America, (CCA) won a federal bid to run an immigration facility at the Houston Processing Center in 1984 in Houston, Texas. Lastly, this paper will examine ethical concerns over prison mismanagement by both governmental leaders and private corporate executives.

Corporations Go to Prisons: The Expansion of Corporate Power in the Correctional Industry

Labor Studies Journal, 2002

Over the last two decades, the U.S. prison population has qua drupled, with some 1.9 million people behind bars in federal and state prisons, and local jails by the year 2000. Corporations are seeking profit-making opportunities from this prison population. In this paper, we examine two major areas through which corpora tions are capitalizing on prison labor: prison privatization and prison industry. We briefly review key explanations of incarceration, re port on the current state of prison privatization and prison indus trialization, examine the impact they have on organized labor, and propose union strategies in fighting against the expansion of cor porate power in the correctional industry.