The Prison State of
America
The incarcerated poor have become the
nation’s most exploited workers. They are
the prototype drones for the corporate
totalitarian state.
By Chris Hedges
December 28, 2014 "ICH"
- "Truthdig"
- Prisons employ and exploit the
ideal worker. Prisoners do not receive
benefits or pensions. They are not paid
overtime. They are forbidden to organize and
strike. They must show up on time. They are
not paid for sick days or granted vacations.
They cannot formally complain about working
conditions or safety hazards. If they are
disobedient, or attempt to protest their
pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can
be sent to isolation cells. The roughly 1
million prisoners who work for corporations
and government industries in the American
prison system are models for what the
corporate state expects us all to become.
And corporations have no intention of
permitting prison reforms that would reduce
the size of their bonded workforce. In fact,
they are seeking to replicate these
conditions throughout the society.
States, in the name of
austerity, have stopped providing prisoners
with essential items including shoes, extra
blankets and even toilet paper, while
starting to charge them for electricity and
room and board. Most prisoners and the
families that struggle to support them are
chronically short of money. Prisons are
company towns. Scrip, rather than money, was
once paid to coal miners, and it could be
used only at the company store. Prisoners
are in a similar condition. When they go
broke—and being broke is a frequent
occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out
prison loans to pay for medications, legal
and medical fees and basic commissary items
such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage
inside prison is as prevalent as it is
outside prison.
States impose an array of
fees on prisoners. For example, there is a
10 percent charge imposed by New Jersey on
every commissary purchase. Stamps have a 10
percent surcharge. Prisoners must pay the
state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an
immediate family member or a 15-minute visit
to a funeral home to view the deceased. New
Jersey, like most other states, forces a
prisoner to reimburse the system for
overtime wages paid to the two guards who
accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The
charge can be as high as $945.04. It can
take years to pay off a visit with a dying
father or mother.
Fines, often in the
thousands of dollars, are assessed against
many prisoners when they are sentenced.
There are 22 fines that can be imposed in
New Jersey, including the Violent Crime
Compensation Assessment (VCCB), the Law
Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment
Fund (LEOT) and Extradition Costs (EXTRA).
The state takes a percentage each month out
of prison pay to pay down the fines, a
process that can take decades. If a prisoner
who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely
solely on a prison salary he or she will owe
about $4,000 after making payments for 25
years. Prisoners can leave prison in debt to
the state. And if they cannot continue to
make regular payments—difficult because of
high unemployment—they are sent back to
prison. High recidivism is part of the
design.
Corporations have privatized
most of the prison functions once handled by
governments. They run prison commissaries
and, since the prisoners have nowhere else
to shop, often jack up prices by as much as
100 percent. Corporations have taken over
the phone systems and charge exorbitant fees
to prisoners and their families. They
grossly overcharge for money transfers from
families to prisoners. And these
corporations, some of the nation’s largest,
pay little more than a dollar a day to
prison laborers who work in for-profit
prison industries. Food and merchandise
vendors, construction companies, laundry
services, uniforms companies, prison
equipment vendors, cafeteria services,
manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor
and the array of medieval instruments used
for the physical control of prisoners, and a
host of other contractors feed like jackals
off prisons. Prisons, in America, are a
hugely profitable business.
Our prison-industrial
complex, which holds 2.3 million prisoners,
or 25 percent of the world’s prison
population, makes money by keeping prisons
full. It demands bodies, regardless of
color, gender or ethnicity. As the system
drains the pool of black bodies, it has
begun to incarcerate others. Women—the
fastest-growing segment of the prison
population—are swelling prisons, as are poor
whites in general, Hispanics and immigrants.
Prisons are no longer a black-white issue.
Prisons are a grotesque manifestation of
corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in
prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as punishment
for crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States. …” And the massive U.S.
prison industry functions like the forced
labor camps that have existed in all
totalitarian states.
Corporate investors, who
have poured billions into the business of
mass incarceration, expect long-term
returns. And they will get them. It is their
lobbyists who write the draconian laws that
demand absurdly long sentences, deny
paroles, determine immigrant detention laws
and impose minimum-sentence and
three-strikes-out laws (mandating life
sentences after three felony convictions).
The politicians and the courts, subservient
to corporate power, can be counted on to
protect corporate interests.
Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA), the largest owner of
for-profit prisons and immigration detention
facilities in the country, had revenues of
$1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300
million. CCA holds an average of 81,384
inmates in its facilities on any one day.
Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based
company that contracts through Aramark
Correctional Services to provide food to 600
correctional institutions across the United
States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3
billion by investors that included Goldman
Sachs.
The three top for-profit
prison corporations
spent an estimated $45 million over a
recent 10-year period for lobbying that is
keeping the prison business flush. The
resource center
In the Public Interest documented
in its report “Criminal: How Lockup
Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee
Profits for Private Prison Corporations”
that private prison companies often sign
state contracts that guarantee prison
occupancy rates of 90 percent. If states
fail to meet the quota they have to pay the
corporations for the empty beds.
CCA in 2011 gave $710,300
in political contributions to candidates for
federal or state office, political parties
and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super
PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union
reported. The corporation also spent $1.07
million lobbying federal officials plus
undisclosed sums to lobby state officials,
according to the ACLU. CCA, through the
American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC), also lobbies legislators to impose
harsher detention laws at the state and
federal levels. The ALEC helped draft
Arizona’s cruel anti-immigrant law
SB 1070.
The United States, from
1970 to 2005, increased its prison
population by about 700 percent, according
to statistics gathered by the ACLU. The
federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the
ACLU report notes, says for-profit companies
presently control about 18 percent of
federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all
state prisoners. Private prisons account for
nearly all newly built prisons. And nearly
half of all immigrants detained by the
federal government are shipped to for-profit
prisons, according to
Detention Watch Network.
But corporate profit is
not limited to building and administering
prisons. Whole industries now rely almost
exclusively on prison labor. Federal
prisoners, who are among the highest paid in
the U.S. system, making as much as $1.25 an
hour, produce the military’s helmets,
uniforms, pants, shirts, ammunition belts,
ID tags and tents. Prisoners work, often
through subcontractors, for major
corporations such as Chevron, Bank of
America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T,
Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, J.C.
Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer,
Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson &
Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola,
Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary
Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell,
Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel,
Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin
and Target. Prisoners in some states run
dairy farms, staff call centers, take hotel
reservations or work in slaughterhouses. And
prisoners are used to carry out public
services such as collecting highway trash in
states such as Ohio.
States, with shrinking
budgets, share in the corporate
exploitation. They get kickbacks of as much
as 40 percent from corporations that prey on
prisoners. This kickback money is often
supposed to go into “inmate welfare funds,”
but prisoners say they rarely see any
purchases made by the funds to improve life
inside prison.The
wages paid to prisoners for labor inside
prisons have remained stagnant and in real
terms have declined over the past three
decades. In New Jersey a prisoner made $1.20
for eight hours of work—yes, eight hours of
work—in 1980 and today makes $1.30 for a
day’s labor. Prisoners earn, on average, $28
a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit
prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour.
However, items for sale in
prison commissaries have risen in price over
the past two decades by as much as 100
percent. And new rules in some prisons,
including those in New Jersey, prohibit
families to send packages to prisoners,
forcing prisoners to rely exclusively on
prison vendors. This is as much a
psychological blow as a material one; it
leaves families feeling powerless to help
loved ones trapped in the system.
A bar of Dove soap in 1996
cost New Jersey prisoners 97 cents. Today it
costs $1.95, an increase of 101 percent. A
tube of Crest toothpaste cost $2.35 in 1996
and today costs $3.49, an increase of 48
percent. AA batteries have risen by 184
percent, and a stick of deodorant has risen
by 95 percent. The only two items I found
that remained the same in price from 1996
were frosted flake cereal and cups of
noodles, but these items in prisons have
been switched from recognizable brand names
to generic products. The white Reebok shoes
that most prisoners wear, shoes that lasts
about six months, costs about $45 a pair.
Those who cannot afford the Reebok brand
must buy, for $20, shoddy shoes with soles
that shred easily. In addition, prisoners
are charged for visits to the infirmary and
the dentist and for medications.
Keefe Supply Co., which
runs commissaries for an estimated half a
million prisoners in states including
Florida and Maryland, is notorious for price
gouging. It sells a single No. 10 white
envelope for 15 cents—$15 per 100 envelopes.
The typical retail cost outside prison for a
box of 100 of these envelopes is $7. The
company marks up a 3-ounce packet of noodle
soup, one of the most popular commissary
items, to 45 cents from 26 cents.
Global Tel Link, a private
phone company, jacks up phone rates in New
Jersey to 15 cents a minute, although some
states, such as New York, have relieved the
economic load on families by reducing the
charge to 4 cents a minute. The Federal
Communications Commission has determined
that a fair rate for a 15-minute interstate
call by a prisoner is $1.80 for debit and
$2.10 for collect. The high phone rates
imposed on prisoners, who do not have a
choice of carriers and must call either
collect or by using debit accounts that hold
prepaid deposits made by them or their
families, are especially damaging to the 2
million children with a parent behind bars.
The phone is a lifeline for the children of
the incarcerated.
Monopolistic telephone
contracts
give to the states kickbacks amounting,
on average, to 42 percent of gross revenues
from prisoner phone calls, according to
Prison Legal News. The companies with
exclusive prison phone contracts not only
charge higher phone rates but add to the
phone charges the cost of the kickbacks,
called “commissions” by state agencies,
according to research conducted in 2011 by
John E. Dannenberg for Prison Legal News.
Dannenberg found that the phone market in
state prison systems generates an estimated
$362 million annually in gross revenues for
the states and costs prisoners’ families,
who put money into phone accounts, some $143
million a year.
When strong family ties
are retained, there are lower rates of
recidivism and fewer parole violations. But
that is not what the corporate architects of
prisons want: High recidivism, now at over
60 percent, keeps the cages full. This is
one reason, I suspect, why prisons make
visitations humiliating and difficult. It is
not uncommon for prisoners to tell their
families—especially those that include small
children traumatized by the security
screening, long waits, body searches,
clanging metal doors and verbal abuse by
guards—not to visit. Prisoners with life
sentences frequently urge loved ones to
sever all ties with them and consider them
as dead.
The rise of what Marie
Gottschalk, the author of “Caught: The
Prison State and the Lockdown of American
Politics,” calls “the carceral state” is
ominous. It will not be reformed through
elections or by appealing to political
elites or the courts. Prisons are not,
finally, about race, although poor people of
color suffer the most. They are not even
about being poor. They are prototypes for
the future. They are emblematic of the
disempowerment and exploitation that
corporations seek to inflict on all workers.
If corporate power continues to disembowel
the country, if it is not impeded by mass
protests and revolt, life outside prison
will soon resemble life in prison.
Chris Hedges spent nearly
two decades as a foreign correspondent in
Central America, the Middle East, Africa and
the Balkans. He has reported from more than
50 countries and has worked for The
Christian Science Monitor, National Public
Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New
York Times, for which he was a foreign
correspondent for 15 years.
