THE BUSINESS OF PRISON

The incarceration industry generates $30 billion a year in the US -
more than baseball or pornography - so you don't have to be a
conspiracy theorist to wonder why the prison population is expanding
so rapidly, writes Anna Mundow

Beeville, Texas: 4.30 a.m.

One by one the bosses clip-clop over to one of the guard towers that
surround the prison. They chat for a while among themselves, waiting
amiably on horseback. Above them, the picket guard attaches a rope to
a plastic milk crate, then lowers the crate over the side. Inside the
crate are the bosses' guns.

They are .357 Magnums, and the bosses are authorised to shoot to
kill. When the crate reaches saddle height, each boss dips in and
grabs one. There is one more guard on horseback, and he stays aloof
from the others. He is known as the Highrider and he is armed not
with a pistol, but with a rifle: a .30-30 capable of picking off a
running inmate at several hundred yards.

The inmates line up two by two for their work detail. They have been
awake since 3.30 a.m., the start of their morning feeding . . . For
hours, the men will pound the ground . . . clearing acres of land in
a process known as flatweeding . . . To pass the time, the inmates,
nearly half of whom are black, sing work songs. This is old music,
handed down from generation to generation of convicts. Some of it
dates back to the days of the plantation.

Pelican Bay, California, midmorning

The SHU (Secure Housing Unit) is designed to deaden the senses. The
cells are windowless; the walls are white. From inside the cell, all
one can see through the perforated metal door is another white wall.
. . . It is surreally quiet . . . very much like an intensive care
ward. The lighting is subdued and even the guards speak in whispers.
In the control room, computer screens glow with luminous, pulsing
cursors and video monitors flicker with grainy black- and-white
images from surveillance cameras . . . Charles Manson lives here.

These are the twin faces of American incarceration. Chain-gangs break
rocks in Texas, swinging their hammers to the rhythm of songs first
chanted by slaves. Prisoners in futuristic isolation cells hear only
the buzz of fluorescent light, the hum of computerised ventilation.
Today approximately 1.8 million Americans are behind bars; no other
nation imprisons more of its citizens. At the current growth rate, by
the year 2050 half of the US population will be incarcerated. The
prospect is, of course, absurd: society would cease to function.

What drives this headlong rush towards the unimaginable? Prison is no
longer just a crime and punishment business, it is a money business.
From the chain-gang to the isolation unit, incarceration has become
one of America's fastest-growing industries, a sure thing in a
softening economy. Generating over $30 billion a year in the US -
more than baseball, more than pornography - the thriving prison
industry has created millionaires with a vested interest in filling
cells and employees with a fatalistic attitude to their long-term
guests. "Let's face it," one warden recently remarked, "they're here
to die."

Joe Hallinan is haunted by prison sounds. "They say you never forget
the clang of the doors slamming behind you, and they're right," he
says. "The shrieks of the inmates in the segregation units, the
rhythmic pounding of feet on doors; it never leaves you."

Hallinan, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, never wanted to go
inside - until he met Jack Kyle. A tough Texas warden, Kyle always
believed in locking people up, still does. But, he confided in
Hallinan, things are getting out of hand. "Everybody wants 'em," Kyle
observed of the new "supermax" prisons that squat like sinister
shopping malls on the outskirts of small towns across the US. The
sign outside one Illinois hamlet says: "Welcome to Tamms/ The Home of
Supermax". And guess what its Burger Shack special is called?
Intrigued, Hallinan spent four years visiting prisons across the
country, from California to the rural south. "I just kept writing,"
he recalls. "In hotel rooms, in airports, on the hood of my car.
Writing and saying to myself: `Oh my God, people are never going to
believe this.`".

The result is Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation,
Hallinan's devastating examination of the 21st-century prison
industry. He first glimpsed that industry's power in a Texas
courtroom at the trial of Joe Boy Lambright, the first prison guard
in Texas history convicted of killing an inmate. "I saw how the
merger of punishment and profit was reshaping this country," Hallinan
writes. "How young men like Joe Boy, who might, in another
generation, have joined the army or gone to work in a factory, were
now turning to prison for their livelihood. I saw job hungry towns,
desperate for something to keep their young people from leaving,
compete for prisons the way they once had for industries . . ."

Abandoned by heavy industry and bypassed by the electronic
revolution, many failing towns in the US's mid-section and south now
have a final shot at prosperity. They can become "prison hubs". Just
as the Cold War bestowed military bases on grateful backwaters, so
the prison boom holds out cash incentives and employment prospects to
decaying towns. "The sales pitch to our town was development,"
explains Doug Richards, an attorney in Springfield, Vermont. Richards
recently opposed the imminent construction of a 350-bed state prison
outside Springfield, but concedes that the inducements were too
attractive for the struggling factory town to refuse. "The state of
Vermont offered a package of some $7.5 million and land for a
community centre. That sold it to the voters."

Federal and state prisons have been features of the US landscape
since the 19th century; many have become part of the collective
imagination: Sing Sing, Folsom, Angola, San Quentin. This is a
sealed, self-referential world with its own Johnny Cash soundtrack,
its own movie legends.

But new players have arrived on the US prison stage: private
corporations who now compete with state governments for lucrative
prison contracts. "So keen is the competition between public and
private that the bottom line drives nearly all decisions behind bars
in this country," Hallinan explains, "from the food the inmates eat
to the type of work they do - even to the TV shows they get to watch
. . . Television acts like 'electric Thorazine'. It keeps inmates
tranquil, and a tranquil inmate is a cheap inmate."

Before 1983, there were no private prisons in the US; today there are
over 150. They are owned by a variety of firms, the oldest and
largest being the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In 1997,
CCA's stock doubled on Wall Street, fetching over 50 times its
earnings on the previous year, a performance rivalled only by the
fastest-growing technology stocks. That same year, Wackenhut, CCA's
closest rival, reported $8.3 million in profits on $137.8 million in
revenues. That, says Joe Hallinan, "is the genius of American prison
expansion. Having failed to make prisons effective, we have learned
to make them profitable".

They call it "selling the walls". Corporations such as CCA assemble
pre-fabricated modular units, minimising construction costs. Small
"pods" of cells surround a control booth, enabling one guard to do
the work that five traditionally did. (Payroll is 75 per cent of a
typical prison's operating costs.) Like a hotel - charging the client
state, say, $50 per day per inmate - the private prison sub-contracts
all services from food to medical care, then takes its cut. Telephone
companies such as AT&T and MCI, for example, compete for prisoners,
who make $1 billion worth of calls every year. In 1997, New York made
$21.2 million from prison telephone-call commissions.

The numbers make sense. According to the industry's own figures, when
a private firm takes over an existing state prison, there is a 10 per
cent saving. When it operates a prison of its own design, the saving
is 15 per cent. Convict labour is also transformed. "At the Eastern
Oregon Correctional Institution . . . inmates don't make licence
plates any more," Hallinan writes. "They make money . . . $6.25 an
hour, on average, manufacturing casual clothing. The prison here,
like prisons across America, is turning itself into a for-profit
factory, cashing in on a tight labour market." Roughly half an
inmate's hourly wage goes to the prison corporation.

Companies like Lee Jeans, Boeing, Victoria's Secret and Eddie Bauer
all farm work out to prison labour, and one California correctional
agency uses prisoners to make TWA's airline reservations. This,
according to its critics, is the new "prison industrial complex".
State-run prisons draw similar criticism. "So this is going to
breathe new life into our town," scoffs Kurt Staudter, another
opponent of the Springfield, Vermont prison. "They'll have inmates
working there for 25 or 50 cents an hour. How is a local cabinet shop
or tool-maker supposed to compete with that kind of slave labour?"
Many in Springfield also fear the eventual takeover of the state
prison by a private company, a growing trend all over the US.

Corporations such as CCA, citing prison overcrowding, say that they
are filling a need. Oklahoma's inmates, for example, are still housed
in that state's 1908 prison, despite the fact that their numbers have
tripled in the last 15 years.

A source within the New England prison system, who requested
anonymity, rejects the argument. "There are plenty of empty cells in
our prisons," he insists, speaking from 15 years experience. "But
saying that is not good for business. This industry depends on
feeding itself. It has to say there's a crisis."

According to the Bureau of Prisons, 58 per cent of the nation's
inmates are jailed for drug offences, thanks chiefly to anti-drug
legislation enacted during the 1980's. "By 1995, under the mandatory
minimum sentencing laws, the average federal prison term served for
selling crack cocaine was nearly 11 years," explains Hallinan. "For
homicide, by comparison, the national average was barely six."

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder about the
connection between an exploding prison population and an industry
that profits from incarceration. Morgan Reynolds, who directs
criminal justice programmes at the National Centre for Policy
Analysis, described his vision of the future for Hallinan. Wardens
become "marketers of prison labour . . . that's the best way to grow
our prison population".

Hallinan thinks the conspiracy theory too crude. "But you now have
enough businessmen - and corrupt politicians - with a financial
interest in heightening the public perception of crime and expanding
the prison industry," he concedes. "Fear drives the whole machine."

All over the US, Hallinan encountered a common perception of soaring
crime. Yet most people, particularly in prison-loving states like
Texas, could not cite personal examples. "I gradually began to see it
as parallel to the Communist scare in the 1950s," Hallinan recalls.
"Back then, the generalised fear bred a huge military arsenal. Now it
breeds prisons."

Affluent white Americans fear crime the most. But black Americans
suffer it most and have a disproportionate chance of being
imprisoned. Today's prison population is 49 per cent black and 18 per
cent Hispanic. That statistic represents one of the largest
migrations in American history: of young urban men, mostly belonging
to minorities, to new prisons. "In the black community, this is seen
as black men being exported to white areas to make a profit for the
white man," explains Hallinan. "It's not slavery, of course. These
people have committed crimes and deserve to be punished. But in the
black community the echoes of slavery are extremely strong."

To which most Americans might respond: "So what. Jail should be
tough." For hardliners, the new "supermax" jail - with its sanitising
corporate language and its emphasis on profit and efficiency - may
even sound too nice.

Hardly. "These concrete cubicles are so spartan, so devoid of
stimulation, that their success is measured . . . by how much inmates
detest them," Hallinan writes of the newest facilities where inmates
are locked in windowless cells. "They press the outer bounds of what
most humans can psychologically tolerate," one judge recently
concluded.

"I go into those cells every day," the New England prison worker
agrees, "and they are mind-altering, designed to break a man down.
I'm surprised more don't try to kill themselves."

Working inside the booming new prison economy takes its own toll. On
April 21st, the New York Times reported "a severe shortage of guards
around the country", partly due to the "explosion of prison building"
and increased prison violence. The starting salary for a guard
averages $23,000, but desperate states like Oklahoma are now lowering
their minimum recruitment age from 21 to 18.

"You know what your duties are today," Curt Bowman, president of the
officers' union at "Little Siberia", a maximum-security prison on the
Canadian border, tells his recruits. "Go to work. Come out alive."
Hallinan's book is filled with chilling reports of inmate and officer
brutality. So why work inside? "My wife and I have been married 28
years and lived 19 years in a travel trailer," one guard responds.
Another says: "Be 54 and try to go out and buy health insurance."

Even its supporters admit that the current system brutalises inmates
and enforcers alike. Opponents of prison expansion and privatisation
question not only the individual but also the social cost. "Educating
children, punishing criminals - these are government
responsibilities," insists Staudter, contemplating his town's new
prison. "But the way they feed people into the prison system now, a
kid has a better chance of going to jail than of going to college."

Joe Hallinan predicts that a slowing economy may teach states how
expensive their new prisons really are. In 1980, prisons cost each US
citizen an average of $30 per year; by 1992, they cost $123 per year.
But for now, the industry grows, expanding its markets in Europe,
Australia and Africa (nine UK prisons are currently owned or managed
by Wackenhut). Sitting on the hood of his car one night, counting the
stars in the south Texas night sky, Joe Hallinan noticed "an
incandescent glow where no lights should be. After a while it
occurred to me that what I was seeing was not the light of some
forgotten town, but the glow of a new American city". Prison, USA.

Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph T. Hallinan
is published by Random House (hardback, $24.95 in US).

Prison, USA: the figures

Over the past 20 years, the US prison population has quadrupled to
approximately 1.8 million, which represents 455 prisoners for every
100,000 citizens.

The federal government currently predicts that one in every 11 men
will be imprisoned during his lifetime. For black men, the odds rise
to one in four. The current prison population is 49 per cent black,
18 per cent Hispanic.

For the past two decades, the US has experienced the biggest prison
construction boom in its history, and now spends some $21 billion a
year on prison construction and maintenance. Like many other states,
California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education.

Forty per cent of prisoners cannnot cannot read.

During the 2000 elections, an estimated 3.9 million Americans - one
in 50 adults - were denied their right to vote due to felony and
another convictions. Of that number, 1.4 million had completed their
sentences. Another 1.4 million were on probation or parole. Thirteen
per cent of black adult males have lost their voting rights based on
criminal conviction (that is, one-third of the total of
disenfranchised voters). Human Rights Watch reports that in the
states with the most restrictive voting laws - in the south and west
- - 40 per cent of blacks are likely to be permanently disenfranchised
(in such states, a convicted criminal loses his voting rights for
life).