US PRISONS AS STRATEGIC HAMLETS

As we settle into the twenty-first century, the United States has the
highest incarceration rate in the world.

Although the fear of "terrorism" has significantly weighted US laws in
the police's favor, the primary reasons for the high incarceration
rate remain the war on drug users and a change in penological
philosophy from one of rehabilitation (or even punishment) to one of
banishment. It is this philosophy that lies behind the so-called
"three-strikes and you're out" laws and initiatives like Oregon's
Measure 11 that established mandatory minimums for certain crimes.

There is no attempt involved in these endeavors to seek justice, only
a desire for revenge and a pretense that these prisoners are less than
human and therefore deserve only a life behind bars or, in some cases,
death by the state.

Underlying the current philosophy of imprisonment is the control of
demographic groups considered surplus by the corporate world order.
This means, among other things, a move away from interest in the
individual offender and a shift of focus to what many penologists call
"control of aggregates". These aggregates, or groups, are primarily
composed of young men of color, although the number of women from
these same groups continues to grow. In the wake of industrial job
flight from their neighborhoods, these groups' presence outside of
prison has become increasingly threatening to the ruling structures.
As members of these groups turn toward other endeavors to make a
living--endeavors often illegal such as drug dealing--the punishment
for their actions has become increasingly harsher. In addition, new
laws enacted to either enhance current legislation or to make even
more actions illegal encourage police to concentrate their enforcement
efforts on these groups.

This trend is not worldwide, however.

In fact, with the exception of the US and the United Kingdom, most
other western countries have softened their penalties (or
decriminalized them completely) for drug possession and other
victimless crimes.

In addition, these countries are attempting to find other means of
dealing with persons convicted of crime that do not involve
incarceration.

In the United States however, the population and practices of prisons
reflect the new concerns of those who imprison.

It is the belief of the justice system and the legislators who write
the laws regulating crime that the only way to stop crime is to lock
up as many perpetrators as possible.

If these concerns could be portrayed with one image, that image would
be the well-armed drug dealer. Furthermore, that drug dealer would be
either an African-American, a Latino immigrant, young and usually
male, although in recent years, the incarceration rate of women has
increased dramatically. The fact that this image has come to represent
imprisonment and criminality to the population proves the
effectiveness of the prevalent approach to penology as the 20th
century ends.

Within the prisons themselves, alarming changes have been made as a
result of the aforementioned philosophical change in penology. Perhaps
foremost among these changes are longer prison sentences which are
often the result of mandatory sentencing and, in many locales, a
"three strikes" policy which mandates life imprisonment for a third
conviction on a felony.

This has led to vast overcrowding in the United States despite an
unprecedented surge in prison construction, and the highest
incarceration rate in the world.

The tangential effects of this practice are seen in the reduction in
public funding for education and social welfare programs as policing
and imprisonment take a higher and higher percentage of said funds.
For example, in California, where the prison population is six times
larger than it was in the late 1970s, recent state budgets have called
for more spending on prisons and punishment than on higher education.
This trend is replicated across the country.

In fact, between 1968 and 2000 the percentage increase in state
spending on prisons was 6 times the percentage increase of spending on
higher education. The total change in spending on higher education by
states was 24%, compared with 166% for corrections.

Architecturally, this mission of control has meant the creation of
what American prison administrators and prisoners commonly refer to as
"super-max" prisoners.

Super-max means super-maximum-security and such institutions can now
be found in several states and in the federal prison system.

Although not completely new to the U.S. system--Alcatraz was a
super-max prison in its time--the current version utilizes the most
advanced security technology, constant psychological intimidation, and
some of the most brutal guards. Prisoners' movements are severely
restricted and the time they spend outside of their individual cells
is minimal if at all. Once in, it is very difficult for a prisoner to
leave such a unit until his/her sentence is up.

Part of the reason for the upsurge in prison populations is simple:
somebody is making money from incarceration. In addition to the drug
war dynamic, which perpetuates not only the need for a higher number
of drug arrests but also the need for the continued violation of the
drug laws in order to justify its existence, prisons themselves are a
growing business.

Whether it is a company that manufactures or provides equipment used
in corrections, a company whose business is building prisons, or the
growing industry of staffing privatized prisons, there is money to be
made. In addition, the growing contracting of inmates in manufacturing
and services by outside industry has created a need for this new
element of the labor force. Like death row prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal
wrote in one of his many commentaries, "Under a regime where more
bodies equal more profits, prisons take one big step closer to their
historical ancestor, the slave pen." Another aspect to the
privatization of prisons (and the use of prisoners as labor) is the
question of whether the role of these institutions is rehabilitation,
punishment or merely the assurance that taxpayer subsidized labor will
continue to be provided. Corporations who do contract prison labor
range from Starbucks Coffee to the Boeing Corporation. The work is
presented to prisoners, legislators and the public as work experience
and job opportunities for the inmates when in reality they are nothing
but cheap labor opportunities for the participating corporations. With
the government assuming costs for all living expenses and a workforce
unwilling to challenge labor abuse and other questionable practices
for fear of retaliation by prison officials, it is a near perfect
environment for the corporation.

As corporate globalism continues to precipitate a shift of more and
more capital to the financial capitals of the north, immigration from
the poorer countries follows.

This has created a problem of controlling these population flows for
the receiving countries.

The preferred solution seems to be imprisonment in detention centers
and/or the cordoning off of neighborhoods where most of the residents
are immigrants (usually of Latino or Asian origin). This separation of
the immigrant population, while nominally temporary, has in reality
created a whole new policing apparatus within the U.S., which has
fewer limitations on its enforcement capabilities than the rest of the
prison system.

This lack of protections is due to the uncertain legal status of some
of its subjects.

There are enough tales of immigrants who have landed in an Immigration
and Naturalization Service (INS) detention center only to get lost in
a Kafkaesque legal maze for years to safely state that these incidents
are not accidents of the system but part of its process.

Add to this scenario the ongoing abridgement of rights for citizen and
non-citizen alike in the wake of 911, and the tribulations of Kafka's
character "K" in his novel The Trial, seem inconsequential.

In the United States, one of the primary reasons (before the PATRIOT
ACT and the creation of Homeland Security) for such tales of distress
is the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act. A major aspect of this law is the denial of asylum to immigrants
convicted of a crime, no matter how small, and no matter how long ago
in their past the violation occurred.

Previously, many of these immigrants were eligible for
parole.

Now they are assigned to a prison, oftentimes after being discovered
during a workplace raid by INS officials.

Like prisons for citizens, monetary reasons motivate the rise in
imprisonment of immigrants, as well. Many county and city budgets
receive large sums of money from the INS, as do private prisons. This
dynamic, just as in the rest of the prison world, does not encourage
administrators to seek out alternatives to imprisonment. Add to this
the desire to control behavior which threatens the middle-class
quality of life and the subsequent desire to exile those who exhibit
said behavior, and one has another part of the equation that drives
the current imprisonment philosophy.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground.