Prison Industrial Complex - Economics

Economics

When the prison population grows, a rising rate of incarceration feeds small and large businesses such as providers of furniture, transportation, food, clothes and medical services, construction and communication firms. Prison activists who buttress the notion of a prison industrial complex argue that these parties have a great interest in the expansion of the prison system since their development and prosperity directly depends on the number of inmates. They liken the prison industrial complex to any industry that needs more and more raw materials, prisoners being the material.

The prison industrial complex has also been said to include private businesses that benefit from the exploitation of the prison labor; prison mechanisms remove "unexploitable" labor, or so-called "underclass", from society and redefine it as highly exploitable cheap labor. Scholars using the term "prison industrial complex" have argued that the trend of "hiring out prisoners" is a continuation of the slavery tradition. Prisoners perform a great array of jobs and are exploited in the following ways: minimal payments, no insurances, no strikes, all workers are full-time and never arrive late. Cynthia Young states that prison labor is "employers' paradise". Because of the high profits involved, new businesses involving the import and export of prisoners were developed. Also the prison industry enables to close the gap between free and coerced labor. Prison labor can soon deprive the free labor of jobs in a number of sectors, since the organized labor turns out to be uncompetitive comparing to the prison counterpart.

The private prison industry has been accused of incarcerating people in mainly impoverished communities for minor crimes so as to use them for free labor. In a study by Doug McDonald, Ph.D. and Scott Camp, Ph.D., known as the "Taft studies", privatized prisons were compared side to side with the public prisons on economic, performance, and quality of life for the prisoner scales. They found that in a trade off for allowing prisons to be more cheaply run and operated, the degree of reform for the prisoners was going down. Because the privatized prisons were so much larger than the public run prisons, they were subject to economies of scale. With more prisoners in a single prison, the day to day cost to hold the prisoner goes down as the initial startup costs of the prison are already taken care of. Furthermore, with more prisoners comes more free labor. When having larger, privatized prisons makes it cheaper to incarcerate each individual and the only side effect is having more free labor, it is extremely beneficial for companies to essentially rent out their facilities to the state and the government