THE United States has the largest population rate in prison in the world today. According to a July 26, 2003 Justice Department report, more than 2.1 million people are behind bars today, with nearly 5 million more on probation or parole.
The number of working class families who don’t have someone caught up “in the system” continues to shrink—especially in the African American and other oppressed communities.
The prison boom began in the late 1970s. It parallels the high tech revolution and the massive restructuring of the U.S. economy and industry over the same time period.
Advances in computerization and science once promised a new era of abundance. But the result was that high technology propelled manufacturing to a new stage where millions of higher-paying jobs—many of them union jobs—were wiped out. There was a 10 percent drop in manufacturing jobs between 1979 and 1983. Industrial cities like Detroit and Pittsburg bore the brunt.
Countless plants were shut down altogether, especially in major urban areas. This had a disproportionate impact on African American workers, as well as those from other oppressed communities. Large sections of cities, big and small, were decimated.
The general restructuring of manufacturing due to the high tech revolution meant that highly skilled, well-paid workers were no longer needed to perform complex tasks. The new technology came to replace these workers and produce at a cheaper and faster rate with little “human error.”
Millions of these workers were displaced and moved to lower paid, lesser skilled jobs—when they could get jobs at all.
The vast majority of those who were able to find work again found jobs in the growing service industry. These jobs were overwhelmingly low-paying and non-union.
Today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 80 percent of all non-farm jobs in the U.S. are in the service industry.
The impact of high tech, outsourcing and restructuring is well known and documented. What is less understood is the relationship of this fundamental economic shift to the dramatic expansion of prisons in the U.S.
SIX-FOLD INCREASE IN PRISON POPULATION
At the same time that high tech changed the manufacturing world, the judicial and penal system boomed. The prison population ranged around 200,000 to 215,000 from 1960 through the mid-70s. By the beginning of the 1980s, this number had doubled. It would double yet again by the early 1990s. Today the numbers are staggering.
The number of people in prison or on parole in the U.S. has reached an all-time high, according to the Justice Department. A July 26 Associated Press report stated that a record 6.9 million adults were “in the system.” This amounts to 1 in 32 adults. The total population on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole has multiplied by six in the last 20 years, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
Compare that to the rest of the world. According to the World Prison Population List, the U.S. has the highest prison population rate in the world: 701 prisoners per 100,000. It is followed relatively distantly by Russia, Belarus, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Of the imperialist countries, the nearest to the U.S. is the United Kingdom, far behind with 141 per 100,000 prisoners. The average worldwide rate is 80 per 100,000.
Not surprisingly, the amount of money spent in jails and prisons has jumped from $9 billion in 1982 to a whopping $57 billion in 2001, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This is a 530 percent increase.
The same report shows an increase in police spending from $19 billion in 1982 to $72 billion in 2001, a 280 percent increase.
While more people are going to jail or prison and are unable to work, much more money is being spent on the state apparatus. This increase in spending has come at the expense of social programs like housing and education.
DEVASTATING IMPACT ON AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITIES
The impact of the Orwellian “corrections” system on the African American community in particular is devastating. In 2002, 10.4 percent of African American men in their 20s were in prison, according to a July 2003 Department of Justice Bulletin. By contrast, 1.2 percent of white men of the same age group were incarcerated.
The same report shows that African American women don’t fare much better. They are five times more likely to enter the prison system than white women.
The African American population in the U.S. is only 12 percent of the total population. But by the end of 2002, 45 percent of all inmates were African American, while white inmates accounted for only 34 percent. Between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate of African Americans more than tripled.
Further, African Americans in prison are not counted as part of the unemployed, covering the real unemployment figures which could be much higher than the current official count of 11 percent in the African American community.
Additionally, millions of African Americans have been disenfranchised by being denied the right to vote in 48 states as a result of their convictions.
To add insult to injury, the U.S. government cynically places prisons outside of the cities that most African American prisoners come from and places them in largely rural, white and more conservative areas. Because prisoners are counted as residents of the district where they are incarcerated but where they cannot vote, these areas gain in legislative representation and receive more government funds, to the detriment of the inmates’ home districts, which are largely urban, African American and poor.
Duke University researcher Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman notes in the May 17 Christian Science Monitor that this is only a new version of the old “three-fifths compromise” where slaves counted as three-fifths of a person. “The presence of disenfranchised Blacks in the South increased the representation of white Southerners in the House,” she notes.
The Native American community also fares badly in this landscape. According to a 1999 U.S. Department of Justice report, one in 25 Native American adults are somewhere in the prison system at any given time, and the number of Native Americans per capita in prison is 38 percent above the national average. Those serving time in local jails amount to four times the national average. And yet, Native Americans are more than twice the national average victims of crime, where most of the victimization happens at the hands of non-Native Americans.
WHY HAS THE PRISON SYSTEM EXPLODED?
Why is the prison system growing so fast? Is there so much more crime now? On the contrary—all reports show that crime rates have fallen.
Many studies suggest that recent stricter laws around sentencing, such as the “three strikes” law in California, have greatly contributed to this trend. However, this doesn’t completely explain the steady growth before and after these laws were passed.
Others point to drug abuse. Indeed, huge numbers of poor people are in jails or prisons due to drug-related crimes. Between 1988 and 1994 the number of drug-related incarcerations rose 155.5 percent. African Americans, while having a similar drug use rate as whites, represent 75 percent of those convicted on drug charges. Women’s incarceration rates in the last 25 years have risen 600 percent, twice that of males, mostly due to drug-related convictions.
But to focus on drug use is to mistake a symptom for a cause. It ignores, for example, the fact that while street-level drug users and small-time dealers are routinely arrested, the drug kingpins and financiers go unpunished. After all, the drug trade produces billions of dollars in profits around the world. This money is handled by the some of the biggest U.S. banks, the only places where large amounts of cash can be kept. Few other businesses can provide more money capital for the “legal” economy today.
It also ignores the role of the U.S. government in bringing drugs into the urban centers of the United States. For example, in 1996, Rep. Maxine Waters launched an investigation into evidence that showed that the U.S. government brought tons of cocaine into Los Angeles in order to pay for its proxy war in Nicaragua.
True, millions are in the system due to drug-related offenses. But the drug crisis and the corresponding “war on drugs” are themselves creations of the very banks and government that benefits most from the mass incarceration of the country’s poor and working people.
Conveniently enough for the capitalist bosses, the drug epidemic allowed them to imprison huge numbers of poor people.
There were plenty of drugs in the 1960s and 1970s and yet the prison numbers were not what they later became.
Yet another explanation for the prison boom was that mass incarceration provides a way to create a new layer of workers: those who legally work for much less than minimum wage. Prisons are more and more privatizing their inmates’ labor. Prisoners are employed as telemarketers, travel agents, furniture makers and much more, usually earning pennies per hour.
However, while these are easy profits, this is again a byproduct, rather than the cause, of the prison increase. The percentage of prisoners working for private corporations remains relatively low.
PRISONS AND THE STATE
For Marxists, prisons, jails, the courts and the entire criminal justice system are integral parts of the state. The state is not a geographical location; it is different from a country or a nation. The state is a tool of repression by one class against another.
In 1884, Frederick Engels wrote in “The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State” that the state apparatus was a necessity of class society to control by force its “insoluble contradiction with itself.” The contradiction he was referring to is the fact that one tiny class enriches itself at the expense of a much larger class—a situation that can only be maintained by violence.
Nowhere is that description more true than in the United States, where a handful of banks and tycoons live off the labor of hundreds of millions of U.S. workers—indeed, from the labor of billions around the world.
The economic retooling due to the high-tech revolution, while producing fantastic profits for the ruling class, is also generating tremendous potential for class struggle. Millions of workers find their livelihoods decimated. New sectors of super-exploited workers—Blacks, Latinos, and women—are entering the workforce with experience in the struggle for their rights. It is no surprise that the fastest growing sector of unionized workers is the service sector.
The prison system has been an essential tool for the ruling class to politically manage the high tech revolution. It has on the one hand organized the newly unemployed workforce, as well as the urban communities where jobs are scarce. On the other hand, it provides a racist tool to terrorize the rest of the workforce against any resistance.
Prisons are the ruling class’s solution to the contradiction of “surplus” workers in the high tech era and the deepening capitalist economic crisis.
The fundamentally racist core of U.S. capitalism focuses its imprisonment binge on African American and other oppressed workers. This becomes a tool to create a divide between white and other nationally oppressed workers, particularly now that they are working more closely together.
Unemployment is an inherent part of capitalism. This “reserve army of unemployed” serves to drive down the wages of all workers. While prisoners in the main do not compete directly with “free labor,” the prison system acts as a whip for the unemployed, impelling people to accept whatever wages or income they can find.
The pretense of “rehabilitation” has been largely dropped from the prison system. In California, this word was simply deleted from the Corrections Department’s mission statement. It is no coincidence that many atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were by U.S. soldiers with experience as prison guards.
Prisons are also concentration camps for the poor and the unemployed. The bosses hope that by warehousing the poor, they can prevent what could be mass rebellions if all these unemployed workers were on the streets demanding jobs.
In this sense, the enormous expansion of the prison system is inspired by the memory of the urban rebellions of the 1960s, and its anticipation of revolts to come.
But in the end, just like the socialization of production during capitalist development leads to working class unity and organization, the mass concentration in confinement of the most oppressed will lead to unity of purpose, tactics and training behind prison walls. The Attica rebellion showed the possibilities of what unity and organization can achieve. Malcolm X became a revolutionary in prison. Mumia Abu-Jamal works every day to bring revolutionary consciousness to all our brothers and sisters behind bars.
There are few crimes more glaring than what is being perpetrated against our class by the bosses and their penal system. The working class demands of solidarity and unity should extend to our whole class, inside and outside of the system. That’s why the struggles to free political prisoners like Mumia and Leonard Peltier are the first steps to winning the goal of “tearing down the walls”—historically one of the first tasks of any victorious revolution.
Demonstration against state funding cuts in education and increased funding to prisons and jails, Oakland, CA 1999.
Photo: Bill Hackwell
A privately-owned for-profit prison in Palm Beach Gardens, FL.
Photo: PR Newswire
