The United States, which hypocritically lectures the rest of the world about “human rights,” jails more of its own population than any other country in the world—by far. One in every 33 adults is either in jail, on parole or on probation.
Louisiana holds the grim title of being number one among all 50 states in imprisoning its own people, making it the world’s prison capital. One in 26 adults in the state is under “correctional control.” For African Americans, the figure is a staggering 1 in 7 adults.
The prison boom that began in the late 1970s coincided with massive changes in the U.S. economy that wiped out millions of jobs. Mass incarceration, having no correlation whatsoever to crime rates, was the capitalist bosses’ answer to the economic dislocation of millions of workers. By the 1990s, state prisons like those in Louisiana were already filled to the brim.
Faced with overcrowding, Louisiana’s local sheriffs turned into prison entrepreneurs. Sheriffs, with financial backing from private investors, foot the bill for new prisons in return for future profits.
To make the allure of profits irresistible, Louisiana increased the amount of money it would pay out per inmate, and guaranteed to keep each new prison filled to 40 percent occupancy. This was enough to spark a boom in prison construction.
Sheriff-run, for-profit prisons sprang up all over Louisiana starting in the early 1990s. A gold rush of inmates followed, with incarceration multiplying by leaps and bounds. The majority of Louisiana’s inmates are now housed in for-profit facilities.
The $182 million industry needs to be supplied with a constant supply of bodies to remain profitable, which has led to the growth of statewide traffic of inmates from southern cities to northern rural areas.
Vast numbers of people from New Orleans and Baton Rouge metropolitan areas are rounded up in daily catches and funneled into rural prisons up north to keep 100 percent occupancy—in other words, to maximize profits for the capitalists.
There are few crimes more glaring than the one being perpetrated against our class by the bosses and their penal system. Our demands for solidarity and unity should extend to our whole class, inside and outside of the prison-industrial complex.
