Today, the US imprisons more people (both per capita and in terms of number of people
incarcerated) than any other country in the world.
Of the approximately 10 million people currently incarcerated worldwide, over 2 million of
them are imprisoned in the US, with a rate of around 655 people imprisoned for every
100,000 residents.
And this rise in the number of incarcerated Americans also aligns chronologically with
another trend in the justice system: the rise of private prisons.
Many people are wary of the practice of privatizing our penal system because of news stories over
the years about corrupt dealings between lawyers, judges, and prison owners/managers who arrange
to have people incarcerated in exchange for cash.
But there’s also a series of deeper moral and historical questions that stem out of
this topic.
And the primary questions are: what is the purpose and function of a prison?
Are they designed to punish, to isolate those who break the law from the rest of the population,
or are they actually places where justice, reconciliation and reform can happen?
If prisons are now the responsibility of the state and the private sector, then what responsibility
do they have to the populations they house?
And does privatizing them change those responsibilities?
Even though private prisons in the US have a relatively short history, with the first
modern private prison opening in 1984 in Tennessee, the US penal system’s relationship to private
money stretches back much further than that.
Because the initial relationship between incarceration and private industry didn’t focus on governments
paying prison operators to house prisoners.
Rather it focused on extracting free labor from incarcerated populations.
Up until the 18th century in Western Europe and the US, most of the conversations about
the role and function of prisons centered heavily on punishment.
Prisoners were to be isolated from the rest of the population for their crimes, and were
expected to suffer acutely.
Think dungeons, corporal punishment, and executions.
The prisons themselves were more of a waystation for the ultimate punishment.
But extracting money from prisoners’ (either through fines or labor) was also a common
practice beginning in the Medieval period in western Europe, then later in the US.
This usually came in the form of debtors’ prisons, where people unable to pay their
bills were held until they could come up with the money or work off their literal debts
to society with unpaid labor.
Debtors could, in theory, leave the prisons once the debts had been repaid in full.
But debtors’ prisons were slowly abolished until they were closed entirely in the US
and Europe in the mid-19th century because they disproportionately targeted the poor.
Meanwhile, the 19th century also saw the emergence of a few key changes in the philosophy and
functions of prisons.
First, many prisons became places of long term captivity, in effect becoming the primary
home of punished populations and not just holding zones until other harsher punishments
could be netted out.
The second major shift in the discussion of prison cultures in the 19th century also came
in the form of prison reform.
Reform took two major strands: living conditions and ideologies.
Prison reformers like Dorothea Dix lobbied to improve the living conditions of long term
prisoners, many of whom were mentally ill and abused by the guards tasked with their
care.
At the same time other reformers focused on the mission and purpose of incarceration,
claiming that prisons had a moral responsibility to rehabilitate incarcerated people and reintegrate
them into society.
Even after the US outlawed debtors’ prisons as inhumane in 1833, the relationship between
state power, criminal punishment, and money continued throughout the 19th century.
One of the primary vehicles for this was the convict leasing system.
In her book, Professor Mary Ellen Curtin details the rise of the convict leasing system after
the Civil War.
The US Southern states found themselves in financial ruin.
There was infrastructural damage caused by the battles and their economy had been anchored
by the practices of legal slavery.
After legal abolition, they looked to other ways to recover financially from the ravages
of war while also severely limiting the legal rights and protections of newly emancipated
black citizens.
As a result they expanded the convict leasing system.
Under convict leasing private businesses could “lease” a prisoner from the state.
In exchange for housing, clothing, and feeding the convict, the contractors (which ranged
from big factories, to coal mines, to private plantations) paid the government a small fee.
Convict leasing effectively reinstated the terms of legal slavery under a different name.
In order to increase their revenue, states began arresting African Americans at increased
rates from crimes that were vaguely defined, such as vagrancy or thefts.
And even though some of these crimes were a result of overwhelming poverty and lack
of opportunity in the region, many of them were charges that were designed to target
poor black communities (and poor white communities, although in smaller numbers overall).
As a result, prisons in Alabama that were primarily housing white prisoners before the
war became overwhelmingly filled with poor black prisoners by the 1870s.
As convict leasing became a source of cheap labor for business owners and a steady stream
of revenue for Southern states determined to rebuild, the system expanded.
Although it was primarily used in Southern states, Northern states weren’t entirely
opposed to the system since it was financially profitable, even though it effectively reinstated
legal slavery.
For prisoners, time spent under the dominion of contractors could be excessively brutal,
with sentences often unofficially extended far past when their terms of service were
supposed to be over.
Under the guise of building a “New South” from the ashes of conflict, convict leasing
really desired to return to the same south grounded in the premise of class and racial
inequality, with a large unpaid workforce underpinning the social structure.
As convict leasing became less common in the early 20th century before ending all together,
it did give way to other forms of profiting off of the labor of convicts, like the chain
gangs famously depicted in films and literature.
Professor Angela Davis in her book details the connections between early precedents like
convict leasing and the rise of what prison abolitionists have termed the “prison industrial
complex” of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The prison industrial complex is a term to describe the relationship between private
industries and incarceration.
Davis points out that at the beginning of her career as a prison rights advocate and
prison abolitionist in the late 1960s, there were close to 200,000 Americans in prison.
By the early 2000s that number had skyrocketed to 2 million.
In part it was associated with a domino effect of policy decisions in the latter half of
the 20th century that disproportionately targeted vulnerable populations.
So our social behaviors and shifts in the law created a context in which more people
were considered criminals or subject to being held prisoner.
Just like with convict leasing after the Civil War, the government turned to private contractors
and business owners to find a place to house a new influx of created criminals.
Beginning in the 1980s the government looked to private prisons as a potential relief,
in addition to building many new publicly run prisons.
These policy changes effectively swelled the number of people considered criminals and
saw a huge increase in the number of residents placed in prison.
Individual states from the 1960s through the end of the century began to increase the number
of facilities they built.
And starting in the 1980s the prison population swelled as a result of Reagan era “war on
drug policies” that targeted non-violent drug offenders with hefty jail sentences in
order to tackle the rising specter of drug addiction in this country.
These same policies were continued through subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations
in the 1990s.
As a result, many poor people and people of color began to fill prisons at an increased
rate, since those populations were also more likely to be surveilled for non-violent drug
offenses.
Additionally there was a move towards deinstitutionalizing psychiatric patients that took place beginning
in the 1950s and 1960s.
Many long term care facilities for people with ongoing mental health issues up until
that point operated largely in the same way as prisons.
Facilities were overcrowded, patients were detained without consent or the ability to
leave, and in some cases suffered abuse at the hands of their caregivers.
But as state funded psychiatric facilities closed, the number of people in need of long
term care essentially shifted into the prison system.
This was in part because many of these newly released patients became homeless and could
be picked up for things like squatting or committing petty crimes in order to survive.
When patients suffering from mental health issues are brought into emergency rooms (where
they can usually only remain for around 72 hours) there isn’t a consistent bridge between
emergency care and long term care, especially because the country as a whole has a limited
number of beds in safe psychiatric facilities.
And by some counts there are approximately twice as many people suffering from mental
illness in US prisons than there are in US psychiatric hospitals even though
many medical experts agree there is no positive correlation between mental health and committing
violent crimes.
So private prisons were looked to as a way of cutting the costs of increased incarceration
that occurred as a result of major policy shifts.
It’s unclear if private prisons actually serve their intended effect (to save the government
money).
However they do make up a relatively small percentage of the overall number of prisons
in the country.
In 2016 privately owned prisons only accounted for 128,063 incarcerated people or 8.5% of
the total prison population according to The Sentencing Project.
Today we see a return to conversations and
debates about the two primary roles of a prisons and jails: their ideologies and how those
ideologies align with their responsibilities to the incarcerated.
As reports of widespread abuses at public jails like Riker’s Island in New York have
hit the headlines in the early 2010s, we turn again to why a country with a relatively small
percentage of the world’s population claims such a large percentage of its incarcerated
population.
And these debates have returned in large part to the same terms they were focused on during
19th century reforms.
As prison abolition activists focus on the decline of private and state run prisons,
others have argued that there could be potential ways forward through restorative justice.
Restorative justice advocates are looking to practices that center the well being of
both the victim and the accused by seeing if there are ways forward besides incarceration
and social isolation.
At the heart of it lies the question: what does it mean to forgive someone for a crime
they committed, after they have paid what we refer to as a metaphorical “debt to society”?
And can true justice look different than just conviction and incarceration?
That’s it for this week.
This episode is the second in our series on “Class and American Culture” and if you
want to see more then check out our episode on Racial Passing.
And I’ll see you all back here next time.