- The American Corrections Association hosts a trade show!! Human rights organizations condemn this show as advertising a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where a prison population of over 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold.
- This new workforce resembles slavery more than paid labor. All the workers arrive on time, they are never late, they never take a day off, and if they don’t like their wage of $.25 per hour, they’re locked up in isolation cells.
- From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. Ten years ago, there were only five private prisons in the country with a population of 2,000 inmates; today, there are 100 private prisons with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number of inmates in private prisons will easily reach 360,000.
- According to the California Prison Focus, “No other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The prison situation mirrors our country’s history with slavery. The US maintained slavery longer than any other civilized, developed country in the world.
- “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party.
- The prison industrial complex is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States and Wall Street is booming with its investors. This is a multimillion dollar industry that has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and catalogs. It includes architecture companies, construction companies, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, security companies, advertising companies, etc……
- Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the Civil War in 1865, a system of “hiring out prisoners” was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments or for petty thievery. They were then “hired out” for cotton picking, work in mines and building railroads. Often times they found themselves back on the same plantation they’d worked on as a slave. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88 percent of hired out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93 percent were Black.
- Companies “hiring out” labor through prisons include: IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstroms, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many, many more.
- The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s under the governments of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes.
- Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75 percent.
- Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, “The secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards to the maximum number of prisoners.”
- Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from acute mental illness.