Prison Slave Labor, Victimless Crime Legislation, & the Prison-Industrial Complex

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Sat Aug-27-11 05:59 PM
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Prison Slave Labor, Victimless Crime Legislation, & the Prison-Industrial Complex

As with our military, profiteers abound in the prison industry as well. And as with our military, the prison-industrial complex and associated profiteers and lobbyists who depend upon an abundant prison population have plenty of money to advance their cause. The prison population of the United States increased from about 300,000 to over 2,000,000 between 1980 and 2000, so that the United States now has by far the highest prison rate of any nation in the world – 751 persons in prison per 100,000 population in 2008. Coincident with the burgeoning prison population in the United States, there has also been a large increase in the number of private prisons, from five in 1995 to 100 in 2005, in which year 62,000 persons were incarcerated in private prisons in the United States.

SLAVE LABOR IN PRISONS

Slave labor as an major component of the growth of the private prison industry

Concomitant with the explosive growth in private prisons, the private prison industry has increased their profits through the use of slave labor. The owners of these prisons have a financial interest in more frequent and longer prison sentences, for which they have lobbied extensively. Tara Herivel and Paul Wright assiduously document the machinations of the prison-industrial complex in their book, “Prison Profiteers – Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration”. From the book jacket:

Beginning with the owners of private prison companies and extending through a whole range of esoteric industries… to the U.S. military (which relies on prison labor) and the politicians, lawyers, and bankers who structure deals to build new prisons, “Prison Profiteers” introduces us to a motley group of perversely motivated interests and shows us how they both profit from and perpetrate mass incarceration.

It turns out that locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap… “Prison Profiteers” traces the flow of capital from public to private hands, reveals how monies designated for the public good end up in the pockets of enterprises dedicated to keeping prison cells filled, and challenges us to see incarceration through completely different eyes.

Michele Alexander, in her book, “The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” comments on this issue:

Prisons are big business and have become deeply entrenched in America’s economic and political system. Rich and powerful people, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have invested millions in private prisons. They are deeply interested in expanding the market…

The rise of prison slave labor in the United States

Prison labor for the benefit of the private sector was rightfully barred in the United States until 1979. The door was then opened for exploitation of slave labor by the private sector with the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP, or PIE for short). Mike Elk and Bob Sloan explain how the Prison Industry Act of 1995 was used to exploit a loophole in PIE

that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders. It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance to the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA), a private trade organization…

The prison-industrial complex not only benefits from the great rise in our prison population and federal laws that pave the way for them to profit from slave labor, but played a leading role in creating these trends through their massive lobbying efforts. They have pressured legislators to enact “three strike” laws and mandatory minimum sentences, which together require long prison sentences for third offenses for various victimless crimes, many associated with our “War on Drugs”. They have been behind so-called “Truth in Sentencing” Acts, which prohibit penal systems from reducing sentences for felonies (including victimless crimes) based on any factors that might otherwise be considered to advance the cause of justice. And they were behind Arizona’s notorious immigration law, as detailed in “Corporate Con Game – How the Private Prison Industry Helped Shape Arizona’s Anti-Immigrant Law”.

Undercutting of legitimate businesses by prison slave labor

The exploitation of prisoners for private profit is not only intrinsically immoral, but it has now become widespread enough to impede the progress of legitimate businesses, through the prison industry’s profiting from a cheap source of labor that is unavailable to legitimate businesses. This puts downward pressure on wages that affect anyone involved in work that is exploited by the prison-industrial complex. Elk and Sloan explain:

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida… cheap labor {is} having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida's forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states. What's more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work…. The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much… proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state, is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON VICTIMLESS CRIMES

A victimless crime is a crime that has no victim, with the possible exception of the perpetrator of the “crime”. Granted there can be honest disagreement over what constitutes a victimless crime. In the United States, some of the most clear cut cases of victimless crimes are recreational, religious, and therapeutic drug use, gambling, homosexuality, transvestism, suicide and assisted suicide.

It has been estimated that in the United States, there are approximately 750 thousand individuals incarcerated for victimless crimes, as well as 3 million on parole or probation. Approximately 4 million are arrested each year for victimless crimes.

The incarceration rate for victimless crimes comes to only about one third of the total incarceration rate in our country. But the toxic effects are not confined to them. The hundreds of thousands of individuals incarcerated for victimless crimes have helped to fuel a private, for-profit prison industry, which has successfully lobbied for more frequent and longer prison sentences for all crimes.

Drug offenses

Of the total U.S. prison population in 2004, more than one quarter, 530,000, were imprisoned for drug offenses, and almost a tenth of these were for marijuana only. Many of those were for mere possession, rather than manufacturing or selling. For example, of 700,000 marijuana arrests in 1997, 87% were for mere possession, and 41% of those incarcerated for a marijuana offense are incarcerated for possession only. Arrests for marijuana possession in 2004 were more numerous than arrests for all violent crimes combined. Our extremely high incarceration rate is at least partially explained by the fact that most non-violent first time offenders guilty of drug possession today in the United States get a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years with no parole, or 10 years with no parole if a large quantity of drugs is involved.

Here is one example of how government intrudes on the lives of innocent people:

US Army veteran Steven Tuck was lying in a Canadian hospital bed. He fled to Canada after his plants were raided in California by DEA agents. He smoked marijuana to alleviate chronic pain from a 1987 parachuting accident.

Canadian authorities arrested him on his gurney, drove him to the border, and delivered him to US agents, and he then spent five days in jail – all with a catheter still attached to his penis. He was offered no medical treatment during his stay in the hospital, and his lawyer, Doug Hiatt, said, “This is totally inhumane. He’s been tortured for days for no reason.”

Reasons why we should abolish the criminalization of victimless acts

The direct destruction of lives
The clearest and most obvious reason for taking victimless crimes off the books is the hundreds of thousands of lives they destroy directly. Glen Greenwald puts it succinctly:

For us to collectively decide that the consensual, adult use or sale of intoxicants will be criminalized, means we are agreeing that hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans will experience life-destroying calamity. These POWs will be ripped from their communities – and frequently from their children – for years, decades and for life, pursuant to mandatory sentencing schemes as Draconian as those in any dictatorship…

Instead of being with their families, these citizens will be confined among a population teeming with violent predators, under harsh and terrifying conditions. Conditions in which, especially for the disabled, their health often cannot be maintained…

Then there’s the rape and assault of these non-violent “criminals”. Tom Cahill, President of Stop Prisoner Rape, explains:

I credit the war on drugs with the tremendous increase in prisoner rape. Most prison rape victims are in for minor nonviolent offenses. The victim profile is a young adult… confined for the first time for a minor victimless crime such as possession of a little too much marijuana – and too poor to buy his freedom. . .

These men and boys who are raped in prison will usually return to the community far more violent and antisocial than before they were raped. Some of them will perpetuate the vicious cycle by becoming rapists themselves…

Adding to the damage done to individuals is the damage that these laws do to families. Perhaps the major reason for single parent households in our country today is the huge number of imprisoned men. This perpetuates a cycle of crime and incarceration over the generations.

Wrecking the lives of the people of other countries
The United States has pressured many countries to collaborate in its “War on drugs”, particularly with respect to preventing the production and export of drugs from those countries. This often involves aerial spraying of farmland (especially in Colombia) suspected of growing drugs, and the consequent destruction of the livelihood of farmers.

The promotion of real crime
We should have learned our lesson from our experiment with prohibition, which spurred the rise of organized crime. Whenever a widely desired something is criminalized, its value will rise exponentially, while the desire for it will remain high, thus creating a need for an organization to fulfill that desire. Peter McWilliams, author of “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If you Do”, explains how this contributes to the rise of organized crime, including narco-trafficking:

If fulfilling that desire is a crime, that organization will be organized crime. Operating outside the law as organized criminals do, they don't differentiate much between crimes with victims and crimes without victims. Further, the enormous amount of money at their disposal allows them to obtain volume discounts when buying police, prosecutors, witnesses, judges, juries, journalists, and politicians…. Once consensual crimes are no longer crimes, organized crime is out of business.

Especially when the forbidden something is an addictive drug, its excessive cost will incite some people to commit crimes they would otherwise not have committed, such as robbery. Crimes committed for this reason can then become habit forming, leading to more crimes.

The time and money that goes into pursuing and punishing victimless crimes drains money away from crime prevention and rehabilitation programs which could otherwise contribute to reducing real crime. It drains money from the criminal justice system which could otherwise be used to pursue real crime. And it even sometimes leads to letting real criminals out of prison to make room for the victimless “criminals”. McWilliams describes the problem:

Real criminals walk free every day to rape, rob, and murder again because the courts are so busy finding consensual criminals guilty of hurting no one but themselves. And even if the courts could process them, the prisons are already full; most are operating at more than 100% capacity. To free cells for consensual criminals, real criminals are put on the street every day.

Contributions to racism and classism
The racial and class disparity in the United States for imprisonment for drug offenses is well known. Though the Federal Household Survey (See item # 6) indicated that 72% of illicit drug users are white, compared to 15% who are black, blacks constitute a highly disproportionate percent of the population arrested for (37%) or serving time for (42% of those in federal prisons and 58% of those in state prisons) drug violations.

Whenever and wherever victimless crimes are prosecuted and punished, the opportunity for arbitrary enforcement of the law based on racism or other nefarious factors is magnified tremendously.

Victimless crimes are unconstitutional
Victimless crimes are not specifically mentioned in our Constitution. Yet, they are intimately related to abuses of our Fourth Amendment. For one thing, warrantless searches and seizures have often been used to obtain evidence of victimless crimes. Secondly, warrantless searches and seizures and victimless crime laws are often pursued for the same reasons: as a means of wielding political power over selected portions of our population. Furthermore, a victimless crime law seems inconsistent with the idea of “The right of the people to be secure in their persons…” Privacilla elaborates on this:

Victimless crime laws do threaten the privacy of innocents because of the monitoring and investigation they require for enforcement… To enforce this kind of crime law, officials must engage in extensive monitoring, wiretapping, and surveillance of suspects and the public. The existence of victimless crimes tends to erode Fourth Amendment protections that are there to protect the privacy of innocents….

In fact, a US Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, was argued partially on this basis. The case involved a Texas law that made consensual sex between homosexuals, even within the privacy of their own homes, a crime. The Supreme Court ruled against the state, striking down that law. It is not clear to me whether the Fourth amendment was part of that decision, but the plaintiff did pursue the case based in part upon Fourth Amendment issues, introducing arguments against victimless crimes:

Liberty cannot survive if the legislature demands that people behave in certain ways in their private lives based on majority opinions about what is good or moral…And of course, the Founders believed wholeheartedly that majorities had no right to impose their beliefs on minorities. In Federalist 10, Madison articulated his concern…

It could also be argued that victimless crimes violate our First Amendment restriction against laws “respecting an establishment of religion”, since religious values often provide the foundation for these laws. And certainly the due process clause of our Fifth Amendment is routinely violated by victimless crime laws, especially given the fact that they are so unequally enforced against the poor and minorities.

Cost
Nobody can say that we are winning our “War on Drugs”, despite the 50 billion or so dollars that we spend on it annually. Drug use in the United States is little different today than it was when the “War on Drugs” began.

McWilliams elaborates further on the cost:

We're losing at least an additional $150 billion in potential tax revenues… moving the underground economy of consensual crimes aboveground would create 6,000,000 tax-paying jobs.

The withholding of medical treatment
Many illicit drugs have important medical uses, but because of the “War on Drugs” their use for medical purposes is either completely outlawed or severely curtailed. Marijuana provides exceptionally good symptomatic relief or treatment for a wide range of medical conditions, for which there is no better or even comparable alternative treatment. Yet the pharmaceutical industry and the prison industry (among others) has lobbied extensively against the legalization of medical marijuana, and the federal government has complied by over-ruling state enacted medical marijuana laws. This adds to the huge profits of the pharmaceutical industry while denying millions of Americans symptomatic relief from serious diseases such as cancer or AIDS.

Especially important is the fact that many illicit drugs are highly effective against pain. Because of taboos against potentially addicting drugs, many people are needlessly denied the pain relief that they need to make their lives bearable, even as they are dying.

SLAVE LABOR FOR PRIVATE PROFIT IS OUTRAGEOUS

Incarceration for victimless “crimes” and a total incarceration rate of nearly one percent of our population are outrages. Our federal prison system provides a public, not a private service. When corporations are offered the opportunity to profit from a system like this, the potential for abuses, such as violating peoples’ Constitutional rights by making them into slaves, is large.

Cutting corners in the interest of profit is the rule, not the exception. For example, phone companies charge prisoners exorbitant rates to contact their loved ones because the prisoners have no other options. Private prison companies charge prisoners so much for their “services” that the prisoners can’t make enough money from prison work to pay for their “room and board”. They therefore often run up monumental debts that they must pay off following their release from prison. Then they are often returned to prison for failure to pay off those debts.

And what right do these corporations have to interfere with our justice system by lobbying for harsher prison sentences – especially where victimless crimes are concerned? Yes, our Constitution gives all Americans the right to petition Congress. But can’t we make a distinction between petitioning and bribing? Those who lobby our government for the purpose of perpetuating these outrages are the real criminals.

Note:

Most of this post was excerpted from my new book: “The Unfulfilled Promise of the American Dream: The Widening Gap between the Reality of the United States and its Highest Ideals”, which explores the anti-Democratic forces that are threatening to make the gap ever wider and tear our nation apart. I discuss the book in some detail here.

The book is now available in paperback, Kindle format, and PDF format. You can read the introduction and table of contents here. You can buy the book here. If you would like to read the book but can’t afford it, pm me and I’ll send you a free PDF copy.