America’s Debt Prisons: The Social Cost of Punishment for Profit

America’s Debt Prisons: The Social Cost of Punishment for Profit




Prisons have come to dictate the development of contemporary American power structures. With the rise of the prison industrial complex in the late 1970s, the marriage of capital and punishment was made complete, establishing an oppressive system where finance and punishment work hand in hand to the advantage of capital. Today, “paying one’s debt to society” quite literally describes our criminal justice system as court sanctioned debts are heaped on those convicted in addition to time served., Punishment for profit reigns, while the financial and social burden of incarceration is placed on the poorest communities in America. In the contemporary prison system, the combined impact of the financialization of prison construction with the imposition of incarceration’s monetary burden onto inmates themselves has ravaged impoverished communities. Meanwhile, corporations stand to make huge profits off of prison contracts and the cheap labor pool provided by inmates. With the prison system representing a billion dollar industry in America, it’s time to consider systematic imprisonment as a key component to contemporary society organized around the global market place and systems of debt.

Punishment for Profit

Currently, an estimated 2.4 million are locked behind bars in America—an all time high—, with over one million housed in private prisons. This population, made up primarily of African Americans and Latina/os, represent the people conservative media and popular crime TV series have repeatedly stigmatized as lazy, and dangerous threats to society. Those incarcerated represent capitalism’s “human surplus;” the systematically disadvantaged, who, if mobilized, would represent a serious threat to the interests of capital. People from impoverished communities—forced to attend schools that pay more on security than education—have suffered most from the combined outsourcing of blue color jobs with the stripping and privatization of welfare, are made innocuous cash cows once entered into the prison system.

Last year alone Corrections Corporations of America (CCA), the largest private prison provider in the United States, netted a cool $301 million profit, while Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut—they changed their name for PR purposes), which also runs prisons in South Africa and Australia, netted $115 million. But it’s not just private prisons that metamorphose punishment into profit. Not only has the private prison become the model for state penitentiaries, but big corporations stand to make millions in contracts by selling their products to corrections facilities.

Perhaps the most profitable function of the prison system is the use of inmates for cheap and occasionally, in ICE detention camps, free labor. Prison labor goes well beyond the clichéd image of inmates stamping license plates. In California, inmates build all UC and state college campus furniture. This should come as no surprise. From capital’s perspective, inmates provide ideal laborers: no need to pay benefits, cheap domestic labor, loosely regulated working hours, and no union organization. In Colorado and California, inmate labor is even being used in the production of artisanal products. Prison run farms produce cheese and other goods for corporations like Whole Foods, which pay the inmates 60 cents an hour for their labor.

Prisons also rely on inmate labor to reduce the cost of facility maintenance. Why outsource to a janitorial company when there is a pool of essentially free labor at one’s disposal? In fact, inmates provide the cooking, cleaning and general upkeep of prison facilities. Though work is “voluntary,” in ICE immigrant detention camps, refusal to work can lead to the revocation of privileges as well as a stint in the “SHU,” or solitary—a punishment widely considered to be a form of psychological torture. Compensation for work (if given) is typically a dollar a day, though it is sometimes handed out in goods such as candy and soda. In ICE camps alone the government and private contractors are saving over $200 million annually in wages.

America’s New Debtors Prisons

Despite the millions of dollars that are made annually on the prison system, housing a prison population of 2.4 million is not cheap. According to Idaho’s Department of Correction’s website, it costs an estimated $55 per diem to house an inmate. In California the cost is more than twice that: on average $129 per day or $47,000 per year. So who’s taking up the financial burden? Since the 1980s, it has been the inmates themselves.

In an alleged attempt to decrease the financial burden on taxpayers, prison fees have increasingly been levied, forcing inmates to take on the cost of their own incarceration. While many of these fees seem small on their own, generally between ten and twenty dollars, they can quickly amass into bills ranging from hundreds to thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars. Deriving an exact estimate of prison fees is difficult as they fluctuate state to state and little data is made available to the public. However, to give a general idea of the financial burden leveled on the “bad guy,” some of the fees currently imposed on inmates in the United States include:

Bail investigation

Court security

Probation supervision

Appointed counsel application

Public defender recoupment

Drug test                                                                       
Residential and Work-release program

Transfer of parole or probation supervisor to another state

Inmate medical and dental

Telephone use

Photocopying

Escort

Notary service

Laundry

Check Processing

Detoxification on intake

Sex offender registration

Electronic monitoring fees

Cost of incarceration while awaiting sentencing: room and board

A particularly striking example, Wilbert Rideau who served 44 years in Angola prison for manslaughter (the longest prison sentence in Louisiana history), was released in 2005 at the age of 64 a not-so-free-man. Upon his release the judge decided Rideau’s debt to society was still not paid in full. Rideau was ordered to pay off the debt of his own imprisonment and defense, $127,905.45 to be exact: $61,000 for his room, board, transportation and jury security and $67,000 to cover the costs of his defense.

While Rideau’s case is indeed exceptional, court sanctioned debt has become the norm in America’s penal system. The idea, according to the justice system is to lighten taxpayer burden while teaching inmates the moral lesson upon which our neoliberal economy is built: one must pay one’s debts. The lesson more accurately is that those in debt must stay in debt. In addition to court-sanctioned fees, many states add “poverty penalties” when they sell prisoner debt to private debt collectors. In Alabama a 30% collection fee is charged, and in Florida a 40% surcharge for debt collection is added. In some states, failure to pay prison fees can result in seizure of one’s driver’s license, revocation of parole, and even extended prison sentences.

Prison fees become a way of piling disadvantage onto the disadvantaged. Upon release from prison, ex-felons are ineligible for section 8 housing and food stamps. Coupled with the fact that the prison system makes it next to impossible for those released to find any form of legal employment, court sanctioned debt ensures that released inmates will cycle back into the prison system, where they will again provide a lucrative source of profit.

Who pays and who profits in prison construction?

Corporations and the finance industry make money, not just on the court-sanctioned debt imposed on inmates, but also in the construction of private prisons financed through lease revenue bonds, a backdoor form of financing that avoids voter approval, in the way required for General Obligation Bonds. Since the construction of new prisons has become unpopular amongst the voting population, lease revenue bonds have been instituted as a way of getting around voter approval, while still making the taxpayer pay.

Not only do revenue bonds keep prison debt off the books and hidden from the state budget, they also promote speculative prison building—the construction of prisons before there are bodies to fill them. The logic is simple: build it and they will come. Or rather, build it and there will be a financial incentive to incarcerate more people. Although there is little to no evidence that an increase in prisons leads to an increase in public safety (in fact there is more evidence of the reverse), revenue bonds are continually levied to finance the construction of both state and privately run facilities without voter approval. The incentive to fill prisons is purely financial, especially when private contractors get paid per capita to house inmates. For example, the huge spike in speculative prison building in the 1990s left many newly built facilities vacant until 9/11, when increased immigrant detention provided the needed bodies for the beds.

In California alone $7.5 billion in lease revenue bonds have been taken out to build 53,000 prison and jail beds—many of these leased out to private contractors—while leaving taxpayers to pay back a burden of $12 billion. While market traders stand to make millions on these bonds, the burden of repayment falls onto local economies with devastating effects, draining states of their resources to provide basic services like education and mental health.

Crime Pays

The financialization of the prison system, a move occurring not just across America, but around the world, creates an economic order that requires the continual expansion of the prison industry. Since many private prisons are paid per capita to detain inmates, there is no incentive for the system to rehabilitate, but rather to foster and perpetuate criminality in order to transform systematically marginalized populations into sources of profit, while leaving the most disadvantaged foot the bill.

Debt has become the rallying cry around which new global social movements are beginning to stir. But in order to understand the power of debt, we must also look at its relationship with incarceration. It is no coincidence that the history of debt and incarceration in America are deeply rooted in slavery. Nor does it come as much surprise that racism is continually used to justify the incarceration of a disproportionate number of African Americans and Latina/os, where they serve as a pool of profit for a primarily white creditor class. Debt and incarceration are systems of social control that mutually support one another. Any call for debt forgiveness must also include a declaration of prison abolition, lest we find ourselves cycling through the same systems of oppression and inequality that have violently repeated themselves throughout modern history.

 

Ferguson-chart-police-stop-more-black-drivers

The shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson set off a wave of reactions that spread across the United States like a wildfire in drought-ridden California. Between Obama’s dismissive comments and the militarized response against the people of Ferguson, the shooting of Mike Brown revealed what has been a crisis in America for decades: the criminalization of poverty.  America’s racial sickness is also a financial one. Racially targeted arrests and the implementation of financial penalties against Ferguson protesters (for example) is merely one aspect of a form of state power that combines physical and financial violence to marginalize and control large swaths of the American population. America’s prison system intertwines debt and imprisonment in the systematic incarceration and impoverishment of communities of color all for the profit of corporate America



This post is by guest author
By Devin Thomas