"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
That is the text of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and with it, the horribly inhumane practice of slavery was abolished throughout the country. The practice of owning people and profiting off of their labor was, and is, rightly deemed to be an evil of such great magnitude that the Constitution itself needed to reflect this fact.
Yet slavery, although legally abolished in every country on the planet, naturally continues globally; for the most part, such slavery is not the result of a government-sanctioned institution or industry. As always, the United States is the exception to this. The private prison is, although used sparingly across the world, an American-invented form of big business that perverts justice with such a level of absurdity one almost wants to laugh.
It’s exactly what it sounds like; a privately-run incarceration facility contracted by state or local governments to house inmates. The primary motivation for such facilities is that they cut costs, but my inspiration for writing this article is the recent news that the federal government plans to stop the use of private prisons. As Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates explained in a DOJ memo, “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.”
The idea of handing control of prisons to a private corporation would, at first glance, seem like a logical way of keeping costs low, given the perception that private ownership trumps government ownership. And, to be sure, some savings are encountered; however, the savings that the prisons do manage to produce come from the fact that reform programs are often cut, staffing is often sparse and non-union—to say nothing of training and wages—and the bare minimum is spent on actually taking care of the inmates; in one Mississippi prison, every inmate reported weight loss of anywhere between ten and sixty pounds. Medical care is often hard to get, and mental health issues—often the very reason that causes inmates to offend in the first place—are ignored. Security is often lax to say the least; beatings and rapes are the norm, and guards’ reactions range from apathy to collusion.
With costs low, the corporation running the facility is free to profit exorbitantly off of the inmates’ labor. Pay is often a couple of cents an hour—sometimes quite literally. A report from Mother Jones—and I cannot recommend the source article highly enough—stated that at Winn Correctional Center, pay ranges from two cents an hour as a dishwasher to twenty-five cents an hour at the sewing machines making garments. Inmates who refuse to work can simply be sent to an isolation cell until they cooperate. There’s no need to worry about any of the usual excuses for non-productivity; the workers live at the factory, they aren’t in a union, and nobody cares about them enough to give a damn if you underpay and mistreat them. The perfect workforce!
Add in the fact that the inmates themselves—and their families—can be milked as a source of profit, and it’s a lucrative field indeed. Prisoners’ “bank” accounts, which they use to access commissary goods and where they store their meager wages, are littered with fees for families transferring them money, moving the cash out upon the inmates’ release, et cetera. That’s to say nothing of the prices of phone calls, which are infamous—in some cases, rates could be as high as $14 a minute. The FCC attempted to step in and cap the rates, but the caps were overturned in court.6
Given that family ties and support on the outside are some of the biggest factors in whether or not an inmate will reoffend upon release, these astronomical fees aren’t just cruel, they make no sense; they make it harder to maintain those ties and they make it more likely that the inmate will return to prison. Perhaps that’s the idea? The private prison lobby is a powerful one, and it fights tooth and nail for things like mandatory sentencing, long sentences for non-violent crimes, and the like.
This, in and of itself, is proof that private entities should not be in the business of jailing people. The purpose of incarceration is to rehabilitate. To heal society, to make sure that people who mess up can atone for it somehow—that is real justice. Pushing for unjust sentencing, pushing for more and more things to be crimes punishable by stints in prison, that is injustice. That is immoral, to say nothing of flagrant corruption, such as the “cash for kids” scandal when a judge was jailed for corruption—he intentionally gave juvenile offenders harsher sentences than was needed, all so they would spend long amounts of time in the facilities that were lining his pockets. If anybody thinks that’s the only judge who’s ever done that—sometimes I wish I was that naïve. The first to make it a national scandal, maybe. But certainly not the first, nor the last.
It’s easy to feel like the inmates deserve it. It’s easy to say that they broke the law, and that’s that—tough luck for whoever’s caught up in the mess. But we have to step back and look at the bigger picture. We have, as a society, allowed private businesses to take over incarceration and make it into a profitable activity. We’ve decided that, in many cases, cutting costs is preferable to actually rehabilitating inmates and keeping them from re-offending. We’ve decided that, to that end, we should effectively allow those inmates to be enslaved and kept in conditions that, were the facilities in China or the Middle East, we would call inhumane, if not simply torture. The DOJ’s decision is admirable, and it’s a good first step to ending this atrocity. But there’s still plenty to be done.
