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Morroque posted:A question for the thread that I am curious about... Is there any salience to the "perpetual prisoner machine" or "crime control as industry" styles of thought when it comes to actual prison reform? Coming at it as an outsider with no interaction with the justice system at all, I've heard it described as either an academically sound point or a conspiracy theory, without anything said in the middle. Is it actually a valid concern? Or simply a morbid thought exercise? I can't find any of my old effort posts on the issue but: basically the relationship between specific business interests and private prisons is badly overstated and misses most of the point (haha don't worry the real story is a lot worse). I mean, okay, there absolutely is something like a "prison-industrial complex". Prisons and crime can be made to be profitable and that profitability absolutely has something to do with their continued expansion. But the notion that prisons are a source of cheap labor and therefore imprisonment is encouraged and expanded has a giant neo liberal-shaped hole where its understanding of both prisons and actual labor markets should be. There isn't nearly enough actual prison labor to explain the massive increase in incarceration, and prison labor itself isn't actually all that productive compared to the third world (what does that tell you?). There are direct, tit-for-tat relationships between the two in a number of isolated cases, the most horrific of which is probably something like the kids for cash scandal, but from the standpoint of the sort of American firm that has these kinds of labor needs it doesn't usually make sense of go to the trouble of hiring prisoners and lobbying for tough-on-crime politics when they already have legislation in place to let them hire children abroad. In the overwhelming majority of cases its hard to see how three-strikes laws, for example, directly impact the bottom line of most labor-intensive industries, except for maybe the handful directly implicated in building, staffing, and supplying new prisons. Some stuff can't be outsourced because it's waste disposal or whatever else and some times it's just pure ideology for some true believer CEO but most of the time prison labor doesn't actually make a whole lot of sense for most companies. The more direct, stable, and long-term relationship between prisons, business, and labor is as an alternative to social welfare. This is point where most people lose sight of the bigger picture, because intuitively the relationship is exactly backwards. They'll shake their heads and say: "This system is crazy! Don't you see if we'd just spend that money on schools, public housing, healthcare, and safety nets that crime rates would inevitably drop and we could stop spending so much on prisons? These crazy Republicans, I tell ya." Well, yes, actually, the basic viability of that kind of platform is perfectly clear to conservatives in the business community-especially to the ones who were losing massive battles with unions that had essentially been bankrolled by welfare checks during lengthy strikes. Laborers could spend all day on the picket line and they didn't even need a huge war chest or even personal savings to get by for the long periods needed to really win concessions at that level. Social welfare, however big of role it actually played, came to be seen as literally financing acts of class of warfare (lol) which is why to this day conservatives love to bitch about lazy, entitled poors leeching off the system. Even before Reagan though that specific relationship was clear to the business community. In fact it was broadly the genesis of the "Law and Order" politics of the Nixon era and beyond. The basic predicament of 60s civil unrest was that you couldn't really do anything about it without getting middle America just crazy woke because you shot a bunch of college students or whatever and they weren't really starving to death on their own living the free love version of NEET lyfe (incidentally some of that was actually due to drug money, not social welfare, so guess what sort of crime the Federal government gets really mad about). The prevailing sentiment in the aftermath kind of became something like "give these loving freeloaders an inch and they'll take a mile". So the relationship between business and the carceral system becomes not necessarily one of direct collusion, but rather takes the posture of "something has got to be done about all these blacks and hippies." You can't really chain them to employment because as excess labor they aren't really employable, and placating them with social welfare only really works in times of growth. Besides which its weak and capitulating and these people just poo poo in our cereal. Prisons are a better deal. What's the point of spending money to keep excess labor healthy, educated, and safe when you can just convict them of something and warehouse them and maybe rent them out once in a while? Either way, it's on the taxpayer dime. Legal punishment becomes the collective punishment for communities that can't or won't get with the basic program of making rich people richer through the wage system. That's how prisons can really become profitable. Yeah, there's a kind of cottage industry that has this gross, incestuous relationship with law-enforcement and they can apply some pressure to keep business booming, but the real motivation has to do with how we handle excess labor in times of contraction and crisis. It's civil unrest, after all, that forms the basis of criminalizing bullshit. Drug crimes, vice, crimes public order, etc--which are the real winners in terms of expanding the prison system because they represent the basic interests and hobbies of the working class and you can nail just about everyone with them sooner or later--give the police an excuse to actively go out and find new people to lock up and neatly sort criminals and law-abiders along racialized and class lines. No one even has to complain before you can go out and collect the nation's idle poor, you can just pick them up right off the street. The reason, then, that we have a metric fuckton of prisoners without necessarily also having a metric fuckton of crime is not actually that they work cheap. They already worked cheap. Their overseas counterparts work even cheaper! And spoiler alert: most of the ones in prison don't do any work that doesn't directly relate to the basic maintenance and operation of the prison itself. We have lots and lots of prisoners because we have lots and lots of poor, because we have a business community and a socioeconomic order that can't employ the entire nation and still expect to make a profit. Part of the reason, in fact, that you're only just recently seeing a serious backlash against police and prisons is that no one has any real reason to give a poo poo any more. Why are the critiques of the prison system like those you mention really picking up steam in the mainstream political discourse almost 60 years after they were transformed into rape dungeons for the poor? Why are Millennials ideologically capable of criticizing Hero Cops when older generations see this as a species of profanity? I tend to think its because it doesn't matter any more in the eyes of people who actually have a say. The unions are dead, the third world provides all the cheap labor you could ever ask for, and there's no longer any ideological reason to go around vacuuming up America's poverty problem because there's not even a real political left trying to make the case that this is actually a bad thing. I mean, it sucks to step over the cold bodies of the homeless on your way to work but as far as the right wing is concerned its one of those problems that has a way of solving itself. The "law and order" narrative is still out there but it doesn't have the energy it used to when crime rates keep dropping, so you can kind of get away with pressuring liberals to do something about the prison system today because who is it really going to hurt? The damage is already done. C.C.A. or whoever else can make some noise but Wall Street isn't going to care. Mainstream liberals are merely embarrassed by the problem, they aren't really affected by it. Any real opposition to social welfare and prison reform at this point is just ideological inertia. Any sort of counter-cyclical Keynesian program--I mean you could fill holes with money and have people dig them up--will do just as much to prevent crime and burn labor as police and prisons but I guess its better to have the latter in your back pocket in times of crisis? In any case there isn't really any particularly well-organized conspiracy to lock people up for the explicit purpose of solving a specific labor problem. That is actually what it amounts to, but indirectly, and on a massive scale. Not many actual businesses would even notice at this point if the government just up and declared "prisons are schools now" or something. The basic function of the institution and everything that feeds into it is one of storage, not crime-fighting. Conditions aside, that's part of what's so ghoulish about the whole thing: there's not even any cynical reason to keep doing it. The only conceivable reason to oppose prison reform in 2016 is that not opposing prison reform means you have admit why you built them in the first place.
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May 1, 2016 15:11
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Morroque posted:Woozy, I think I read what you are saying as in general support of the "crime control as industry" hypothesis, but with the general caveat that it isn't really the surface elements that are the real reason why it's there. I recall Nils Christie made the similar point that it was mostly about storage, and even recently there has been the discovery that the War on Drugs was a political machination even at it's inception -- though, I'm unsure how weighty that particular evidence will remain. That's the intended reading, yea. As to the notion of storage, you could say part of the problem is that a criminologist wouldn't actually have anything to say about it. One of the reasons prison threads tend to be such broad topics of discussion is because its an old and massive system with deep structural roots and about a dozen or so areas of serious institutional dysfunction, and to that extent the field of criminology is actually a whole other huge wall of text. Even the basic psychology of crime and punishment is an ideological question and criminology as a field of study produces more, uh, "career oriented" sorts of people than real serious critical types. I would suggest with something like Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor, Lockdown America: Police and Prison's in the Age of Crisis, or The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison as starting points for reading material on the notion of "storage" formulated as prisons as an alternative to social welfare.. Those are the three most commonly linked books in these threads by my informal counting. It's not actually usually that dry of reading, although it is depressing. You can knock out Lockdown America in an evening or two. Anyhoo, the question of "what now" doesn't change, really. Do prison outreach, do justice advocacy, do activism for prison reform. Most facilities will have some way of getting books donated to their libraries, which are universally the shittiest most mind-numbing collection of romance novels and inspirational pablum. Sometimes there are a bunch of hoops to jump through due to rules on contraband. It's the best possible time to be working on those issues since like I said institutional opposition is at an all-time low. A dozen or more states have very recently suffered serious and embarrassing crises in their prison populations, sometimes reaching the point of full-on breakdown at local levels where, say, judges have ordered something, the police and government won't or can't comply, and now the two are just staring at eachother. It still matters to me as an activist, to the millions still inside, and to people like HFG whose voice really is the substance and necessity of what these threads have historically been. It just doesn't matter as much to the rich, who have already won.
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May 2, 2016 02:02
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