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Elizabeth Waller- Prison Industrial Complex research


The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is described by Critical Resistance as “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems” (Critical Resistance, 2019). It consists of a web of relations between powerful legal and for-profit entities that source their power from racial, economic, and social privileges. It helps to maintain the authority of these groups, putting minorities and poverty-stricken people into a severely unbalanced cycle of imprisonment for corporate profit. These groups include (but are not limited to) prisons, courts, police, media platforms, the probation service, and any companies that profit from clothing, transporting, and feeding prisoners, or from exploiting prisoner labor.
The Prison Industrial Complex doesn’t only affect the prisoners, but their families and friends as well. Prisoners’ families are often required to shell out large sums of money for bail, legal fees, representation, etc., and are deprived of their incarcerated family members’ income while they are in prison. This is a huge financial burden for many families. Furthermore, once the prisoners are released, they receive little help in terms of transitioning back into society, and often have difficulty finding or maintaining employment or housing. These financial hardships only perpetuate the poverty cycle and maintain the power of the privileged groups.
Private, for-profit prisons are some of the main agents in the Prison Industrial Complex. When a prison makes money off of how full the prison is, and there are multiple multinational companies investing in said prison, there is far more incentive to fill the prison than to focus on humane treatment of the prisoners. In these cases, the prisoners stop being seen as human beings, and instead become capital for the stockholding companies. The police and overall justice system also benefit from this, so they feed into this by targeting and criminalizing specific communities in order to fill the prisons. The Empty Cages Collective lists “poor people, people of colour [sic], queer communities, individuals with psycho-emotional health challenges trying to survive in our culture, as well as political organisers [sic] and those that resist capitalism and the state” as commonly target groups (Empty Cages Collective, 2019). This is criminalization is assisted by the media, which perpetuates racial and social stereotypes by showing limited, skewed images of these groups. For example, like we saw in The Roof is On Fire, minority teens are almost exclusively portrayed as criminals and troublemakers on the news. When viewers buy into and believe these stereotypes, they don’t question the injustice of the Prison Industrial Complex and the system is allowed to continue.

Sources:
“What Is the PIC? What Is Abolition?” Critical Resistance, criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.
“What Is the Prison Industrial Complex?” Empty Cages Collective, 2019, www.prisonabolition.org/what-is-the-prison-industrial-complex/.

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