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Samantha Brounstein-Prison Industrial Complex Research

Prison Industrial Complex 

        To start, there are so many of my findings that could not be brought up due to the sheer amount of information that the prison industrial complex has to touch upon. Hopefully, for the larger-scale group project, they will be easier to grapple with to get a full picture of the problems at hand within the guise of private prisons in the US.
        The Prison Industrial Complex has seen a surge in visibility as of recent and with good cause, there are a small group of news sites that are actively attempting to educate the public on America’s use of private prisons and the idea of “Legalized Slavery” that is in place in the United States and the UK in particular.
So what makes up the prison industrial complex? It includes the overlapping interests of private prisons, policing, and harsh imprisonment of individuals as a social, economic, and political solution.
For example, political figures say they want to put “illegal aliens” in prisons/deportation camps, once elected, they put the action behind their words and create stricter, more rigid laws to incarcerate those people that fall under the category “illegal alien” which much harsher prison cycles. The ACLU reported that there are 3,278 prisoners serving life sentences for non-violent crimes. 
Another issue is that those incarcerated are peoples that are generally considered minorities or less desirable members of society; people of color, LGBT community members, poor people, the disabled, youths, and immigrants.
The inmates are shipped to a private prison that gets funding from the government as well as the corporations that run them AND profit from the prisoners who work for minuscule pay depending on the prison. Inmates in State Penitentiaries are generally paid a little less than $2 and hour while those in private prisons are paid around $.08 a day or sometimes not at all. There are no workplace protections and are generally incredibly exploitive.
In essence, the prisons pay their workers nothing and are able to profit off of them for longer by keeping them inside for life while expanding prison population and paying politicians to bring stricter laws and fund a more rigid police to enforce it, hence creating a prison complex where no one is able to escape. It sets the “prisoners” up to fail and puts them in a situation where they can’t get out of the system even if they try, effectively creating a type of government legal slavery.
The private prison population has increased 5x faster, between 2000 and 2016, than the total prison population while private immigration detention centers have risen in population by 442% (from 4,841-26,249 people) in the US 
The US has the highest number of incarcerated peoples (about 1.5 million of which 150,000 are incarcerated in private prisons according to the ACLU as of 2016) and prisons are still trying to cut cost of operation. They give inmates less benefits, harsher living conditions, they have reduced training for staff members resulting in situations where staff does not know how to properly deescalate issues (as most people have read about in the news on multiple occasions, headlines about assaults of inmates who have no defenses to begin with). 
When corporations have their hands in running prisons, it isn’t about rehabilitation of inmates, it is about exploiting them for profit. It is a goldmine because of the unregulated workplace, the workers can quit, they don’t have to give them rights, money, or even a choice. 






http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/

https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/private-prisons

http://www.prisonabolition.org/what-is-the-prison-industrial-complex/

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-on-mass-incarceration-u-s-growth-in-private-prisons/

https://study.com/academy/lesson/prison-industrial-complex-definition-facts-statistics.html


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/12/the-prison-industrial-complex/304669/

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