The (previously) untapped market of immigrant detention

The perverse functionality of the American penal system has been widely recounted, for which reason the privatization of the prison industry shouldn't come as much of a surprise. The United States spends roughly $70 billion per year on prisons. According to MSNBC, "California now spends more incarcerating 167,000 adults than it does to educate 226,000 students in its 10-campus University of California system." As Bruce Western and Becky Pettit note in their article Incarceration & social inequality, the penal system functions more as an institution of social stratification rather than as a mechanism for crime control. The U.S. prison population is overwhelmingly male, African American and lacking in a High School diploma. Mass incarceration reproduces these inequalities as the time spent in prison is time outside of the job market, outside of education, and away from family. As prisons are privatized it is inevitable that incarceration rates will continue to climb. How else can surplus value be extracted from the market?

NPR has scanned through hundreds of pages of finance reports and lobbying documents which indicate that the private-prison industry helped to draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070.

That private industry is working with law makers to pass legislation which protects their bottom lines is hardly a surprise. The United States Supreme Court recently deemed the unlimited donation of corporate money to political campaigns as protected free speech.

By: Will Charles