Save Our Prisons! Crime And The Production of Jobs

Doug Berman blogged the other day about this NY Times article describing agitated Pontiac, Illinois prison employees seeking to save their jobs by saving their prisons.  The gesture was certainly understandable, but it also makes plain some serious social pathology.  Towns like Pontiac are heavily dependent on crime and the incarceration of individuals (presumably most of whom hale from Chicago) for their daily bread.  To put it simply, these folks depend on people selling drugs and attacking people.  And they need legislatures to expand the criminal law, increase sentences, and reduce parole. 

Any government that incarcerates creates prison employees, but in America, that business is so large that it becomes its own sector.  It spurs private sector investment.  It becomes a social good.  And people will fight to save this good.  The Pontiac Prison story is far from the first time we've had evidence of this phenomenon - thus the name prison industrial complex.  But the phenomenon is problematic in so many ways that it bears repeating again and again.

1.     Prisons make a lot of money for people.  The more crime and the longer the sentences, the more communities and industries reliant on prisons make money.

2.     The people who make the money are often - but by no means always - from very different ethinic and social groups and geographical communities.  We know that most offenders from big cities emerge from very specific geographical areas.  We also know that most state prisons are located outside of big cities.   A city like Philadelphia has significant city prisons, run by city residents, but once an offender is sent for a state bid, all the food services, health services, and guarding services are provided far from Philadelphia and the communities from which these offenders came.  And the money to pay for these things flows there as well.  In Illinois, according to Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza, 60% of the state's prisoners come from Cook County; only 1% are housed there.

3.     Political power is then exported from cities to these prison communities.   Rural, white communities receive greater representation due to the surge of new "residents" in their communities.  Residents who, by the way, can't vote.  Essentially, imprisonment can undermine the one person, one vote paradigm.  And voters from central state can't judge, and probably don't care about, the effects of criminalization and incarceration on the home communities of offenders.  This is invisible to them. 

4.     And as people begin to enjoy the benefits of money and enhanced political power, it creates incentives for them to support laws and policies that perpetuate those benefits.  This is simply rational action.

This cycle is only one part of the reason why it's so incredibly hard to get revisit and transform our criminal laws.  But it is important to remember.   

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Agreed: absolutley important stuff.

There was a PBS documentary not long ago, "Prison Town, USA" that discussed some of the points you make here: "In the 1990s, at the height of the prison-building boom, a prison opened in rural America every 15 days. 'Prison Town, USA' tells the story of Susanville, California, one small town that tries to resuscitate its economy by building a prison — with unanticipated consequences."

See here: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/prisontown/

And the film synopsis: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2007/prisontown/about.html

[John C]

I'm not convinced. The presumptive reason for the exploding prison population is the existance of laws that 1) criminalize wide swaths of behavior, and 2) require long periods of custodial incarceration (mandatory minimums, drug laws, etc.), along with ancillary factors like prosecutorial control over charging and pleas, lack of rehabilitative programs, lack of prevention programs, and so forth.

I don't see a chicken and egg problem here - I think the number of prisons follows the number of inmates generated by the substantive criminal law. When a group gets together to "Save the Prison," they are just trying to keep their slice of pie the same - they aren't arguing that the pie (the prison population) should grow larger (or even stay the same). Unless there is evidence that the "prison industrial complex" has effective lobbying power over the substance of the criminal law (which I am not aware of, but maybe someone has a cite), I remain skeptical of the claims in this post.