From Global Research, March 10, 2008
The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery?
By Vicky Pelaez
"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners' work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
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[Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else's land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery - which were almost never proven - and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of hired-out miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972. ]
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The U.S. is King of the global prison hill, the result of a ferocious policy of mass Black incarceration. A new study by researchers at the Pew organization shows the U.S. is number one in numbers of prisoners per capita and sheer size of the national inmate population - many more inmates than are incarcerated in 1.2 billion population China. Seven times more Americans are locked up than during the early 1970s, when the prison explosion began, with non-whites now representing large majorities of prisoners. Mass Black incarceration is a deliberate policy of every state in the nation - a furious backlash against Black gains during the Sixties that continues unabated, disconnected from actual crime rates. Prison "reform" is a worthy goal, but the ongoing crime against Kmtyw Americans as a people must be tackled head-on, by confronting the true nature of the beast.