Cruel and Unusual Punishment: America’s Prison Industrial Complex

By Imam Khalid Griggs

“Excessive bail shall not be required nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.” — Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.” — Due Process Clause, Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The United States has over 2.4 million men, women, and children incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country. While representing less than five percent of the global population, America nevertheless locks away an astounding 25 percent of the total number of prisoners worldwide, managing the largest penal system on the planet. In Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, Robert Perkinson explains how imprisonment in the United States has achieved an unprecedented scale — combining law enforcement, courts, and prisons, the U.S. criminal justice system consumes $212 billion a year and employs 2.4 million people, more than Walmart and McDonald’s combined, the nation’s two largest private employers. Concrete and concertina wire have become integral features of the American landscape. Although crime rates in this country fall below international levels, the incarceration rate in the United States is six to ten times greater than any other industrialized nation. China, a nation with at least five times the population of this country, incarcerates 1.6 million people — a figure that pales in comparison to America’s prison population.

The Prison Industrial Complex

The prison industry in the United States has reached a level of self-sustaining profitability resulting in what has been characterized as the Prison Industrial Complex. Former President Dwight Eisenhower, a legendary American military hero, delivered a chilling commentary in his farewell address on January 17, 1961, warning the nation of a major threat to the country:

“In the councils of Government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

President Eisenhower was warning against the comfortable relationship between parties charged with managing war and producing weapons and equipment for it. The Military- Industrial Complex was described as an all-too-friendly relationship that develops between defense contractors and government forces, where “war for profit” is the result. It developed near-sacrosanct status in the halls of American government after World War II, during the period from the 1950s to the early 1990s known as the Cold War — a global struggle between the former Soviet Union and the United States for strategic influence and control over the human and physical resources of the rest of the world.

The civilian defense industry reaped financial windfalls from the seemingly endless quest for world domination by the two superpowers. The mantra of the United States during this period was to “fight Communism” at all costs, even if taxpayer dollars had to be redirected from national social service and education programs to sustain the War Against Communism.

In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan launched a national War on Drugs that generated the “product” — inmates, particularly African Americans and Latinos — which would quadruple the U.S. prison population in less than two decades and fuel the ascension of America’s newest growth industry: the Prison Industrial Complex. The domestic War on Drugs has been a cynical war on the nation’s poor, disproportionately funneling at least seven times the number of African Americans than whites into the system.

In an insightful article titled “The Prison-Industrial Complex,” Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg reveal the relationship between the Military-Industrial Complex and its domestic counterpart:

“As with the building of weapons and armies, the building and maintenance of prisons are big business. Investment houses, construction companies, architects, and support services such as food, medical, transportation, and furniture all stand to profit by prison expansion. A burgeoning ‘specialty item’ industry sells fencing, handcuffs, drug detectors, protective vests, and other security devices to prisons. As the Cold War winds down and the Crime War heats up, defense industry giants like Westinghouse are re-tooling and lobbying Washington for their share of the domestic law enforcement market. Night-vision goggles used in the Gulf War, electronic ‘hot wire’ fencing, and other equipment once used by the military are now being marketed to the criminal justice system.”

Communication companies like AT&T, Sprint, and MCI have gotten into the act as well, charging prisoners exorbitant phone rates — often six times the normal long-distance charge. Smaller firms like Correctional Communications Corp. are dedicated solely to prison phone systems fully equipped for systematic surveillance.

In her landmark work Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis asserts:

“Corporations associated with the punishment industry reap profits from the system that manages prisoners and acquire a clear stake in the continued growth of prison populations. Put simply, this is the era of the prison industrial complex. The prison has become a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison.”

As state budgetary restraints have limited the unfettered expansion of state prisons, privately owned prisons have become the fastest-growing sector of the corrections industry. Bastions of American capitalism such as American Express, General Electric, and the investment firm Smith Barney are among the investors in private prisons traded on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. Correctional Corporation of America is one of the largest owners of private prisons in the world. Free from most government oversight, private prisons are notoriously brazen in brutally disciplining inmates for otherwise minor infractions. Because private prisons receive a fixed amount of money from contracting federal, state, or local governments for each inmate in custody, administrators and staff often receive minimal pay and training and, more often than not, are at best ignorant of — if not outright hostile toward — the inner-city culture of the majority African American inmate population.

According to Evans and Goldberg, prisons are also a leading rural growth industry. With traditional agriculture being pushed aside by agribusiness, many rural American communities face hard economic times and compete to secure prison facilities of their own — seen as a source of construction jobs, local vendor contracts, prison staff positions, and tax revenue.

Calling All African American Mentally Ill, Children, Men and Women

Caught up in America’s penal dragnet are clinically certified mentally ill individuals. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, three times as many people with mental illness can be found in jails and prisons than in psychiatric hospitals. This alarming statistic is due in part to inadequate community mental health facilities and punitive, over-zealous policing against persons who are often unable to respond to or understand commands issued by law enforcement. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 16 percent of adults in state prisons and local jails are mentally ill — a figure that may be under-reported, since only inmates who self-identify at intake as having a major mental health disorder, or who admit to having spent at least one night in a mental hospital, are counted. Typically, these inmates suffer from serious mental disabilities such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression, and are more likely to become victims of physical and sexual abuse by other inmates and/or guards.

Forty-four of the 50 U.S. states house juveniles under the age of 17 in adult facilities. In most states, 75 percent of children aged 13 and older are routinely sentenced as adults if they have previous criminal records or if the nature of their offense is particularly violent. On any given day, 8,500 children under 18 are confined in adult prisons and jails, even though, according to BJS, only 34 percent of kids in juvenile detention centers have committed violent crimes. No other industrialized nation on earth has as harsh a sentencing structure for juveniles as the United States, where teenagers can be sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for violent crimes.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that sentencing juveniles to life without parole, except in homicide cases, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The Court has also ruled that juveniles are exempt from state-sponsored executions. Justice Anthony Kennedy voiced the sentiment of the Court and of people of good conscience nationwide when he noted that juveniles deserve more lenient treatment from the criminal justice system because they are immature, impulsive, and more susceptible to peer pressure. Teenagers placed in the general population of adult prisons are considered “fish” by older, predatory inmates and suffer a disproportionately high rate of rape, violent assault, and suicide or attempted suicide. Too often, juveniles are indoctrinated into adult prison life — and sometimes into juvenile detention centers as well — by being offered protection from beatings, robbery, and violent assault in exchange for unquantifiable sexual favors.

One of the most odious aspects of America’s criminal justice system is the disproportionate number of African Americans confined within its penitentiaries. In her groundbreaking work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander reveals:

“More African Americans are under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery.”

In Texas Tough, Perkinson offers further insight:

“A half century ago — before the Montgomery bus boycott, before the War on Poverty, and before the conservative reaction against the social experimentation of the 1960s — blacks in the United States were imprisoned at roughly four times the rate of whites. Today, a generation after the triumphs of the civil rights movement, African Americans are incarcerated at seven times the rate of whites, nearly double the disparity measured before desegregation.”

Although two generations have passed since Brown v. Board of Education, African American men today go to prison at twice the rate they go to college. Alexander observes that the political and financial ascension of prominent African Americans like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey can distort the reality of continuing institutional racial dynamics — dynamics that have, to a large degree, replaced the overt racism of the slavery and Jim Crow eras with a societal, uninformed, benign neglect toward the criminalization of people of color, particularly African Americans and Latinos.

In Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System, Laura Magnani and Harmon Wray offer a searing analysis:

“Criminalization has become a tool of social control. It is more politically correct than an outright expression of racism or classism, but it accomplishes the same purpose. It is possible only when people are convinced that criminal behavior is solely the result of individual weakness or inherent badness rather than the direct outgrowth of social inequality, poverty, racism, deteriorating education, and decaying communities. It is easy to track, over the past thirty years, the growth of the myth of the ‘criminal type’ and the ways in which those in power have manipulated the inherent racism and classism in our society to cast poor people of color as criminally inclined.”

Women represent the fastest-growing population in U.S. prisons. Over the last two decades, the number of female prisoners has increased by more than 350 percent, with women of color disproportionately represented. According to a fact sheet from the National Women’s Law Center and the Chicago Legal Aid to Incarcerated Mothers, African American women comprise 46 percent of the female prison population, white women 36 percent, and Hispanic women 14 percent. Six percent of women are pregnant when they enter prison and are routinely separated from their child immediately after giving birth. Because there are fewer prison facilities for women, incarcerated mothers are ordinarily housed much farther from home and family than the average male prisoner — a distance that causes substantial hardship for visiting children.

Amnesty International USA reports that the imbalance of power between inmates and guards involves both direct physical force and indirect coercion rooted in the prisoner’s total dependency on officers for basic necessities and the guards’ ability to withhold privileges. Some women are coerced into sex in exchange for favors such as extra food or personal hygiene products, or to avoid punishment. In federal women’s correctional facilities, 70 percent of guards are male. In many states, guards have access to — and are encouraged to review — inmates’ personal history files. Guards have been known to threaten prisoners’ children and visitation rights as a means of silencing women who speak out, and to issue rule-infraction tickets that extend a woman’s sentence. Prisoners who complain are frequently placed in administrative segregation.

21st Century Slavery

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, southern states enacted a series of laws known as Black Codes. Modeled on the earlier Slave Codes, these restrictions on the newly emancipated attempted to ensure a supply of inexpensive agricultural labor, restrict the liberties of freed people, and maintain the white-dominated social hierarchy. Central to this effort was the establishment of a convict lease system, under which white planters could “lease” prisoners to labor without compensation on plantations — including, in some cases, the very plantations from which they had recently been emancipated. Under the Black Codes, newly freed people could be forced into convict servitude for actions such as public drunkenness, careless handling of money, vagrancy, breaking curfew, or “wanton” speech or conduct.

In one of the cruel ironies of American history, the Thirteenth Amendment — while abolishing chattel slavery throughout the United States and its territories — did not forbid forced servitude for persons convicted of crimes:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to its jurisdiction.”

The convict lease system was eventually replaced by county-supervised chain gangs and state-run prison industries. In Beyond Prisons, Magnani and Wray observe:

“In 1979, the United States government repealed the interstate transport law that had forbidden the interstate transport of prisoner-made goods. The Department of Justice implemented a national work program throughout the federal prison system. There, prisoners theoretically work for minimum wage, of which 80 percent is withheld for room, board, victim compensation, medical fees, and educational costs. Thirty states now allow some type of legalized contracting of prison labor to private firms.”

Prison labor has thus become an alternative to moving offshore for many corporations. As American companies looked to maximize profits by sourcing jobs to countries with cheaper, largely unregulated labor forces — such as China, Bangladesh, and India — many realized that an even more exploitable labor pool was available domestically, through prisoner workers rather than foreign laborers. Prison laborers are not protected by the Occupational Safety and Health Act and are not permitted to organize to improve working conditions. Average minimum wages for state prison labor in this country are $0.93 a day for non-industry work, with average maximum wages of $4.73 a day — far below public or private-sector minimums, since most prisoners work institutional prison jobs rather than jobs with private industry. Private-industry state prison jobs pay anywhere from $0.23 to $7.00 an hour, but the “take-home” portion of that pay is only about 20 percent of the total (Singleton and Boushey, 2002).

Given the severe restrictions on the rights of prison laborers, it is unsurprising that some industries have turned to prison labor as an alternative to moving offshore. The list of U.S. corporations doing business inside federal and state prisons reads like a Who’s Who of corporate America, including IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret, and Target. According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces:

• 100 percent of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, and canteens
• 93 percent of paint brushes
• 92 percent of stove assemblies
• 46 percent of body armor
• 36 percent of home appliances
• 30 percent of headphones, microphones, and speakers
• 21 percent of office furniture

Legalized Torture: Supermax Prisons and Communication Management Units

The cruel and unusual punishment fostered by America’s Prison Industrial Complex is arguably best illustrated by the existence and practices of the nation’s 66 Supermax prisons. According to the website spunk.org, “supermax” is short for “super-maximum security” — a facility designed to house violent prisoners or those who might threaten the security of guards or other prisoners. Some prisons not formally designated as supermax maintain “control units” with similar conditions. The underlying theory is that solitary confinement and sensory deprivation will bring about behavior modification. Supermax prisoners are locked into small cells for approximately 23 hours a day, with almost no contact with other human beings — no group activities, no work, no educational opportunities, no communal meals, no sports, no congregating for religious services, and no genuine attempts at rehabilitation.

Within recent years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has created highly secretive units within supermax facilities known as Communication Management Units (CMUs), which appear to disproportionately house Muslim inmates accused of non-violent crimes. Although shrouded in secrecy, CMUs are known to exist at the federal prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana, and Marion, Illinois. The only publicly available explanation for their purpose — beyond primarily housing Muslim inmates — is to “restrict the communication of terrorist inmates.”

Conclusion

The state of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States represents a socio- spiritual crisis for persons of faith and good conscience. Not since the institutionalization of chattel slavery in this country has such a large percentage of the population remained complicit through silence and indifference. As Angela Davis rightly observes:

“The prison therefore functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. This is the ideological work that the prison performs in our society — it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.”

It is indeed ungodly for agencies of the state to legitimize any form of torture — including total isolation from human contact, sensory deprivation, and physical brutality — in the name of forcing lawbreakers to pay their debt to society. The flawed criminal justice system perpetuates the obscenities of the Prison Industrial Complex even after release, denying ex-prisoners citizenship rights and the capacity to financially support themselves and their families. Family members and loved ones of ex-prisoners are doubly victimized by the actions of the criminal justice system upon release: convicted felons are routinely denied the right to vote, serve on juries, live in federally subsidized housing, receive education grants, or — except in uncommon circumstances — secure a living-wage job.

Just as during slavery, prisoners are demonized to such a degree that even well- intentioned people find it difficult to advocate for prisoner rights, for fear of being seen as supporting criminals and sociopaths. If there is any hope for significant reform or replacement of the current criminal justice system and its Prison Industrial Complex, the following minimum steps must be taken by individuals:

1. Believe that dehumanizing, torturous conditions for lawbreakers are neither necessary nor desirable, and are in fact counterproductive to the rehabilitation and redemption of human beings — then take action.
2. Advocate for comprehensive prison reform and greater use of sentencing alternatives to incarceration, such as restorative justice and community service.
3. Organize a support network and system for family members of incarcerated individuals, including transportation to visit loved ones, independent social service outlets such as food and clothing banks, and emergency financial assistance.
4. Support individuals and organizations that act on behalf of the incarcerated.
5. Adopt a correctional institution within a reasonable distance of your home and assist inmates with literature, religious counseling, and social support — understanding and addressing the actual, not perceived, needs of inmates at that facility, even when it means raising uncomfortable issues with administration officials.