The Prison-Industrial Complex
Part One
The Atlantic Monthly
December 1998; Volume 282, No. 6; pages 51 - 77.
Less than a quarter mile from the old prison is the California State Prison at
Sacramento, known as "New Folsom," which houses about 3,000 Level 4 inmates.
They are the real hard cases: violent predators, gang members, prisoners unable
to "program" well at other facilities, unable to obey the rules. New Folsom
does not have granite walls. It has a "death-wire electrified fence,"
set
between two ordinary chain-link fences, that administers a lethal dose of 5,100
volts at the slightest touch. The architecture of New Folsom is stark and
futuristic. The buildings have smooth gray concrete façades, unadorned
except for narrow slits for cell windows. Approximately a third of the inmates
are serving life sentences; more than a thousand have committed at least one
murder, nearly 500 have committed armed robbery, and nearly 200 have committed
assault with a deadly weapon.
Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The
prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at
times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom -- like old
Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system -- now operates at
roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of
California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to
existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent
offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug
offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of
inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the
biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent
bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its
jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and
the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts
that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a
release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply
to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new
prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.
Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about
100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local
jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold
people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now
imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a
million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so
large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of
Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. "We have
embarked on a great social experiment," says Marc Mauer, the author of the
upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. "No other society in human
history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of
crime control." The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon.
Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration
rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000
people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and
then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is
about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new
prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America's
prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the
inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.
The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American
sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward
explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people:
"There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing
too many crimes." Indeed, the nation's prisons now hold about 150,000 armed
robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders -- enough violent criminals
to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need
to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United
States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the
proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has
actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering
state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been
convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America's inmate
population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who
have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would
usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment -- or would not be
considered crimes at all -- in the United States now lead to a prison term, by
far the most expensive form of punishment. "No matter what the question has
been in American criminal justice over the last generation," says Franklin E.
Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, "prison has been the
answer."
On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address
to issue a warning, as the United States continued its cold war with the Soviet
Union. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex." Eisenhower had grown concerned about this new
threat to democracy during the 1960 campaign, when fears of a "missile gap"
with the Soviet Union were whipped up by politicians, the press, and defense
contractors hoping for increased military spending. Eisenhower knew that no
missile gap existed and that fear of one might lead to a costly, unnecessary
response. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and
will persist," Eisenhower warned. "We should take nothing for granted."
Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a
prison-industrial complex -- a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic
interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the
actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the
nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of
special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a
seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and
conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural
areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private
companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections
not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government
officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since
1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20
percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent.
The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young
attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains
the thinking: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if
crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons -- and building even more
prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."
The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the
homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a
wide assortment of violent sociopaths. About 70 percent of the prison inmates
in the United States are illiterate. Perhaps 200,000 of the country's inmates
suffer from a serious mental illness. A generation ago such people were handled
primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice, system. Sixty to 80
percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse.
Meanwhile, the number of drug-treatment slots in American prisons has declined
by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in
ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the
proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty
years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are
African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use
among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men
are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about
half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every
fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is
likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime. The number of women
sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the
80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders. About
75 percent have children.
The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and
institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting
the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with
a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass
"tough-on-crime" legislation -- combined with their unwillingness to disclose the
true costs of these laws -- has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties.
The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the
state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of
an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have
thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two
decades have converged and reached extremes. In the realm of psychology a
complex is an overreaction to some perceived threat. Eisenhower no doubt had
that meaning in mind when, during his farewell address, he urged the nation to
resist "a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action
could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
Liberal Legacy
The origins of the prison-industrial complex can be dated to January of 1973.
Senator Barry Goldwater had used the fear of crime to attract white
middle-class voters a decade earlier, and Richard Nixon had revived the theme
during the 1968 presidential campaign, but little that was concrete emerged
from their demands for law and order. On the contrary, Congress voted
decisively in 1970 to eliminate almost all federal mandatory-minimum sentences
for drug offenders. Leading members of both political parties applauded the
move. Mainstream opinion considered drug addiction to be largely a
public-health problem, not an issue for the criminal courts. The Federal Bureau
of Prisons was preparing to close large penitentiaries in Georgia, Kansas, and
Washington. From 1963 to 1972 the number of inmates in California had declined
by more than a fourth, despite the state's growing population. The number of
inmates in New York had fallen to its lowest level since at least 1950. Prisons
were widely viewed as a barbaric and ineffective means of controlling deviant
behavior. Then, on January 3, 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New
York, gave a State of the State address demanding that every illegal-drug
dealer be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.
Rockefeller was a liberal Republican who for a dozen years had governed New
York with policies more closely resembling those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
than those of Ronald Reagan. He had been booed at the 1964 Republican
Convention by conservative delegates; he still harbored grand political
ambitions; and President Nixon would be ineligible for a third term in 1976.
Rockefeller demonstrated his newfound commitment to law and order in 1971, when
he crushed the Attica prison uprising. By proposing the harshest drug laws in
the United States, he took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the
nation's political agenda. In his State of the State address Rockefeller argued
not only that all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life but also that
plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile
offenders should receive life sentences.
The Rockefeller drug laws, enacted a few months later by the state legislature,
were somewhat less draconian: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an
illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen
years to life. The legislation also included a provision that established a
mandatory prison sentence for many second felony convictions, regardless of the
crime or its circumstances. Rockefeller proudly declared that his state had
enacted "the toughest anti-drug program in the country." Other states
eventually followed New York's example, enacting strict mandatory-minimum
sentences for drug offenses. A liberal Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip
O'Neill, led the campaign to revive federal mandatory minimums, which were
incorporated in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Nelson Rockefeller had set in
motion a profound shift in American sentencing policy, but he never had to deal
with the consequences. Nineteen months after the passage of his drug laws
Rockefeller became Vice President of the United States.
When Mario Cuomo was first elected governor of New York, in 1982, he confronted
some difficult choices. The state government was in a precarious fiscal
condition, the inmate population had more than doubled since the passage of the
Rockefeller drug laws, and the prison system had grown dangerously overcrowded.
A week after Cuomo took office, inmates rioted at Sing Sing, an aging prison in
Ossining. Cuomo was an old-fashioned liberal who opposed mandatory-minimum drug
sentences. But the national mood seemed to be calling for harsher drug laws,
not sympathy for drug addicts. President Reagan had just launched the War on
Drugs; it was an inauspicious moment to buck the tide.
Unable to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, Cuomo decided to build more
prisons. The rhetoric of the drug war, however, was proving more popular than
the financial reality. In 1981 New York's voters had defeated a $500 million
bond issue for new prison construction. Cuomo searched for an alternate source
of financing, and decided to use the state's Urban Development Corporation to
build prisons. The corporation was a public agency that had been created in
1968 to build housing for the poor. Despite strong opposition from upstate
Republicans, among others, it had been legislated into existence on the day of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, to honor his legacy. The corporation was an
attractive means of financing prison construction for one simple reason: it had
the authority to issue state bonds without gaining approval from the voters.
Over the next twelve years Mario Cuomo added more prison beds in New York than
all the previous governors in the state's history combined. Their total cost,
including interest, would eventually reach about $7 billion. Cuomo's use of the
Urban Development Corporation drew criticism from both liberals and
conservatives. Robert Gangi, the head of the Correctional Association of New
York, argued that Cuomo was building altogether the wrong sort of housing for
the poor. The state comptroller, Edward V. Regan, a Republican, said that Cuomo
was defying the wishes of the electorate, which had voted not to spend money on
prisons, and that his financing scheme was costly and improper. Bonds issued by
the Urban Development Corporation carried a higher rate of interest than the
state's general-issue bonds.
Legally the state's new prisons were owned by the Urban Development Corporation
and leased to the Department of Corrections. In 1991, as New York struggled to
emerge from a recession, Governor Cuomo "sold" Attica prison to the corporation
for $200 million and used the money to fill gaps in the state budget. In order
to buy the prison, the corporation had to issue more bonds. The entire
transaction could eventually cost New York State about $700 million.
The New York prison boom was a source of embarrassment for Mario Cuomo. At
times he publicly called it "stupid," an immoral waste of scarce state monies,
an obligation forced on him by the dictates of the law. But it was also a
source of political capital. Cuomo strongly opposed the death penalty, and
building new prisons shielded him from Republican charges of being soft on
crime. In his 1987 State of the State address, having just been re-elected by a
landslide, Cuomo boasted of having put nearly 10,000 "dangerous felons" behind
bars. The inmate population of New York's prisons had indeed grown by roughly
that number during his first term in office. But the proportion of offenders
being incarcerated for violent crimes had fallen from 63 percent to 52 percent
during those four years. In 1987 New York State sent almost a thousand fewer
violent offenders to prison than it had in 1983. Despite having the "toughest
anti-drug program" and one of the fastest-growing inmate populations in the
nation, New York was hit hard by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the
violent crime that accompanied it. From 1983 to 1990 the state's inmate
population almost doubled -- and yet during that same period the violent-crime
rate rose 24 percent. Between the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws and the
time Cuomo left office, in January of 1995, New York's inmate population
increased almost fivefold. And the state's prison system was more overcrowded
than it had been when the prison boom began.
By using an unorthodox means of financing prison construction, Mario
Cuomo turned the Urban Development Corporation into a rural development
corporation that invested billions of dollars in upstate New York. Although
roughly 80 percent of the state's inmates came from New York City and its
suburbs, high real-estate prices and opposition from community groups made it
difficult to build correctional facilities there. Cuomo needed somewhere to put
his new prisons; he formed a close working relationship with the state senator
Ronald B. Stafford, a conservative Republican whose rural, Adirondack district
included six counties extending from Lake George to the Canadian border. "Any
time there's an extra prison," a Cuomo appointee told
Newsdayin 1990, "Ron Stafford will take it."
Stafford had represented this district, known as the North Country, for more
than two decades. Orphaned as a child, he had been adopted by a family in the
upstate town of Dannemora. The main street of the town was dominated by the
massive stone wall around Clinton, a notorious maximum-security prison. His
adoptive father was a correctional officer at Clinton, and Stafford spent much
of his childhood within the prison's walls. He developed great respect for
correctional officers, and viewed their profession as an honorable one; he
believed that prisons could give his district a real economic boost. Towns in
the North Country soon competed with one another to attract new prisons. The
Republican Party controlled the state senate, and prison construction became
part of the political give and take with the Cuomo administration. Of the
twenty-nine correctional facilities authorized during the Cuomo years,
twenty-eight were built in upstate districts represented by Republican
senators.
When most people think of New York, they picture Manhattan. In fact, two thirds
of the state's counties are classified as rural. Perhaps no other region in the
United States has so wide a gulf between its urban and rural populations.
People in the North Country -- which includes the Adirondack State Park, one of
the nation's largest wilderness areas -- tend to be politically conservative,
taciturn, fond of the outdoors, and white. New York City and the North Country
have very little in common. One thing they do share, however, is a high rate of
poverty.
Twenty-five years ago the North Country had two prisons; now it has eighteen
correctional facilities, and a nineteenth is under construction. They run the
gamut from maximum-security prisons to drug-treatment centers and boot
camps. One of the first new facilities to open was Ray Brook, a federal prison
that occupies the former Olympic Village at Lake Placid. Other prisons have
opened in abandoned factories and sanatoriums. For the most part North Country
prisons are tucked away, hidden by trees, nearly invisible amid the vastness
and beauty of the Adirondacks. But they have brought profound change. Roughly
one out of every twenty people in the North Country is a prisoner. The town of
Dannemora now has more inmates than inhabitants.
The traditional anchors of the North Country economy -- mining, logging, dairy
farms, and manufacturing -- have been in decline for years. Tourism flourishes in
most towns during the summer months. According to Ram Chugh, the director of
the Rural Services Institute at the State University of New York at Potsdam,
the North Country's per capita income has long been about 40 percent lower than
the state's average per capita income. The prison boom has provided a huge
infusion of state money to an economically depressed region -- one of the largest
direct investments the state has ever made there. In addition to the more than
$1.5 billion spent to build correctional facilities, the prisons now bring the
North Country about $425 million in annual payroll and operating expenditures.
That represents an annual subsidy to the region of more than $1,000 per person.
The economic impact of the prisons extends beyond the wages they pay and the
local services they buy. Prisons are labor-intensive institutions, offering
year-round employment. They are recession-proof, usually expanding in size
during hard times. And they are nonpolluting -- an important consideration in
rural areas where other forms of development are often blocked by
environmentalists. Prisons have brought a stable, steady income to a region
long accustomed to a highly seasonal, uncertain economy.
Anne Mackinnon, who grew up in the North Country and wrote about its recent
emergence as New York's "Siberia" for Adirondack Life magazine, says the
prison boom has had an enormous effect on the local culture. Just about
everyone now seems to have at least one relative who works in corrections.
Prison jobs have slowed the exodus from small towns, by allowing young people
to remain in the area. The average salary of a correctional officer in New York
State is about $36,000 -- more than 50 percent higher than the typical salary in
the North Country. The job brings health benefits and a pension. Working as a
correctional officer is one of the few ways that men and women without college
degrees can enjoy a solid middle-class life there. Although prison jobs are
stressful and dangerous, they are viewed as a means of preserving local
communities. So many North Country residents have become correctional officers
over the past decade that those just starting out must work for years in
prisons downstate, patiently waiting for a job opening at one of the facilities
in the Adirondacks.
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent of The
Atlantic. His article "A Grief Like No Other," about the families of murder
victims, was The Atlantic's cover story for September, 1997.