There are three orienting facts that render mass incarceration in the United States an ethical problem worthy of our deep consideration. First, the rate of incarceration has grown dramatically over the last 40 years so that today there are 2.2 million people in prison or jail, and another 5 million on probation or parole. This means that 1/32 adults in the USA are under state supervision. Second, the application of incarceration is disproportionately applied to the poor, people of color, and other vulnerable populations. Research shows that 85-90% of those in the criminal justice system fall below the poverty line, and the experience of incarceration only impoverishes people further. The consequences of having a criminal record are harsh and debilitating, ranging from family disruption, social alienation, and disenfranchisement. In these ways and others, the current situation of crime and punishment represents a dramatic moral challenge. Finally, victims of crime are themselves poorly served by the current system, often ignored or sidelined in the machinery of punishment. This course seeks to discover alternatives to the current systems of crime and punishment in order to imagine a more inclusive, just and moral society.
Alex Friedmann: “Prisoners as Commodities: Moral and Ethical Objections to Private Prisons”
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Del curso dictado por Vanderbilt University
Justice, Mercy and Mass Incarceration
19 calificaciones
De la lección
The Rise of the Prison
This module takes up the question of the rise of the prison, and its expressions in contemporary USA. How did the Prison Industrial Complex arise, and why has it taken the form it has?
Conoce a los instructores
Graham ResideAssistant Professor
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
What are your biggest objections to private prisons?
There are many.
I mean you can certainly approach this issue on a number of fronts.
Let me ask you particularly say,
on an ethical respect, from an ethical perspective.
On a personal level I find it morally and ethically
unacceptable to incarcerate people for the purpose of generating corporate profit.
Simple as that. We should not inject a profit motivation into our justice system.
It warps the incentives so often
people ask me what is the main difference between public and private prisons.
And I'll say well public prisons,
are operated by public employees,
you know government employees as a public service,
for the public good,
to ensure public safety.
Private prisons on the other hand,
are operated by private corporations for profit companies.
For the purpose of generating private profit for individual shareholders,
corporate executives and so forth.
And the motivation behind and for profit prisons is to make money, to generate profit.
Like all companies, so of course,
I'm not singling out the private prison industry,
that's when we're talking about obviously but
all companies exist for the sole purpose of making money.
Now some people are under the misimpression that McDonald's is
in the business of selling hamburgers. They're not.
McDonald's is in the business of making money,
the way they make money is by selling hamburgers.
Private prison companies likewise are in
the business of making money instead of hamburgers,
their product is people; prisoners.
And I find that morally and ethically objectionable.
And I'm not alone of course. There's a number of,
for example faith based groups,
that have come out specifically,
in opposition to prison privatization.
Locking people up for profit.
And this includes a wide variety of Methodist,
Universalist churches, Church of Christ,
Presbyterian Church, Thank you.
You know Episcopalians and so on.
I don't know, the Catholic bishops have they come out.
Yes the Catholic bishops have to,
at the Southern Catholic Bishops Conference.
It's because of this reduction of a human being to a commodity?
Basically yes. I mean that's why there are parallels
drawn between slavery and the modern private prison industry.
Now of course it's very difficult to compare
those in the modern prison industry with the,
you know centuries, you know institution of slavery.
But there are parallels that exist.
I mean the last time in this nation,
before the modern era of private prisons,
that we held people in bondage against their will and exploited them
to generate profit for private individuals or entities, that was slavery.
Right. We had slaves and they were worked in the fields on behalf of
private owners and plantations to generate profit for those entities.
And so the modern day version of the private prison industry has many parallels to that.
And that is one reason among many of,
my people finding them objectionable.
However, when making arguments against the private prison industry,
I typically do not use moral or ethics as part of that argument because quite frankly,
when you're talking to policy makers those people who actually have
the power and ability to change the industry, our law makers,
governors you know members of Congress,
the people in our governments both state and
federal that actually contracted private prisons,
whether they're immoral or unethical is completely immaterial.
That has nothing to do with it. You know.
Back in the day, slavery was legal
it was perfectly legal in United States to keep people as slaves.
Today, the private prison industry is perfectly legal. You know.
It operates through the auspices of our government.
But that does not make slavery right even though it was legal back then.
And the fact that private prisons are legal today also does not make it right.
But whether it's immoral or unethical from a policy standpoint, really doesn't matter.
Our politicians or policy makers frankly couldn't care
less whether it's considered immoral or unethical
as long as it meets the goals that they want to achieve which
is primarily keeping people locked up for as long as possible.
So your assumption there or your conviction is that,
the motivation is to keep people locked up.
We have, the system of the private prison industry.
Keep certain kinds of people locked up.
Well certainly, mostly poor people locked up.
Yes it is a means of social control in the United States.
I mean you know you don't see police raids in say Brentwood or Green Hills,
in more affluent areas here in Nashville,
and then you know locking up a bunch of people for white collar crimes.
You know you don't see the resources devoted to that but you do see
those resources devoted to primarily poor and minority communities,
and locking up low level street drug dealers for example,
who will be replaced the next day by others
because there's an economic incentive to do that.
So yes, it is certain people, certainly not all.
I think part of the,
the problem of the private prison industry though is the way that it operates,
is that private prisons have contracts that are based on per diems.
What that means is a private prison company receives payment based upon the number
of people it's locked up and then a certain dollar amount is assigned to those people.
So say on the $50 per diem contract for every prisoner that
a private company locks up each day they receive $50.
So a thousand prisoners were locked up in a private prison, $50 each,
$50000 a day, multiply that by
365-- that's how much they get in a year for running that prison, for example.
What that means is you know for every person is
locked up and the longer they hold them the more money they make.
And even more egregious,
a number of private prison contracts include what are called occupancy bed guarantees,
which means that the companies are paid,
for 90% occupancy of their beds even if those beds are not filled.
In other words, that's the floor,
they're going to get at least 90% occupancy payments.
So in a thousand bed facility,
they will be paid as if 900 of those beds were filled at
any given time even if only 500 are filled or 600 are filled or none.
If you take it to the extreme. So.
So the perverse incentive here is for these businesses to grow.
We need to lock up more people.
We have to lock up more people or lock of a larger percentage of the population.
So this will kind of morph into a little discussion of,
So how big is the private prison industry?
So roughly you know roughly,
around a hundred and twenty five,
a hundred and thirty thousand people
nationwide are locked up in privatized Federal and State prisons.
That doesn't include immigration,
doesn't include local jails and a few other different categories,
but out of 2.2 million people locked up,
that's not a whole lot.
I mean on average it's around eight and a half percent
of people that are locked up in private prisons.
Well necessary that means,
you know over 90% are locked up in public prisons.
So the private prison industry is not a large portion of our criminal justice system,
and frankly they see it more as a,
kind of a much larger market they can move into.
And so some of the argument is, what we,
there's not really an incentive to lock up
more people because there's just so many people already locked up.
All we have to do is expand that area.
But the nature of our capitalistic economic system is you always have to expand.
Companies can't just stay where they are.
They always have to grow.
And one way you can grow,
in the private prison industry,
is locking up more people and holding them for longer periods of time,
and expanding into other areas where you can exert more control,
correctional control over people.
Whether that be community corrections,
halfway houses, electronic monitoring or so on.
And both CCA and NGO group are doing that.
They are expanding into these other areas,
they're diversifying into other forms of correctional control.
Now, a lot of people do not have a lot of personal empirical experience with prisons.
You know prisons are closed environments.
The way I like to put it is the walls around
prisons don't just keep prisoners from getting out,
they keep members of the public from looking in.
And people rarely have a realistic idea of what happens in prison,
what prisons are really like because all they really know,
or what they may be read in the paper or they see on you know,
Oz or Prison break or Orange Is The New Black which are fictionalized accounts of course.
So there's a great dearth of knowledge among members of the public,
about prisons in general and private prisons specifically,
since Private prisons are even less transparent than our public prison system.
So, they might not quite understand some of the incentives or
the realities of how prisons work and why private prisons might be a bad thing.
So instead, I typically use an analogy of policing.
Because people are at least usually much more familiar with policing,
police officers, they see police officers on the street.
You know there's a lot more reporting on on policing in this country.
And I asked them what would you think about a business model,
where our police departments were privatized,
and they weren't run by
sworn law enforcement public employees but rather by private corporations as you know,
will kind of rent the police officers-- "Rent-A-Cops".
And what if we had a structure for contracting with
these private police companies that
the more arrests they make the more money they would make.
They were paid on a per arrest basis.
You know what kind of result would you anticipate coming from that.
And most people would understand intuitively that they would be an economic incentive
for these companies to start arresting
everybody for whatever reason they could come up with.
Jaywalking, throwing cigarette butts out of your car,
you know, loitering, anything that they can think of.
To lock more people up because they would have a financial incentive to do so.
That would maximize their profit.
And again, that's what corporations do.
They generate profit. They make money.
That's why they exist.
So a lot of people would look at that business model and say,
"Well that's just ridiculous.
We would never have a privatized police force and pay them on a per arrest basis."
But that is essentially exactly what we have in the private prison industry.
When we contract that private prison companies on
a per diem basis to lock people up in their for profit facilities.
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