Little wonder, then, that public prisons are overcrowded.593 Yet while providing security, housing, food, and medical care for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry, it's a $70 billion594 gold mine. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCAs goal is to buy and manage public prisons across the country at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, and here's the kicker, the prisons have to contain at least 1,000 beds595 and states have to agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.596
The problem with this scenario, as Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections, recognizes is that while states may be tempted by the quick infusion of cash, they "would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population."597 Unfortunately that's exactly what has happened. Among the laws aimed at increasing the prison population and growing the profit margins of special interest corporations like CCA are three-strike laws (mandating sentences of twenty-five years to life for multiple felony convictions) and "truth-in-sentencing" legislation (mandating that those sentenced to prison serve most or all of their time).598 This, as we saw earlier, is the overcriminalization of America which means more prison inmates–for profit, that is.
And yes, in case you were wondering, part of the investment pitch for CCA and its cohort GEO Group includes the profits to be made in building "kindler, gentler" minimum-security facilities designed for detaining illegal immigrants, especially low-risk detainees like women and children. With immigration a persistent problem in the southwestern states, especially, and more than 250 such detention centers erected across the country, there is indeed money to be made.599 For example, GEO's new facility in Karnes County, Texas, boasts a "608-bed facility still smelling of fresh paint and new carpet stretch[ing] across a 29-acre swath of farmland in rural South Texas. Rather than prison cells, jumpsuits, and barbed wire fencing, detainees here will sleep in eight-bed dormitory-style quarters, wearing more cozy attire like jeans and T-shirts. The facility's high walls enclose lush green courtyards with volleyball courts, an AstroTurfed soccer field, and basketball hoops, where detainees are free to roam throughout the day"600
"And this is where it gets creepy," observes reporter Joe Weisenthal for Business Insider, "because as an investor you're pulling for scenarios where more people are put in jail."601 In making its pitch to potential investors, CCA points out that private prisons comprise a unique, recession-resistant investment opportunity, with more than 90 percent of the market up for grabs, little competition, high recidivism among prisoners, and the potential for "accelerated growth in inmate populations following the recession."602 In other words, caging humans for profit is a sure bet, because the U.S. population is growing dramatically and the prison population will grow proportionally as well, and more prisoners equals more profits.
In this way, under the pretext of being tough on crime, state governments can fatten their coffers and fill the jail cells of their corporate benefactors. However, while a flourishing privatized prison system is a financial windfall for corporate investors, it bodes ill for any measures aimed at reforming prisoners and reducing crime. CCA understands this. As it has warned investors, efforts to decriminalize certain activities, such as drug use (principally possession of marijuana), could cut into their profits.603 So too would measures aimed at reducing the prison system's disproportionately racist impact on minorities, given that the incarceration rate for blacks is seven times that of whites.604 Immigrants are also heavily impacted, with roughly 2.5 million people having been through the immigration detention system since 2003.605 As private prisons begin to dominate, the many troubling characteristics of our so-called criminal justice system today–racism, economic inequality, inadequate access to legal representation, and a lack of due process–will only become more acute.
Corruption Equals Criminals for Profit
Doubtless, a system already riddled by corruption will inevitably become more corrupt, as well. For example, consider the "kids for cash" scandal which rocked Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, in 2009. For ten years the Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation, which specializes in private prisons for juvenile offenders, paid two judges to jail youths and send them to private prison facilities. The judges, who made over $2.6 million in the scam,606 had more than 5,000 kids come through their courtrooms and sent many of them to prison for petty crimes such as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and trespassing in vacant buildings.607 When the scheme finally came to light, one judge was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison608 and the other received 28 years,609 but not before thousands of young lives had been ruined.
In this way, minor criminals, from drug users to petty thieves, are being handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism. This is the culmination of an inverted justice system which has come to characterize the United States, a justice system based upon increasing the power and wealth of the corporate state.
No matter what the politicians or corporate heads might say prison privatization is neither fiscally responsible nor in keeping with principles of justice. This perverse notion of how prisons should be run, that they should be full at all times, and full of minor criminals, is evil.
Corporate Takeover of America
Although big business and government have always had intimate relations, that relationship was at one time governed by a tacit understanding that the government's first priority was to protect the individual rights of its citizens, while corporations–private entities, separate from government–were free to concern themselves with making a profit. Unfortunately, the rise of the corporate state over the past seventy years (a development that both President Eisenhower and Martin Luther King Jr. warned against) has done away with democratic government as we have known it. In the process, the interests of megacorporations have been prioritized over those of the average citizen. Nowhere is this emphasis on corporate profit at the expense of the American citizenry more evident than in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
A nonprofit membership organization which purports to uphold principles of "limited government, free markets, federalism and individual liberty,"610 ALEC is comprised of state lawmakers and corporate representatives with a mutual interest in seeing legislation adopted at both the state and federal levels. ALEC was founded in 1973 and has approximately 2,000 state lawmakers among its members, or roughly a quarter of state legislators in the nation.611 Unlike lobbying groups, however, ALEC is not required to disclose its relationship with legislators.
Although ALEC has been described as a conservative organization, the only credo–political or otherwise–subscribed to by that of its corporate members is materialism, which gives allegiance to no interest, political or otherwise, other than its own. Indeed, while ALEC keeps the names of its corporate members under tight wraps, its roster includes some of the biggest names in the corporate world.612
Arizona Police Enforce Racial Profiling Law (PressTV)
Whatever Happened to Representative Government?
In a nutshell, ALEC's formula for success relies on creating model legislation. Although ALEC's legislation crafting meetings are off limits to nonmembers,613 the group's political might is well known. Roughly 1,000 ALEC bills are introduced in legislatures throughout the country each year, and about one-fifth become law.614 The model legislation which ALEC produces and which state legislators, having paid a fee to access, can introduce to their own legislatures has been described as "ready-made, just add water, written in language that can withstand partisan debate and legal scrutiny."615
Not surprisingly, given the corporate bent of its membership, much of the model legislation created by ALEC involves privatizing government functions or creating
policies which favor corporate profits over public interest. Incredibly, in Florida, legislation lowering the corporate tax rate was so closely worded to the ALEC model that it accidentally included the ALEC mission statement.616
In other words, although we elect our so-called representatives to write and debate the legislation which governs our lives, it is the corporate elite which now assumes that role. Of course, this means that representative government as we have known it is becoming extinct.
As you might expect, ALEC has been behind a number of controversial pieces of legislation that have become law.617 For example, ALEC worked with the National Rifle Association in order to pass legislation in states across the country similar to Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which became the focal point of the Trayvon Martin shooting controversy. Twenty-five states now have similar laws.618
Bolstering the Police State
ALEC has also helped engineer a number of laws which bolster the aura of an emerging police state. For instance, ALEC has been the mastermind behind the strengthening or imposition of voter ID laws across the country.619 In the past, these laws have been used to discriminate against specific demographic groups of voters.
One of ALEC's most infamous pieces of model legislation, one that has ushered in a police state in Arizona, formed the core ofthat state's controversial immigration law, which generally withstood a legal challenge before the U.S. Supreme Court. Among those members who helped draft the model legislation was CCA, the country's largest private prison company. CCA benefited greatly from ALE C's legislative efforts to privatize the prison industry. That model legislation morphed into SB 1070, a law which promotes racial profiling and allows police to randomly violate the Fourth Amendment by patting down, detaining, or arresting anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant, including American citizens. Two-thirds of the thirty-six immediate co-sponsors of the bill in the Arizona Senate were ALEC members or attendees at the legislation drafting meeting.620
Another one of ALEC's more egregious pieces of legislation, the Prison Industries Act (PIE), privatizes prison labor and directs any money earned by the prisoners towards expanding the prison industry creating more prisoner work programs and paying corporations for setting them up. Prior to ALEC's intervention, that money was used to offset taxpayer expenses. Now it fattens corporate wallets. Some thirty states operate PIE programs based upon legislation derived from ALEC. Florida has forty-one prison industries, California has sixty, and there are roughly one hundred throughout the other states that employ prison labor.
Prison Labor
What some Americans may not have realized, however, is that these resulting prison labor industries, which rely on cheap, almost free labor, are doing as much to put the average American out of work as the outsourcing of jobs to China and India. "It's bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China. They shouldn't have to compete against prison labor here at home," noted Scott Paul, Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing.621
States influenced by ALE C are also seeking to replace public workers with prisoners who work not for pay but to get time off their sentences. Coupled with the trend towards privatized prisons–where, in exchange for corporations managing state prisons, states agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate for at least twenty years–this expansion of the prison labor industry contributes to an environment in which there is a financial incentive for ensuring that more people are put and kept in jail.
Factories of Death
The historical parallels relating to the emergence of a corporate-driven prison industry are chillingly detailed in Richard Rubenstein's insightful book The Cunning of History.622 Despite Nazi military commander Heinrich Himmler's infamous 1943 order calling for the total annihilation of the Jews, a directive replaced it that stated all able-bodied Jewish adults at Auschwitz be sent to hard labor camps instead of the crematorium.623 The motive behind the change of plans: corporate profit. Many German corporations, including BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other major German chemical and pharmaceutical companies, invested huge sums in the construction of factories at death camps for the express purpose of utilizing the available and infinitely replenishable pool of death-camp slave labor–much of it to produce products for European countries.
Over the course of World War II, the German pharmaceutical corporation, Bayer A.G of Leverkusen, made extensive use of death-camp inmates for their experiments on human beings. Bayer laboratories synthesized a new anti-typhus medicine and wanted it tested. The medicine came in two forms: tablet and powder. Bayer wanted to know which one had the fewest side effects. Bayer researchers were given permission to conduct their experiments on death camp inmates.624
Auschwitz Concentration Camp
(Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Medical experiments conducted by the Third Reich and its corporate enablers fell into two general categories: 1) use prisoners to conduct tests that would have been normal attempts at advancing medical knowledge had the subjects participated willingly and 2) discover means to ensure German rule over Europe forever. The mass sterilization of Jews, Gypsies, and other undesirables by the Nazi regime fell into the latter category, and the death camps were the place to carry it out. In this nightmare vision, as Rubenstein realized, "the victims would have had as little control over their own destiny as cattle in a stockyard. In a society of total domination, helots could be killed, bred, or sterilized at will."625
This practice of using prisoners was not unique to Nazi Germany or other totalitarian regimes. No government holds a monopoly on the mentality that sees powerless human beings as unwilling or unsuspecting subjects of experiments on behalf of the "greater good." During the Cold War, the practice of using prisoners for medical experiments was very common in the United States as well.626 In the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the U.S. government sought to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis by deceiving black prisoners into thinking they were receiving free health care. Those who received the placebo endured the full effects of the disease and/or death in the name of scientific progress.627 This experiment only differed from those carried out by the Nazis in that the American prisoners were completely blind to what was being done to them whereas the Nazi victims had some idea of what was happening.
This psychopathic "modern" mentality, which places a higher priority on "solving an administratively defined problem" rather than focusing on its social consequences on human beings, characterized both the American and German experiments. Yet even though the numerous accounts of corporate complicity with the Third Reich are shocking and appalling, Rubenstein adamantly refutes the notion that the "corporate executives [were] possessed of some distinct quality of villainy"628 Mass murder simply became part of business and a successful corporate venture.
Unless we ignore the socio-economic factors that facilitated the justification of massive killings, as Rubenstein recognizes, we cannot assume that it cannot happen elsewhere or in future times.629 The lesson is clear: it is a stern warning for citizens and policy-makers today as the police state continues to spread its tendrils into everyday life with the assistance of better and more efficient technology in an attempt to profit from prison labor.
CHAPTER 26
The Psychology of Compliance
"Laws are rules made by people who govern by means of organized violence, for non-compliance with which the non-complier is subjected to blows, to loss of liberty, or even to being murdered."630–Author LEO TOLSTOY
Why did Nazi soldiers commit unspeakable atrocities at Hitler's request? Why do so many of us stand by silently when we witness bullying?
It appears that we, as humans, implicitly comply with authority. Furthermore, when in positions of authority, we innately act aggressively.
Thankfully, most of us will not have to confront a warlord or find ourselves in the position to seriously harm others. However, some groups in modern society, namely police and corrections
officers, too often abuse their authority. Understanding why we create and allow hostility will enable us to create more effective safeguards against unnecessary violence.
The Experiments
In 1961 professor Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment at Yale University in which subjects were asked to administer an increasingly intense shock punishment to a friend or acquaintance631 in another room whenever he or she answered a question wrong.632 The test subjects believed they were causing another human being great harm, even though in reality they were not. Despite the fact that many subjects were visibly uncomfortable (nervously laughing, etc.) with giving painful shocks to another human being, twenty-six out of forty participants continued shocking people up to the highest (450-volt) level, labeled "XXX" on the machine. No subject stopped before giving a 300-volt shock, labeled "Intense Shock" despite the fact that the confederate in the next room expressed severe agony and health concerns. All of the subjects were voluntary participants. When a participant expressed an unwillingness to administer the next shock, experimenters prodded them to do so by asking "Please continue," or stating: "The experiment requires that you continue."633
A decade later, researchers conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment634 randomly assigned participants to be either guards or prisoners in an intricate role play. With only the instruction to "maintain order" in the simulated prison, the "guards" began harassing and intimidating prisoners. "Prisoners" did attempt to rebel, but always returned to compliance quickly after an outburst, despite the fact that they were volunteers. Due to the extreme aggression of guards, the experiment was terminated after only five days (the original design would have held students for two weeks).
In the decades following these shocking studies, psychologists have asked, why do people (those in power or those subordinate to power) act aggressively? Organizations like the military or police force have been widely studied to answer this question. Today, theories of learned obedience are generally accepted.
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State Page 19