Prison Industrial Complex Research Theory

Research Theory: Prison Industrial Complex

Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is the term frequently used for the mass imprisonment the United States has been using over the past few decades for the control of crime and the fulfillment of personal interests of industries offering surveillance, economic and political solutions in the same matter. The recent mass incarceration of the US has dragged its people to prisons leading to an uprise in crimes and criminals abruptly and creating a new network of people that are overly crowded within the available number of prisons and facilities. This paper aims to formulate a theory paper. The research question would be identified based upon the foundations laid by literature review, a proposed methodology for defining the interdisciplinary research for the issue described, and suggesting future research after drawing upon the results and conclusions.

Research Question

The identified research question for the research paper is as follows:

Prison industrial complex: Is it meant to rehabilitate, or is it only for corporate profits?

The intersection of government concerns and the United States’ justice system is debatable to date since the ultimate benefit of incarceration is still vague in terms of rehabilitation and refinement of the prisoners. Various departments benefit from incarceration in the country, like probation offices, transportation firms, food companies, and their deliveries, court caretakers, service providers, and police departments, etc. (Stephens, 2021). Suppose the same prisoners are released to society when their imprisonment tenure is over. In that case, it is hard to discern whether they would remain a threat to the community, recidivate or become better human beings. Hence, the societal impacts of the released prisoners from the prison industrial complex are not researched widely and explicitly regarding its consequences. This paper would make original contributions in this context so that personal benefits of the prison privatization businesses and the government should be given a re-thought process.

Problem Statement

It has been widely reported that the current estimate of the US prisoners is approximately 2.3 million people, with an increment of 4.5 million people going for probation (Tufts University, n.a.). Despite representing only 5% of the entire world’s population, the country has the highest number of imprisoned people globally. It could be deduced that 20% of its population is behind the prison walls.

Several factors contribute to the upsurge in confinement over the previous years. The first and foremost being the use of drugs within the region for which 31 million people were arrested that were alleged to be involved in the drug war (Tufts University, n.a.). Moreover, it is assumed to be a center for holding the migrants for non-documentation and other relevant concerns (Tufts University, n.a.). The immigration detention centers have been privatized for the political and social interests of some agencies where racism is witnessed. Blacks are under probation more than the Whites crossing borders. Though detainees are provided private facilities where they have to spend a great amount of time before they can lead a normal life within the state, the strictness of access to food, healthcare facilities, and maintenance is observed for maximizing shareholders stakes. Also, the overall crime rate has escalated, which resulted in increased incarceration in the United States. It seems as if someone has released a great number of crooks to the community that is committing any possible kind of crime such as sex trafficking, drugs, massive killings, burglary, cybercrime, domestic violence, harassment, child abuse, rape, robbery, terrorism, and violent crimes, etc.

Systematic detention of people has been observed in prison industrial complex contributing to the obvious racial discrimination in the United States. People of color were imprisoned in double numbers compared to the Whites (Tufts University, n.a.). The racial disparity has been an evident factor of the US culture since the days when Blacks were first brought to the region for slavery. Black men have been behind bars in higher numbers than White men for the drug offense charges, regardless of their age.

Literature Review

There are three types of prison privatization business: convict leasing, piece pricing, and privatization (Schultz, 2015). During the subsequent years of the 1800s, the landowners of South paid prisons the lease for allowing the prison inmates to work on their lands and railway roads. Piece pricing was used in prison where cruel and violent inmates were imprisoned, and the American states had complete physical control. Privatization started when the businesses wanted to have prison inmates, and for that, they made contracts with the prisons to provide full facilities. This officially took a turn towards creating the first formal adult private prisons in the United States. The federal government made the private prisons accountable for the prisoners’ accommodation, administration, and management.

The war on drugs started by the US-led to the mass incarceration of drug-abusing offenders across the country in the early 1970s (Andre Douglas Pond Cummings, 2012). Different publishings in this area suggest that the growth in mass incarcerations in the US prisons depended on the theories of drug incarcerations related to the drug war and parole violations (Pfaff, 2015). However, these two theories could easily be discredited since the rise in parole admission could be balanced with the parole discharges. Also, drug incarcerations due to drug abuse were relatively small compared to all of the other types of crimes and their relevant incarcerations. The third theory was presented in the same publishing that drug offenders remained in prison for a short period despite representing the large share of the population coming fastly to the prisons.

The above theory could be related to prison re-admissions to keep the prison population substantial. For the same concern, research has been conducted stating it as a ‘structural re-entry industry’ for deliberately maintaining the status of the prison industrial complex. A recently published article declared after conducting semi-structured interviews with the re-admitted individuals and the service providers for those admissions that there are systematic issues within this setting called prison re-entry industry (PRI) that does not allow the individuals to establish themselves as normal individuals within the society and re-established (Ortiz & Jackey, 2019). The issues encompass the lack of facilities for preparing those individuals to become settled in the outside society, remaining under strict supervision even after they are released that serve as a barrier for them to perform substantially and positively in the society, and impossibilities for finding employment opportunities as they have not been prepared before the release. These complications result in a societal disparity in finding jobs, enhance social suppression, and giving rise to inequality leading to involvement in crime again and high rates of recidivism, ultimately incarceration and re-admission to prisons.

Most of the offenders were attributed to be African Americans and Blacks that had a high likelihood of their imprisonment. The changes in drug laws later tried to re-emphasize the violence within the country being a clear result of drug abuse for which massive incarceration was done based on African Americans, Blacks, and Latinos, declaring them the lawbreakers. Prions industrial complex increased the domestic incarceration rates as the related industries wanted to benefit from the crime rates rising due to drugs despite being criticized that drug addiction should be dealt with as a public health issue rather than a criminal activity. The studies hypothesized that along with having cheap labor in the form of racist prisoners, the industrial beneficiaries wanted to reap fruits by providing for these prisons, their building, and management with remunerative contracts with their funding and aids (Moore & Elkavich, 2008).

The rate at which the prison population has been growing since the 1980s has been exponential as America has contained more than $43 billion prisoners within its correctional facilities (Schultz, 2015). It was undoubtedly visible that specific race people were brought to prisons that marked the American culture of racism. A plethora of research has been published indicating that African Americans and Blacks have been imprisoned specifically in the rapidly growing prison population within the US. A study referred to 43% of the 2.6 million incarcerated Americans as African American men and women (Smith & Hattery, 2006). Various benefits still go to the White population, inside and outside the jails, such as removing the African American population from the common public and putting them behind bars. The presence of African Americans in jails meant more jobs for Whites outside the prison and more public facilities to the White community economically.

Moreover, it has been investigated that particular gender, the women, have been affected by the growing privatization since targeting races has not stopped in which indigenous women are included (Davis & Shaylor, 2001). The basic facilities of life are snatched from them, and it became hard for them to survive in prisons. It was manifested that only the driving force behind prison privatization or prison industrial complex was profitability gained through prison reestablishments and management, and not on the rehabilitation of the inmates, specifically the races that were put in large quantities behind bars.

Since the research declares that the basic facilities were limited for the targeted races, there was an unfair distribution of food and favors towards the other groups of the society, in which Whites have profited. Therefore, unsafe conditions and prison violence started taking shape, consequently forcing the authorities to build new private prisons and expand some existing ones. Some of the overcrowded inmate population was shifted to these private prisons where neo-capitalist cultures nurture well (Ryan, 2009-10, p. 4-5). The government likes to invest in the private sector due to cost-savings, and businesses tend to privatize more because of elevated profit maximization. Capital amassing has become possible due to the expensive prison labor, and the business owners direct a sense of personal control. The investigations assert that prison labor is used as a commodity rather than human beings since they are mostly not paid at par with their skill level. Even the most skilled ones are paid fairly low based on their expertise level. Elite brand names such as IBM, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Motorola, Compaq, and Hewlett Packard have seen accelerating growth in their shares. They have benefitted through the struggles of prison labor and prison contracts for their lucrative growth over the years.

Research also shows the issues and concerns related to the privatization of the prisons related to the strictness of crime control policies. It fostered homelessness, poverty, and abandonment that resulted in mass incarceration. The government started to look into this matter by asking the private companies to provide food, healthcare, security, and education to the inmates that gave strength to their businesses (Schultz, 2015, p. 96-97). The collaboration between the government and these service providers was fortified so that rectification within the prison walls could be justified. The neoliberal philosophy was seen in line with the prison privatization, which was later termed the ‘military-industrial complex’ by President Eisenhower (Schultz, 2015, p. 96). The name specifically calls this due to the coordination between the state’s military and private weapons industry for which some of the labor from prison was used based on the incentives generated by the free market rules where government stops intervening in the demand and supply regulatory procedures (Aviram, 2015, p. 15). Additionally, as stated in the problem statement section, the research has corroborated a large purpose of mass incarceration for stopping illegal immigration, which the government has itself produced by detaining the undocumented immigrants, especially African Americans, Blacks, Latinos, and Hispanics, and imprisoning them eventually (Shimmel, 2014, p. 11). Despite dropping crime rates within the country after mass incarceration, confirmed ineptitude of prisons in releasing positively changed individuals into the society, and ineffectiveness in reducing recidivism rates, it was professed that private companies wanted to exploit and capitalize on people who are not free for making a free and bankable market (Schultz, 2015, p. 97).

Proposed Methodology

With the advent of globalization, the rise of interdisciplinary studies has been perceived. The treatment of different variables simultaneously is a unique process yet a crucial one where the interplay of one variable or study or its impact over another could be studied in depth. After this paper, after probing profoundly into the literature gathered from most scholarly works, the interdisciplinary study should comprise political science, law, criminology studies, cultural studies, and economics.

Based on the research question, the research method that would best answer the question would be a qualitative study to gather attitudes, behaviors, and opinions from the targeted, especially the most incarcerated races, for either detention purposes or cheap prison labor. The qualitative study could infuse a survey in which the sample population could ask questions based on the disciplines mentioned above. An interdisciplinary connection to the research could be sustained. There is a notion that mass incarceration, which was during the early 1980s, started has changed immensely after 30 years have passed. There is high technological intervention in every field, even in jails, for entirely altering the prisons’ ways and processes. For example, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has proposed the use of technology for enhanced healthcare services for the prisoner using telemedicine and closed-circuit television to reduce prison healthcare costs (Hart, 2003). Hence, with such improvements, it could be investigated whether the lives of the inmates have improved or not, whether they have been able to create enhance themselves as better human beings and whether their recidivism urge would be low when they come out of prison. Their opinions about the facilities provided by the service providers, also now known as the profit makers with collaboration with the government, would be better comprehended with a qualitative study. Also, it could be interpreted with the aid of the same research methodology that whether the employment chances given to them by the elite brands and business makers are satisfactory for them to become self-sufficient once they are released and whether the jobs are well-paid. Their standpoints could also matter on how racism has provoked political and economic interests of the privatization firm and why do they think the government is not taking leaps to release the hard-working races into the mainstream economy so that they could be of appropriate use to the country’s economy and also could earn better for themselves and their families.