The prisons are the crime

A new report released by The Pew Charitable Trusts warns that unless policies change in states across the U.S., taxpayers could be paying as much as $27.5 billion for the prison industrial complex over the next five years. This number consists of $12.5 billion to construct new prison beds, as well as an additional $15 billion for prison operations themselves. (www.pewtrusts.org)

What is more alarming, however, is the number of lives that these policies will damage. The report estimates that by 2011, one in every 178 U.S. residents—1.7 million men and women—will be incarcerated. The number of prisoners will outnumber the residents of Atlanta, Baltimore and Denver combined.

Given the continued racist criminalization in the media, schools and in the streets, this population will undoubtedly be disproportionately people of color. Given the continuing drop in jobs and social services across the country, the majority of this population will undoubtedly be poor.

As the world gears up to celebrate International Working Women’s Day, the report announces that women are expected to be the fastest growing population of prisoners, with a 16 percent increase in their incarceration over five years. The population of men in prison is expected to also increase by 12 percent.

A media release for the report states, “A significant driver of the expected increase in the prison population is the cumulative impact of state policy decisions. These include mandatory minimum prison sentences, reduced parole grant rates and high recidivism [re-arrest] rates.”

“It’s a tempting leap of logic to assume the more people behind bars, the less crime there will be,” the report stated. But, it admitted, “there is no clear cause and effect.”

The prison industrial complex is a system where working-class people are warehoused, forced to work for slave wages, and subject to racism,

sexism, anti-LGBT bigotry, rape, torture, harassment and abuse at the hands of prison officials.

Just as the repression of immigrants serves the bosses who can super-exploit immigrant labor with the threat of deportation, the prison system serves bosses who can pay below-minimum wages for services ranging from telemarketing to building furniture—used in public schools in some states—to data entry.

People are often incarcerated for crimes of survival, or for crimes related to drug offenses in a world where many turn to drugs as an escape from the oppression they face in their daily lives. If and when prisoners are released, they generally face the same conditions upon return to the outside world, with the added stigma of a criminal record.

It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out what is needed to create healthy communities and healthy individuals: Jobs at a decent wage, and training. Universal education. Social services, including health care, child care, after-school and drug-rehabilitation programs. Cultural enrichment. An environment that promotes growth and potential. Why doesn’t the government take the money used for the prisons—and the war, for that matter—and put it towards these solutions?

The answer is that the government isn’t interested in any of this. Its focus is on one thing, and one thing only—profits for the capitalist class. And as long as the prison industrial complex is profitable they say: Let the taxpayers subsidize it.

But as always, repression breeds resistance. The marches demanding justice for victims of police killings—like Sean Bell in New York, Kathryn Johnston in Atlanta and others—are a reflection of this. The demand of “not one more penny for war” at the Feb. 17 marches included the war at home against people of color and the poor. And the horrors of the prisons themselves will inevitably bring more into the movement for justice and liberation—just look at revolutionaries Malcolm X and George Jackson.