Professor Hadar Aviram is Harry and Lillian Hastings Research Chair at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, the author of Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the Transformation of American Punishment (University of California Press, 2015). She draws out the “lights and shadows” of post-2008 criminal justice policy. Her speci al focus is fiscal spending and taxing after this 18-month period, e.g., the Great Recession, ended.
“The 2008 financial crisis has not uniformly led to more punitivism,” Aviram writes in her book’s Introduction. “In fact, as the rhetorical devices, political alliances, and criminal justice policies presented in chapters 4–7 of this book argue, the effect of the financial crisis on penal and correctional policies in the United States has been more complex and nuanced. In some criminal justice sites the recession scaled down the punitive project, whereas in others it has led to tough policies. These mixed trends require an explanation in light of the literature suggesting that in times of austerity governments tend to recur to greater, not lesser, reliance on punishment and oppressive social control.”
By one objective metric, however, the demand for employment in the prison-industrial complex has remained robust. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1988, the earliest year data is available, there were 142,200 correctional officers and jailers employed nationally. This occupation rose to a total of 382,150 in 1997 and 432,680 in May 2013.
Detainment and imprisonment creates employment in the private- and public-sectors. At the same time, detainment and imprisonment reduces the official employment data as those awaiting trial and sentenced to prison are uncounted in government employment data. The social position of non-white prisoners relative to employers, prior to incarceration, cries out for attention. These imprisoned individuals, according to Loïc Wacquant of the University of California at Berkeley Sociology Department, come from the ranks of the economically marginal. These caged individuals are part of the US working class. They are also superfluous to the employer class.
“Fewer than half of inmates [in US prisons] held a full-time job at the time of their arraignment and two-thirds issue from households with annual income amounting to less than half of the so-called poverty line,” he writes.
The American government’s (federal, state and local) race to incarcerate black and Latino communities exists within the struggle between capital and labor. The former has triumphed over the latter in the past 40 years through deindustrialization, deregulation and privatization. Class interests propelling US-style capitalism have shaped imprisonment and punishment, a trend in which capital has restructured labor along what African American author and scholar WEB Du Bois called “the color line”.
A post-WWII era of shared prosperity saw a 33.2% rate of union membership in 1956, with the top 10% receiving 31.8% of national income for the same year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The opposite trend followed. The top 10% received 47% of national income while the rate of union membership fell to 11.2% in 2013.
The hammer of detainment and imprisonment falls hardest on black and Latino individuals. The US incarceration rate by race per 100,000 in 2010 was: white 380; Latino 966 and black 2,207.
Robynn J.A. Cox is an assistant professor at Spelman College and RCMAR Scholar at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. In her report, “Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights,” she writes: “From 1979 to 2009, there was a decrease in the share of individuals sentenced to state facilities for violent crimes and property crimes, but large increases in the proportion of individuals serving time for less serious crimes such as drug crimes and other crimes. This shift in focus occurred after the federal government increased federal funding and resources to state and local law enforcement to support the war on drugs. In order to obtain economic gains from the resulting prison boom, impoverished rural communities — and the private sector — began using prison construction as part of their economic development strategies, with hopes that prisons would be a recession-proof industry that would help to stimulate their economy through job creation and regional multiplier effects.”
Consider the money-power of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. This 31,000-member union shapes bipartisan Golden State politics in ways big and small, on both sides of the prison wall. The money-politics of big business is nothing to sneeze at, either. I recall asking a California Dept. of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman on background for her employer’s top vendors by payment. She replied with figures for fiscal year 2009-10 that did not reflect the total funding available in the vendors’ contracts, just payments made for the first-quarter.
County of Los Angeles Sheriff—$6,560,317.06; Healthtrans LLC—$5,011,271.47; GEO Group, Inc.—$3,575,632.89; Amerisource Bergen Drug Corp.—$3,470,477.87; Rosen, Bien and Galvan, LLP—$1,425,159.95; and Cornell Companies, Inc.—$1,369,494.01.
Under the Obama White House, the GEO Group is a company expanding into the detention of immigrant detainees. This is a for-profit operation. Here, we see displaced peasants and workers from Central America and Mexico seeking paid work in the US, absent such opportunities in their homelands. Like stateside national minorities, these apprehended individuals become commodities in the prison-industrial complex. That is, their imprisonment produces a revenue stream for the GEO Group. To earn its investors a return on their capital, the company must spend less money than it takes in. The two groups of hyper-incarcerated US prisoners, blacks and Latinos, speak volumes about America’s so-called post-racial moment, and a divide that fragments the working class. Our current moment of crime and punishment reflects a status quo that won’t go gently into the night without a sustained campaign of militant dissent and alternate social order.
If there is, as Wacquant asserts, a correlation between labor force participation, incarceration and immiseration, such intersecting forces of class, gender and race suggest sites for mobilization and organization to push for progressive change. A popular movement struggling to emerge from the dustbin of history can marshal power to shape a post-status quo future.
We turn to young black people’s efforts with allies of all backgrounds to oppose police shootings of unarmed African Americans after Darren Wilson, a white officer, shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August 2014. This fledgling movement for equality with justice shows, as Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates argue in A Freedom Budget for All Americans (Monthly Review Press, 2013), what matters most to forging working-class alliances and winning people’s victories. They write: “Governments react to power. Those who wield it tend to get what they want; those who lack power do not.”
Seth Sandronsky is a Sacramento journalist and member of the freelancers unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2015
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