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Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital Disaccumulation
Monthly Review, July, 2001 by Staughton Lynd, Alice Lynd
Is There A Prison-Industrial Complex?
Any analysis of contemporary U.S. society must seek to explain the trends in the last two decades toward the confinement of more and more persons behind bars, toward harsher conditions of incarceration, toward indiscriminate use of the death penalty, and toward the disproportionate incidence of all of the above on blacks and Hispanics. In Ohio, for example, African Americans constitute about half of the 45,000 persons imprisoned, about half of the two hundred men on death row, and about two-thirds of the four-hundred-plus prisoners at the Youngstown supermax (a supermax prison is one in which prisoners are allowed virtually no contact with one another, and are subjected to constant and very sophisticated surveillance).
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The prison advocacy movement has thus far produced a single phrase which appears to represent our analysis of these trends: the "prison-industrial complex." Where did this phrase originate? What is the analysis that it intends to convey? Is it accurate?
The term "prison-industrial complex" is, of course, derived from President Eisenhower's use of the term "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address to the nation at the close of the 1950s. The suggestion was that profit-making corporations benefit from an arms race, and that the nation permits itself at its peril to become economically dependent on preparation for war.
An earlier, more radical version of the thesis expressed by the term "military-industrial complex" was put forward by Walter Oakes, writing in Politics magazine during the Second World War. Coining the phrase "permanent war economy," Oakes wrote: "The fact is that the capitalist system cannot stand the strain of another siege of unemployment comparable to 1930-1940....The traditional methods...will not be followed." In contrast to the many analysts and commentators predicting a new depression after World War II, Oakes correctly forecast that heavy armament expenditure would forestall any such economic collapse.
Whether in its Oakes or Eisenhower version, the analysis indicated that military spending has an economic function separate from--perhaps even inure important than-its ostensible purpose of protecting the nation from harm.
The words "prison-industrial complex," then, have by implication the same meaning. The message is: "Don't believe the proffered rationale that society has a need to put criminals behind bars in more and more restrictive and expensive facilities. What is really going on is that the capitalist system, having exhausted other opportunities for profit-making, is trying to make a buck on building and operating prisons. Watch the growth of prison production of goods and prison performance of services for profit. Notice the efflorescence of so-called private prisons which, laying aside the mask, make clear that their primary purpose is to maximize profits. (When the authors toured the first private prison in Ohio, on the occasion of its opening in spring 1997, the first words to be seen inside the prison doors were on a wall display entitled, "The price of our stock on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday," or words to that effect.)
We think the implicit analysis encoded in the term prison-industrial complex is inaccurate. We believe that the prison boom derives primarily from capitalist society's need to control a labor force that is no longer economically required. It seems to us that prisons are explained less by a desire to accumulate profit than by a concern to manage the social discontent engendered by capital flight and disinvestment: in a word, by disaccumlulation.
Youngstown as a Case Study
Consider Youngstown.
Manufacturing employment used to represent close to half of the employment in the Youngstown-Warren area, compared to about one quarter in the United States as a whole. Steel was the dominant industry. For many years the Mahoning Valley of northeast Ohio constituted the third largest steel-producing area in the United States.
Then came the mill closings of 1977 (5,000 jobs at the Campbell Works), 1978 (1,500 jobs at the Brier Hill Works), and 1979 (3,500 jobs at U.S. Steel's facilities). The 10,000 jobs lost in the basic steel industry were multiplied three or four times in the surrounding community, as suppliers, fabricators, truckers, and others all felt the ripple effect of the closings.
Since 1980, Youngstown has perennially had the highest unemployment rate of any city in Ohio. As is everywhere the case, the black community--roughly 50 percent of the present population of Youngstown--has been especially hard hit.
What was to be done? Assorted city fathers, economic development entities, and chambers of commerce sought for many years to lure new profit-making entrepreneurs into the area. The Cafaro family, enriched by construction and ownership of one of the area's two largest shopping malls, sought to create a business that would make $50,000 luxury cars with non-union labor. It failed. Congressman Traficant sponsored a commuter aircraft plant, which never got off the ground. (The Congressman did obtain money for a new federal court house, and is presently sponsoring a second federal court house--for what?--and a convention center.) A brewery, a riverboat casino, and a dog racing track were all enthusiasms for a day, but failed to materialize.
