paid $0.23 an hour to start, and can work their way up to a maximum of $1.15 to manufacture electronics that go into the propulsion, guidance, and targeting systems of Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) PAC-3 guided missile, originally made famous in the first Persian Gulf conflict. (source: "Why are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles?," by Justin Rohrlich, Minyanville, March 7, 2011.)I had located the article about this prison labor via a link in another recent article in The Atlantic about a Sesame Street feature titled "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration." This latter article reveals that the feature's main sponsor is BAE Systems , "[t]he British contractor, whose U.S. subsidiary is one of the largest suppliers to the Department of Defense, [and who] depends — like many other defense contractors — on the low-overhead labor of prisoners incarcerated at for-profit facilities." Now, I have no issue with BAE Systems' sponsoring a Sesame Street feature that is directed toward children who have a parent in prison, but the article reminded me of how huge our prison-industrial complex is and how much money corporations such as BAE Systems can make by hiring poorly paid prison labor. For-profit prison corporations have increased exponentially over the last ten years (See Appendix Table 2 in the Bureau of Justice Statistics' report of December 2011). These for-profit prison corporations lobby against reducing penalties in order to keep their prisons full and profitable (See "War on Drugs: How Private Prisons are Using the Drug War to Generate More Inmates"). It doesn't take too great a leap to see how for-profit prison corporations and corporations looking for cheap labor might have some common goals, however unacknowledged and disputed.
Since reading about black prison labor in the South in the early twentieth century, described so thoroughly in Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name, I have been particularly interested in this issue of prison labor and its opportunities for corruption.
Under Jim Crow laws in the South, black men could be arrested for a number of reasons, for behavior that today we are appalled (one hopes) was ever considered criminal in this United States. Among these was the law against "vagrancy," a law so "vaguely defin[ed] ... that virtually any freed slave not under protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime" (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 53). At the close of the Civil War, Mississippi immediately passed a law requiring African Americans "to enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest." Other states began to pass similar laws. African Americans in the South were not free to seek employment wherever they wished, whenever they wished. They could not leave employment without permission from their employer. If they were caught without a signed discharge paper, they could be arrested.
And they were arrested. No black man walking alone without employment papers was beyond fear of being arrested, imprisoned, and fined for any number of reasons, fines that enriched local law enforcement and prevented prisoners from being released to freedom--because they were unable to pay the fines. Then local sheriffs began loaning prisoners to mining companies or brick-making companies or turpentine camps, where the living conditions were abysmal, even though on paper companies were required to provide the prisoners with adequate food, clothing, and living quarters. For instance:
In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed. (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 57).Many whites profited from black prison labor: local law enforcement receiving payment for the loans of prisoners, companies that profited hugely by having virtually free labor, and Southern families whose names are still among those of the elite. For example, the success of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was due largely to prison labor. In 1907, that company was acquired by U. S. Steel, whose founding chairman, Elbert H. Gary, was "quoted as saying he was outraged when he learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using slave labor" (Blackmon, p. 335). Gary thought to abolish such slave labor, but for four more years, deep in the mines of Alabama, slave labor for U. S. Steel continued:
[I]n correspondence between company executives and state officials, U. S. Steel made it clear that despite the chairman's discomfort with the system, it realized the benefits of a captive labor workforce, particularly in thwarting efforts to unionize local labor. It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control. (Blackmon, p. 336).Joel Hurt, the very successful Atlanta businessman, well-known even today for his "signature developments" in Atlanta, such as the High Victorian Inman Park and Druid Hills and the firm he hired to complete these developments, the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, greatly profited from forced prison labor. Finally, public outrage over the horrible conditions in Hurt's brick-making business, Chattahoochee Brick, caused the all-white Georgia electorate to abolish the prison labor system in 1908. Other Southern states followed suit. However, across the South, the prison labor system was just too profitable and resisted consistent and continued reform; it was revived by law again or morphed into the chain gang. In 1928, "the fee system and its profit motivation to encourage sheriffs to make as many arrests as possible remained in force" (Blackmon, p. 367). In Alabama, one state prison inspector wrote, "'Our jails are money-making machines,'"(Blackmon, p. 367). The profitability of prison labor and the occasions of prisoners arrested on the most trivial of charges to supply a labor need is clearly supported by records of the times:
Two Mississippi sheriffs reported making between $20,000 and $30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring black laborers and selling them to local planters. After a plea for more cotton pickers in August 1932 [the year my father was born], police in Macon, Georgia, scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy" charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a similar roundup in the cotton town of Helena, Arkansas. (Blackmon, p. 377)It wasn't until the onset of World War II that the federal government made a really concerted effort to abolish the corrupt prison labor system in the South. Efforts had been made in the past, laws instituted, but the recalcitrance of Southern states stymied any real reform. After Pearl Harbor, the federal government was gearing up for mass mobilization of its citizens to the armed forces, and President Roosevelt "instinctively knew the second-class citizenship and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited by the enemies of the United States" (Blackmon, p. 377). From Georgia and Alabama to Texas, the full weight of the federal government descended upon individuals and companies that profited from what the government finally officially called "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."
It took almost 100 years after the Civil War for African Americans to be free of involuntary servitude, of "slavery by another name," despite the fact that over those years efforts were made again and again to reform the prison labor system. The history of that system makes me wary of our prison labor system today, from which companies such as Lockheed Martin profit. Law enforcement, too, has profited from our prison-industrial complex which has expanded exponentially since the onset of the so-called "War on Drugs."
The War on Drugs introduced new disparities between the arrests of whites and blacks and other minorities. Over the years, studies showed again and again that African Americans and other minorities used crack cocaine more than whites, and whites used powder cocaine more than African Americans. In the 1980s, "federal penalties for crack were 100 times harsher than those for powder cocaine, with African Americans disproportionately sentenced to much lengthier terms" ("Race and the Drug War, www.drugpolicy.org). As the ACLU reports, "[o]n average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses." In 2010, the so-called Fairness in Sentencing Act reduced the ratio of crack cocaine penalties versus powder cocaine penalties--18:1.
Over the years, there was no lack of information concerning these disparities in arrests and incarceration. In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U. S. Department of Justice published a report that found a clear racial disparity in drug arrests:
Annually, the FBI compiles statistics on persons arrested for 'drug abuse violations,' a category consisting both of drug selling and drug possession,. To learn how many arrests there were for drug abuse violations, specially tabulated data were obtained from the FBI covering the three-year period 1991 to 1993. An annual average was then taken based on the three years. Based on these arrest records, blacks constituted an average of 40% of persons arrested nationwide per year for drug abuse violations. [my emphasis] (Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D., "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests," Bureau of Justice Statistics, U. S. Department of Justice, 1 October 1995)Compare these statistics of drug arrests (40% African Americans) to the statistics of illicit drug use:
To learn how many people admitted to using selected categories of illicit drugs--drugs that, if possessed, potentially subject the person to risk of arrest--any time during the 12-months prior to their interview, specially tabulated national data were obtained from SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration]. The data consist of annual averages based on three years of surveying households (1991-1993) [including college dormitories and homeless shelters]. These self-reports show that blacks constitute 13% of persons who admitted using (and therefore possessing) illicit drugs each year. [my emphasis] (Langan, "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests, 1995)Eighteen years after Langan's Bureau of Drug Statistics report on racial disparity in drug arrests, the ACLU has published a report, titled "The War on Marijuana in Black in White," in which it claims that "a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates." In 2009, Human Rights Watch released a report that concluded that "adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007." In 2011, the U. S. Department of Justice released these statistics f0r 2010: 678 white people were incarcerated for every 100,000 U.S. residents; 4, 347 Blacks were incarcerated for every 100,000 U. S. residents ("Correctional Populations in the United States, 2010.") The Bureau of Justice Statistics "now estimates that one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime."
According to The Sentencing Project, "[m]ore than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color. ("Racial Disparity," The Sentencing Project)
These disparities in incarceration rates of blacks and other minorities and whites indicate a real lack of justice in our justice system. Michelle Alexander connects the dots for us in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This mass incarceration of African Americans is another way of controlling Black Americans, much as the old Jim Crow laws did in the years following the Civil War and into the twentieth century. People incarcerated for a felony (such as marijuana possession) leave prison with their opportunities and civil rights vastly curtailed:
[I]n major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, p. 7)Put together the disparity between arrests of blacks and whites in the Drug War, the rise of the prison population (and particularly the minority population) as a result of the Drug War, the rise of private prisons, and the use of prisoners for labor, and you have a recipe for corruption no less worrisome than prison labor during the Jim Crow years.
--------------------------------
Oh, the victims of federally legalized pot, courtesy of Brian McFadden
See also: "Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital, at www.nola.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment