Prison-industrial complex

The Prison-Industrial Complex

Summarizing the so-called PIC or prison-industrial complex, journalist Eric Schlosser writes, “The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation’s criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass tough-on-crime legislation—combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws—has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties.”

The prison-industrial complex is, in short, the symbiosis of private corporate interests with the administration and bureaucracy of the prison system. Some summarize it as a situation in which public costs support private profits: e.g. politicians may pass legislation giving unjustifiably high prison sentences to low level offenders simply to underwrite the bottom line of a private prison corporation to whom the government has awarded contracts. According to the PMP, the privatization of prisons, a growing phenomenon, can contribute to a moral hazard whereby states can benefit from lower budget outlays at the public cost of an expanding ineffective prison system. The private prison industry is now a $2 billion industry housing about 5% of all inmates currently incarcerated (See Mark Mauer, The Sentencing Project, 25 October 2004).

The Prison Moratorium Project has fought the PIC materially through their campaign against the multinational Sodexho Alliance. The campaign resulted in Sodexho’s divestiture of a 10% stake in a prison industry leader, the Corrections Corporation of America.