Welcome To The Con-Federate States Of America.
This morning I scanned the goings-on around the world, which these days is not always the best way to start the day. However, I came across a couple of articles buried in the finance pages that really piqued my interest.
The first covered a private prison company, the impressively named GEO Group, which had just announced a record annual profit, up by roughly sevenfold on the previous year!
This stellar increase in their bottom line had absolutely nothing to do with a clever new product launch or the acquisition of a rival organisation; far from it. It was due to their friend and benefactor, Stephen Miller, dishing out new contracts to house immigration detainees.
Another company, Core Civic Inc., a private prison operator and one of the largest for-profit prison and detention contractors in the United States, saw its revenue jump by a staggering $2 billion in just one year, a tidy increase by anyone’s standards.
I should imagine somewhere a group of shareholders was uncorking something French, bubbly and expensive.
It was time to do a little research into the state of America's prisons; what I discovered was that locking people up is indeed an industry, a thriving one at that! This sprawling business empire is run by corporations that generate enormous profit margins, while their workers, and increasingly their detainees, are little more than slaves.
If Abraham Lincoln were still around today, he would no doubt ask why a civil war was fought to abolish slavery. Our answer to him would be that, these days, the same slavery from two centuries ago still exists, only now it’s hidden behind high walls topped with razor wire and a growing archipelago of detention warehouses.
Slavery is indeed alive and well in the land of the brave and the home of the free; it's just diversified, and we have to question the word 'free'.
Imagine this, if you will.
In America, the law states that no goods are allowed into the country if they are perceived to have been manufactured using slave labour or indeed prison labour. A noble sentiment, an admirable and highly ethical standard to uphold, and one that should be applauded. However, as I delved deeper into various articles on America's correctional facilities, I was exposed to a world I had no idea existed.
Western, modern-day slavery.
Recent statistics bear witness to the fact that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other society in history. Forget Stalin. Forget Lenin. They were pussies compared with the policies of our friendly superpower.
The numbers remain jaw-dropping:
White adult men incarcerated: roughly 1 in 430.
Black adult men incarcerated: roughly 1 in 54.
That's a five-to-one disparity! This means that one in five Black men born this century in America is projected to be imprisoned at some point in his life.
Now, add the older demographics and women's institutions (which most articles conveniently omit), and you're still looking at close to 1% of the population in prison at any given moment.
So what does one do with all these people, at huge cost to the American taxpayer? The short answer is that they have to work, and believe you me, they do.
America's federal prison labour scheme, delightfully branded UNICOR or "Factories With Fences" (yup, that’s their snappy tagline), ‘employs’ around 11,500 inmates, who manufacture everything from military combat helmets and body armour to office furniture, paint and clothing, all of which are sold to the government at a tidy profit. Oh, and let’s not forget state-run prison industries that employ tens of thousands more!
Now for the really, really good bit!
Wages.
UNICOR pays its ‘industrial workers’ (read: prisoners) between 23 cents and $1.15 an hour. The most unskilled jobs, such as kitchen hands, cleaning staff, and maintenance, pay as little as 5 to 12 cents an hour, and in five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, and Texas) they are not paid at all!
Granted, the workers receive three meals a day, shelter, and as much sodomy as they can bear, so, by capitalist standards, it remains one of the cheapest labour pools on the planet.
If that wasn't enough to sweeten the deal for these giant companies, all overheads, including housing, feeding, and clothing the workforce, are charged to the taxpayer!
As a champion of democracy and freedom (excuse the pun), the country does not, strictly speaking, compel its convicts to work. Oh, no, that would be undemocratic. Those who decline the privilege are simply confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, with an hour's runaround in a concrete pen the size of half a pickleball court.
This is Democracy, but with an asterisk.
Since I last wrote about this, a twist has crept in: America has quietly, under the direction of Reichsführer Stephen Miller, built a second, parallel prison-labour economy, and the beauty of this one doesn't even require a criminal conviction.
Meet the gigantic government-created monolith that is ICE detention. Roughly 68,000 people are held in immigration detention on any given day, a rise of nearly 75% over the past year. ICE’s budget has increased substantially in recent months, so expect that number to rise significantly. The overwhelming majority of these incarcerated people are held in facilities operated by, you guessed it, GEO Group and CoreCivic.
BOOM!
These are not prisons for people convicted of crimes; detention is meant to be non-punitive administrative holding. What makes it even more remarkable is that detainees are routinely put to work cleaning, cooking, and carrying out maintenance for around a dollar a day, not an hour a day, in facilities where courts have repeatedly ruled that ordinary labour laws simply don't apply to them.
The companies, meanwhile, are having their best year on record. Given the obscene profits they are shovelling into their coffers, there’s no stopping them.
Both GEO Group and Core Civic are opening nine additional detention centres to meet the ever-growing demand. This is the closest thing to a vertically integrated slavery business America has operated since the days of the plantations.
The concept is perfect in its simplicity: arrest, detain, put the detainees to work, bill the government, and repeat.
America's three-strikes laws, meanwhile, remain, though a little chastened. California, the original home of "three strikes and you're out," reformed the law in 2012 so that a third strike carries the automatic 25-years-to-life sentence only if the new offence is serious or violent.
This is progress, of a sort. It means the poor sod who nicks a Hershey bar, gets caught, and has the misfortune of having "priors" is no longer automatically sentenced to a life spent manufacturing office furniture. He'll just have his sentence doubled instead. One hopes he finds that a source of great comfort while chained to a sewing machine.
Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln was a watershed film that touched hearts and made America feel good about itself.
Now, with this resurgence of modern-day slavery made up of half domestic prison economy and half immigration-detention centres, it seems to me there could be a sequel brewing.
Working title: Lincoln II: Terms and Conditions Apply.
Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories, and is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.
