The Ideological Origins of the Private Prison System in the United States

As of 2010 the United States has the highest prison population in the world, accounting for a staggering 25% of the world’s prison population while only accounting for 5% of the world’s total population. According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (2010) 2,266,800 prisoners are incarcerated in the United States. While most of this is still in public facilities there is a rapid increase in prison privatisation in the United States. The first private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America established its first prison in Tennessee in 1984—in two decades it generated a 500% increase in profit. So how has it become that corporations in the United States have come to profit from society’s deviants, thus creating a market out of crime? This essay will track the growth of prison privatisation in the United States in order to understand its historical origins in relation to the emergence of modernity. Prison privatisation, although not unique to the modern era, has become a rapid growth industry in the United States because of the proliferation of capitalist ideology—specifically neoliberal capitalist ideology that emerged during the 1980s.

The causal factors of prison privatisation in the United States can be thought of as threefold: economic, social, and ideological. The emergence of a neoliberal economic and political ideology in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, although a response Keynesian economic policies which saw high inflation during the 1970s, has its modern intellectual roots in the Enlightenment (Steger and Roy, 2010). Classical liberalism, the philosophy that serves as neoliberalism's parentage, is deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy; the belief that reason was the foundation of freedom and the all men were born free with natural rights to life, liberty and property (Steger and Roy, 2010; Locke 1967). During the 17th Century, English philosopher John Locke (1967) argued against the insular mercantilist economy of absolutist monarchies, believing that "the reason men enter into society, is the preservation of property; ... there may be laws made and rules set as guard fences to the properties of all ... [and] whenever legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the property of the people ... under arbitrary power, they put themselves in a state of war with the people. (p. 430). Similarly, according to Steger and Roy (2010), Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith argued that the economy claimed "a superior status because it operates best without government interference under a harmonious system of natural laws" (p. 2-3). Smith (1853), extolling the moral superiority of an unregulated market, suggested that with providence "an invisible hand ... make[s] the same distribution of necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among its inhabitants" (p. 264).

The influence of the European Enlightenment can be seen on the ideals of the American Revolution; the people of Britain's American colonies, unrepresented in Parliament, but nevertheless taxed, used this economic and political oppression as motivation to declare themselves independent. Upon severance from Britain, Thomas Paine (1776) declared, "society in every state is a blessing, but government in its best state is but a necessary evil" (p. 1). Therefore, the argument Enlightenment philosophers were making was not merely that an unregulated market was the most efficient in distributing resources, but that it was morally the best form of economy to ensure, as Smith (1937) argues, that "every man ... is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man" (p. 651).

It is these classical liberal ideals that saw resurgence in the 1980s, now what is called neoliberal. Michel Beaud (2001) has argued that it marked an ideological shift that saw a bottom-to-top interventionism that was similar to the responses to the Great Depression. The Great Depression of the 1930s convinced economists such as John Maynard Keynes that the classical liberal "night watchman" government was ineffective to safeguard an economy, and hence citizens, from market failure (Steger and Roy, 2010). Keynes advocated for modest government stimulation, intervention, and regulation, to generate market growth in times of economic crisis. The government stimulus of the American economy by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society saw one of the most economically prosperous and (relatively) egalitarian times in American history. However, from the early 1970s a series of spikes in oil prices caused runaway price inflation; this, combined with rising unemployment was what economists called "stagflation"—the dream of the Keynesian economy was over, and "an entirely new breed of [economic] liberals sought a way forward by reviving the old doctrine of classical liberalism under the novel conditions of globalisation" (Steger and Roy, p. 9). Upon the election of the Reagan administration in 1980, in response to the Keynesian consensus of decades before, change was sought by “global power elites that include managers and executives of large transnational corporations, corporate lobbyists ... state bureaucrats, and politicians” (Steger and Roy, p. 11). Neoliberal policies espoused reduced government spending through the privatisation of public assets as well as control of interest rates through independent central banks.

The late 1970s and 1980s also saw a resurgence of social conservatism as a response to political upheavals of the 1960s in American society. Many advocates of neoliberal economic policy also embraced socially conservative values that emphasised a tough approach to law and order (Steger and Roy, 2010). The increase in privatisation of public assets during the 1980s certainly points to the increase in prison privatisation in the United States. However, this is not the only contributing factor. Richard Nixon, elected to the presidency in 1968, adopted a new strategy in response to 1960s social justice movements such as the Civil Rights movement and the largely student and intellectual orientated neo-Marxist New Left. Nixon’s “southern strategy” was to “criminalize where possible, and demonize where not” (Wood, 2003, p. 22). Republican political strategy counted on closet racism and framing the push for social justice with a class of degenerates associated with crime. Phillip Wood (2003) has pointed out Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murry’s argument of the immorality of the welfare system because of its funding of criminal behavior. Another critical political factor that has contributed to the increasing in American’s prison population is the increased criminalisation as a consequence of the “war on drugs” initiated by Nixon and exacerbated by Reagan in the 1980s (Sinden, 2003; Payan, 2006). The US Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act and the Sentencing Reform Act during 1984 creating a mandatory minimum parole for many drug-related crimes as well as abolishing federal parole. The irony of the war on drugs, as Tony Payan (2006) has pointed out, is that it saw a massive increase in federal spending on drug enforcement, hardly a tenant of neoliberal philosophy. Despite this contradiction in philosophy the neoconservative backlash in the 1980s and its push for a tough stance on crime combined with a neoliberal push for privatisation of public assets, including prisons, inevitably led to a burgeoning prison population that budding corporations sought to capitalise on. This gave rise to the American Prison Industrial Complex—the etymology borrowed from Eisenhower’s 1961 warning of a growing “Military-Industrial Complex”.

The conservative criminal justice policies in the United States in the post-Nixon era to 2000 has seen 650% increase in incarceration rates with a total prison population rise from less than 200,000 in 1968 to 1.3 million in 2000 (Wood, 2003). As a consequence, Byron Price (2006) has argued, demand has consistently outstripped supply, leading to an increase in federal spending on prison construction as well as an inevitable condition of prison overcrowding. Neoconservative criminal justice policy subsequently plays right into the hands of neoliberal economic policy. The core tenants of capitalist production seek to exploit the problem of prison overcrowding: maximise demand, open markets, and private investment. The combination of the poor economic growth of the 1970s and increase in public spending on correctional facilities led to massive fiscal deficits at federal, state, and county levels—conditions ripe for the privatisation of existing prisons as well as the construction of new prisons (Price, 2006). Many deals struck with state governments have a clause to guarantee a maintaining of 90% capacity or the state faces staggering penalty costs, forcing many states to adopt harsh sentencing measures to avoid penalty. The most significant expansion of private prisons began in the mid-1980s when most states nearing their debt limits, combating overcrowding, and contending with constitutional violations opted for the easy solution of selling off their prisons to private interests (Wood, 2003). Punitive justice policies maximise demand for criminals, privatisation allows for an increased market for corrections corporations, and these serve to exponentially create a system of equilibrium whereby private investment in corrections corporations demands a profit, thereby seeking the creation of demand and market share. At face value the economic argument is logical, but even the most ardent capitalist must question the morality of the creation of a demand for crime, because that is exactly what the prison industry requires to make a profit.

Wood (2003) has pointed out that it is not only corrections companies that benefit from privatisation, but construction, architectural, food, health, laundry, waste collection, transportation, and communications companies all benefit, thus are interested in maintaining and expanding private prisons. All these companies, as well as third party investors, have an interest in maintaining this system and the punitive criminal justice system which perpetuates it. As such many companies lobby politicians for privatisation as well as tougher sentencing—thus distorting both the political system as well as the criminal justice system. David Shichor (1995), as well as arguing for fierce individualism and mistrust of government as causal factors in prison privatisation, has also drawn attention to Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant ethic—the idea of religious devotion to work as a strong value within Protestant societies such as the United States. This combined with social Darwinist attitudes to work and social stratification serves as an ideology to justify profiting from others’ deviance and failure to conform to capitalist society. Many private prisons in the United States are located in Southern and Western states and target impoverished communities, incentivised by politicians offering tax breaks and low-paid non-unionised jobs (Sinden, 2003). There has also been criticism of privatisation as serving an inherently racist agenda, some even as far as suggesting prisons and prison labour is a new form of slavery (Wood, 1995). Theoretically, private prisons are exercising what is essentially state power, and therefore it is subject to arbitrary measures, often to maximize profit (Shichor, 1995).

In many societies, with regards to failed social, economic, health, and educational policy, incarceration is regarded as the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff; a reactionary measure to crime to treat its consequences rather than addressing its causes such as poverty, mental illness or lack of education—to capitalise on society’s failures is morally reprehensible. As Shichor (1995) has argued, “private corporations were not established for serving public good; they were established to generate profit for their owners and stock holders” (p. 67). Instead of serving to rectify society’s criminal problems, prison privatisation only serves to aggravate it in concert with a distortion of the criminal justice system. However, the impetus of neoliberalism’s private enterprise is myopic, in the sense that it does not follow any moral intuition in the pursuit of profit—it is blind to all other considerations.

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