Abstract
I am so grateful for Rob Scott’s insightful response. The crisis of mass incarceration is indeed most serious and, thus, I am delighted that Scott has got us all thinking even harder about exactly why the American labor movement must play an active role in ending it.
I agree wholeheartedly with Rob Scott’s powerfully stated point that mass incarceration itself is the problem because it creates severe unemployment and, what he sees as the even more serious ill, “unemployability.” Indeed, notwithstanding what the title assigned to my piece might imply, this was in fact my central point as well. While I think it is important to shine clear light on the ways in which companies have profited from their ability to re-access prison labor after 1979—both by exploiting prisoner workers and, in turn, by undercutting the wages and needed workplace regulations of workers in the free world—the central punch line of my piece is that mass incarceration is the issue, not competition per se. It is mass incarceration that undermines the well-being of the working class both behind and beyond prison walls.
Perhaps, then, it is misleading to use the term “growth” industry when referring to prisons because, as both Rob Scott and I contend, prisons and prison labor in fact only net higher rates of unemployment and, for some, permanent unemployability. And yet, prison populations and prison industries have indeed grown exponentially over the last four decades. Of course, the fact that prison populations and prison industries expanded so dramatically as the twentieth century became the twenty-first, however, was neither natural nor inevitable. Corporations lobbied for that growth— sometimes advocating passage of tougher drug laws and lengthier sentences, and other times insisting on the overhaul of legal barriers to their use of prison labor. In both cases, though, business did this lobbying because a growing carceral state markedly upped their profits. So, again, here is the point: while a few in this nation have profited handsomely from this historically unprecedented expansion of the carceral state, others have paid dearly. Indeed, the fact that prison industry creates and depends upon high rates of exploitation, unemployment, and unemployability does not mean that this industry cannot also grow and profit handsomely. Just think back to Carnegie’s nineteenth-century steel mills.
So while federal prisons do not profit off of a large carceral state to the extent that private companies do, and in some areas of production barely break even, the ability of federal prisons to access the free world market and private companies to access prison labor in new ways both serve to undercut the economic power of the labor movement and the livelihoods of American workers. We must make crystal clear that prisons are exploitative, destructive, and profitable to the few over the many. In my piece, I hope to have shown not only that the incarcerated are rendered permanently unemployable by this system but, as importantly, that any arguments for keeping imprisonment rates high for the sake of creating or maintaining jobs in the carceral sector are deeply flawed. As Rob Scott says, mass incarceration “chiefly manufactures unemployability,” but, meanwhile, companies still profit from it. This is why labor should not only care about the prison industrial complex—it needs to take powerful stands against it. Period.