The American justice system is designed to maximize profit and minimize opportunities for rehabilitation. By persecuting low impact crimes in the poorest communities, private prisons have created a market for free labor while removing all opportunities to get out of the ghetto. By prioritizing combat training over deescalation training, police departments have created a culture of violence within the justice system while being effectively immune to any consequences of their violence. Time after time this nation has shown that it will always prioritize short-term profit over human rights and long-term well-being. The prison-industrial complex is the most recent manifestation of the same greed that created slavery and Jim Crow and must be radically challenged in the same way.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits slavery, a fact that every Stevens student surely learned many years ago. However, this simplistic view is not the whole truth. The amendment declares that “Slavery nor involuntary servitude” will exist within the American justice system. Following the traditional narrative, it adds, “except as punishment for a crime.” To many, this is a just qualification. Criminals have wronged our society in some way, so they deserve punishment. Again, on the surface, this makes intuitive sense to most people. It is the same logic behind putting a child in timeout. If a child knows they will be punished for a certain action, they are less likely to take that action. It works for children, so it must work for adults as well. This is the general reason for the nature of prisons in America. It is the timeout from Hell. Instead of being told to sit in the corner, inmates are made to live in a concrete box for extended periods of time. They are forced to use the toilet a few feet from where they sleep, while being “guarded” by sadistic policemen who were in someway unfit to be field officers. In addition to this already nightmarish scenario, inmates are compelled to act as modern slaves. For some reason, minimum wage laws no longer apply to these particular human beings. They can work upwards of 40 hours a week, while making anywhere from $0-$6,000 per year. Prisoners are made to live in dehumanizing conditions while working hard labor for little or no money, simply because they are viewed as morally inferior to the rest of society. This sounds very familiar does it not?
Anyone forced to work against their will is a slave. Morally, slavery is wrong, an idea the nation decided long ago. Yet American economics still relies on this free labor. Many prisons supply the workforce for almost all American-made clothing. It does not matter if these people are criminals, involuntary servitude is wrong as it deprives individuals of their basic rights. This, at the root, is what the American prison system aims to do. In order to force compliance, they strip inmates of their dignity and autonomy. They shame them relentlessly without offering any help to alter the behavior that put them in prison. Once someone gets out of prison, they are shunned from nearly all employment opportunities, so they must turn to crime to survive. They often come out of the institution with some kind of hatred for the society that put them there. Finally, many prisoners spend significant time in solitary confinement or have been subjected to other dehumanizing punishment methods, leaving them desensitized to social interaction and with even less capability to function in society. All rights are stripped from these humans, without a single opportunity to make amends with the world. They pay taxes, yet they cannot vote, they are forced to work for free, and they are treated as animals to teach them a lesson with no moral to it. This is the perfect equation to create a repeat offender. On the day of release, a man leaves the front gates with nothing. He has not seen the outside world in years, and everything seems different. Then he is told to make it work. Of course 77% of released convicts end up back in jail within five years. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, they have no other option.
Criminal justice reform must address human rights issues like these. No human ought to be subject to forced labor, even as a punishment. Prisons should be centers for rehabilitation instead of mental torture. Both of these problems come from private prisons which create extremely harmful conflicts of interest in the justice system. Private prisons hold about 1 in 10 American prisoners, yet they dictate most policy surrounding prisons. Their contracts require that the state keep them filled, meaning police officers must make more arrests despite a general decrease in crime across the nation. The number of inmates they house determines the profits and contracts of these prisons. They have no interest in reducing crime, but rather in increasing it. This is the exact opposite of what a prison should do. Instead of terrible conditions that desensitize criminals and force them to turn to crime so that they may survive prison, prisons ought to hire psychiatrists and social workers so that these disenfranchised members of society may become productive. The investment in private prisons is a short-term thought that prioritizes money over human well-being. By investing in mental health and a safe society, the economy will have more individuals contributing to it, and be boosted. The United States has an incarceration rate that is significantly higher than most other Western societies combined, all to make a few extra bucks.
Ending the profit motive behind suffering is a necessary step to a just prison system, but it does not address the root causes. A key critique of the human-rights-oriented reformist ideology is centered around the fringe, an inherently weak position. Some people will ask about the murderers and pedophiles. Should they be allowed to vote? Should they be treated with decency, even after they showed no decency to their fellow humans? Well, human rights are universal to all beings. They are things that one does not have to earn but instead are inherently possessed. However, these individuals may pose a threat that cannot be effectively managed by rehabilitation and basic satisfaction alone. For them, maybe something similar to the traditional prison is the proper response. Although they should be given dignity and all their basic needs should be satisfied, they should not be allowed to roam the streets among those they threaten. Now that this is out of the way, let us examine the real answer to the questions around murderers and pedophiles. Is it right to take away the rights of an entire population because some of them are a serious threat to the rest of society? A vast majority of prisoners do not fit this description. All violent crimes and sex crimes combined make up about 13% of the U.S. prison population, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). When someone says that prisoners should not be treated as humans because of this small number of people, they are actually silencing the 87% of prisoners who are wrongfully imprisoned but must pay for the crimes of the worst among them. That 87% of inmates, according to the BOP, is almost entirely non-violent drug charges or minor property infractions. The legality of drugs is a topic for another time, but it is morally unquestionable that addicts should be treated as humans as well. They should, just as explained earlier, be given every opportunity to recover and find meaning through contributing to society as a whole.
Peter Kropotkin, a 19th century Russian activist, spent much of his time studying prisons very similar to those of modern America. He concluded that prisons are “universities of crime, mandated by the state.” The justice system should do its best to make this claim false. By investing in rehabilitation, and taking funding away from the institutions which profit from mass incarceration, criminal justice reform can act as a positive first step. The next step, after learning to treat people with decency, is to fundamentally change the way that U.S. courts function. Right now, according to Justice in America and The Appeal, 98% of cases are decided by plea deal. This means that only 2% of cases actually face a jury, only 2% of people are actually given due process, only 2% of people are actually protected under “innocent until proven guilty.” Trials are very expensive, so it is common practice for a prosecutor to offer a defendant a plea deal including a decreased (but not eliminated) sentence. This puts most people in a very difficult position — either risk bankruptcy to defend themselves in a case they may not win, or spend no money with a decreased sentence. This is no real choice for the impoverished who are mostly targeted by drug and property laws.
This piece mainly related to the terrible and unethical circumstances that prisons utilize to maximize profit without helping anyone who passes through the system. I was able to briefly touch on the problems surrounding the proprietorial process and racist/classist laws, but I encourage anyone reading this to do more research. It is a serious problem that affects American democracy. Anyone who supports human rights should be outraged at the way society treats the poorest and most oppressed among us. Most of my knowledge originated from Clint Smith, a Ph.D. candidate specializing in justice reform at Harvard, and his podcast Justice in America, as well as The Appeal, the sponsoring organization.
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