Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition

Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition
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Prison Industrial Complex and Abolition
Buck uses the analogy of a drainage system as a figure of speech to explain how the rich exploited the poor to gain wealth in the colonial era. Just like water is pumped in a drainage system, the elite continues to be wealthy by using the poor based on class system, race, and gender. Buck reflects on capitalism, and white supremacy in Kentucky and West Virginia, in which the rich white people continued being rich. In contrast, the poor white people continued being poor but still had power over enslaved people and the black community. This paper holds that in the contemporary world, the drainage system is still there where the rich benefit from the poor based on class, race, and gender, focusing on the prison industrial complex and abolition.
Prison Industry Complex ( PIC) is a term used to describe the government's and industry's overrunning interest that uses policing, imprisonment, and surveillance as a solution to political, social, and economic problems. In the United States of America, Prisons were established as reform and rehabilitation centers for social vices, a program funded and managed by the state and federal government. With reforms, the state and federal governments mandated the leadership role of some of its prisons to private corporations, which increased the growth of prisons. According to the National Institute of Correction ( NIC), the prison system grew four times higher from the 1920s compared to the last four decades ( National Institute of Correction,2022).
Significantly, these reforms were not oriented to reform and rehabilitation but rather profits and economic benefits. The leadership of the private prisons is politically invested in lobbying for legislation favorable to profit from the privately owned prisons. For instance, California has the highest prison population fueled by economic growth and geographical conditions ( Gilmore,2019). California government deliberately invested in prison, which saw an exponential growth of up to 500% between 1982-2000. According to Gilmore, capitalists saw an opportunity in California in four surplus dimensions; Land, capital, labor, and state capacity. State capacity encouraged private prison ownership while poor people provided work. In return, the California Corrections department employed 54,000 employees, and owners of the land sold at a lower price while they provided labor and growth of the community around the prisons.
According to Scommegna, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with the minority occupying the highest percentage compared to the white population( 2012). Scommegna argues that black people are incarcerated at a rate of 3074 per 10,000, Latinos at 1258 per 100,000, and white people at a rate of 459 per 100,000. This means that white people are most likely to be arrested than white people.
Therefore, mass incarceration in America is fueled by race and capitalism. To make profits, prisons have to arrest people, and black people are a target. Capitalists, through political aliases, lobby for reforms that favor the prison. Most of the people imprisoned are based on ...