America’s Preferred Investment
Most parents have aspirations for their children to receive a traditional education by attending a college university in order to take advantage of the better financial opportunities that America has to offer. The current professional field is becoming significantly more competitive everyday. The advancement of technology and access to information presented to the world has been consistently doubling every couple of years for some time now. The top ten jobs in 2013 did not even exist in 2004. This means that much of the information that the average college student learns in a school year will be mostly outdated two years down the road before many of them even graduate. Consider that rate today. This illustrates how we are currently preparing a vast number of students and interns for jobs that will be outdated by the time they are prepared to put their degree to work. This is an area where adequate investment directly into our education system could easily produce the workforce necessary to handle our ongoing advancements, especially in technology, medicine and science. It also drastically improves the unemployment rate. But unfortunately, those efforts aren’t even close, and it’s showing.
The United States ranks 20th in Educational Attainment, and 11th in Cognitive skills, placing an overall ranking of 14th place in education internationally. It’s estimated that more than two billion dollars is spent each year strictly on students who must repeat a grade, and more than 20% of all Americans read at, or below a fifth-grade level. Could there be a connection to the report that the US Department of Labor estimates that today’s students will have at least 10-14 jobs by the time they are 38 years old? Quite likely.
Now let’s take a look at how this issue proves that the education of our nation’s citizens, is, or is not a priority for the American government. And how we can improve.
The Department of Education itself was officially signed into law as late in American history as 1979, and surprisingly is hands down the smallest Cabinet level department we have. In the year of its inception the department was granted an annual budget of $12 billion. Today it is only six times that amount at nearly $70 billion a year. To put that importance into context, compare that to the other cabinet departments. This may explain why not much has changed in way of learning institutions across the country that still require year-round school fundraisers, education lotteries, and teachers paying for school supplies out of their own pockets. The attention and proper funding needed towards improving staggeringly underperforming schools in America not only seems to not be there, but doesn’t seem to be close to a priority given the available resources. So where is the likeliest destination for such a vast number of citizens who cannot take adequate advantage of the education system?
Enter the prison industry, a construction so profitable and in demand in America that it has long been a hot commodity on the New York Stock Exchange for decades. A simple yet undeniable connection between the two entities of the education system and the Prison Industrial Complex are that the less educated you are, according to statistics and reports, the more prone you are to violence and engaging in criminal activity. Does this mean the most educated among us do not commit crimes at a high rate? Absolutely not. The difference is well-educated tends to come along with being well-financed. And the richer you are, the less likely you are to be incarcerated, especially long term. And seeing as how the less educated and low income population greatly outnumber the more elite educated and high income earners, the question is what to do with so many, for lack of a better term, powerless, segments of the population. There are specific crimes that are responsible for the bulk of today’s overcrowded prison system. These crimes include robbery, assault, murder and drug related offenses. The three major contributors to these crimes have overwhelmingly been poverty, lack of education, and the more controversial and misguided, ‘War on Drugs’. A war that has been waged by our government as early as the presidency of Richard Nixon, to combat drug manufacturers, traffickers and users. A war that has also cost the US taxpayer over 1 trillion dollars over the last 50 plus years with little positive results to show for the financially exorbitant initiative. The institutions still cannot even keep drugs out of the jails and prisons they send the inmates to. And most importantly, it has been a war that has gradually gone from simply an inability to win, to a very lucrative business endeavor. So how does all of this further connect with education?
Today the United States of America has the largest and most efficient prison system in the world, incarcerating more of its citizens than any other country in human history. Yes, human history. To be more precise, we incarcerate a half million more of our own citizens than the entire nation of China, which has a population five times that of the United States.
During this growth, the country’s incarceration system is gradually being taken over from government hands and into the responsibility of private corporations whose only goal is to see a profit. And in this corporate business, there appears to be an urgency to incarcerate more citizens, justified or not.
Ironically, in 2009, during a significant expansion of the prison industry in America, arguably our biggest international ally had a much different take on the issue. That same year the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that private prisons are unconstitutional. Dorit Beinisch, the Supreme Court President wrote, “when the power to incarcerate is transferred to a private corporation whose purpose is making money, the act of depriving a person of liberty loses much of its legitimacy”.
And many organizations here in America are sharing a similar outlook. According to the Progressive Labor Party, “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work, lobby for longer sentences in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself, liking it to that of a Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps”. A key line in that quote is, “Prisons depend on this income”. This is extremely important in understanding what has to occur in order to keep this industry so financially profitable even if less criminal acts are being committed. And here is the best example of this taking place.
In 2012 the Corrections Corporations of America sent a letter to the governors of 48 states offering to buy and operate their jails and prisons. The only catch, the state governments would have to sign a 20-year contract guaranteeing that the prisons are filled no less than 90% for the duration of the contract. And if for some reason this agreement of capacity is not met, the U.S. taxpayer pays for every empty bed up to this 90%. Litigation is also an option if the agreed upon quotas are not met. Amazingly, many of the states housing institutions that make up the private prison industry are even agreeing up to 100% guaranteed occupancy. If it hasn’t been made apparent by now, this is equivalent to predicting crime for profit. And when it doesn’t happen, you incarcerate people who would have otherwise been largely found not guilty had you not had a quota to meet. Also worth noting is an overwhelming majority of the state and federal prisons reside in political red states, adding to the tax revenue of these regions.
What we are seeing is a widespread business model, fully supported by our government, that is taking advantage of the deficiencies in our educational system as opposed to repairing them, while making incredible efforts to target and imprison specific demographics in order to fulfill contractual obligations. And that success is translating into significant influence, particularly in politics. According to the Justice Policy Institute, the private prison population grew significantly from 2002 – 2009, increasing lobbying dollars 165%. A little over a decade later, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, private prisons currently hold 8 percent of the nation's total prison population, including 16 percent of federal prisoners and 7 percent of state prisoners.
This has given these corporations more money to attract the support of politicians and judges to help them expand their businesses further with very little opposition. In summation, imagine your freedom being dependent upon a group of executives meeting their financial bottom line for a fiscal quarter, as opposed to your true guilt or innocence in a court of law. However, as outrageous as that may seem, it also appears that as long as the focus of incarceration is predominantly on marginalized groups of people, the concern is not so high. Fast forward, most of the largest American corporations currently are heavily invested in prison labor, to include IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, AT&T, Revlon, Macy’s, DELL, Hewlett-Packard, and Target stores just to name a few.
The incentive, cheap, highly profitable labor. But just how profitable is prison labor in America? In reality inmates are contracted by some of the largest corporations in the country, while getting paid pennies on the dollar. In most cases this can accumulate to roughly $20 a month.
So how much money can be made if you are the corporation responsible for housing inmates? To give you a better idea of its profit potential, according to Global Research March 2014, former Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged retail giant NIKE to cut ties to its workforce in Indonesia and bring production to his state.
His quote, “There won’t be any transportation costs, we’re offering you competitive prison labor.”
To most U.S. citizens, at first glance this looks like a fair and efficient justice system, when in reality corporate businessmen have figured out a way to work alongside the media, politicians and government officials in order to pass laws that target specific people for imprisonment for profit.
And although these high incarceration rates do ultimately affect some racial groups much more than others in order to continue record profits without significant opposition, many people argue that these statistics could literally happen to anyone. And if that is the case, does that not make this business model of the prison industry even worse? Are we really more comfortable in saying to ourselves that these contracts that are signed by our state governments, ensuring that prisons are to be filled to near capacity regardless if a crime is truly committed or not, makes me feel better because I don’t think it’s about race?
To not challenge the destructive cycle of the prison industrial complex with the level of technology and access to information that we have attained in this country, shows that we truly accept this flawed initiative. What are we truly protecting with these wars we are fighting abroad if the most educated, affluent and influential among us can stand by and watch the very essence of what we are fighting against as a military, play out right in front of their very eyes as members of the public and still remain silent?
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