“The stunning return of the prison is not linked to crime… it is not the coming of the exclusive society, or the risk society… it is not the coming of late modernity, or post modernity… it is the remaking of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism or rather, under the press of neoliberalization as a transnational political project entailing the reconfiguration of the triad of market, state and citizenship (which of course starts at different baselines in different countries) has been more or less successful, or more enthusiastically embraced, or more or less successfully resisted, but is present and looming everywhere. The return of the prison is one element in the triple transformational of the state. First - the withdrawal of the economic state. Second - the retraction and recomposition of the social state transformed into a trampoline to insecure employment with a shift from welfare to workfare. Third - the growth and glorification of the penal state. The neoliberal revolution has brought back the prison as a vacuum cleaner of the detritus of the market society, as a disciplinary device to impose insecure work on the precarious factions of the postindustrial proletariat, and as a signifying machine and moral theater to project the fortitude of the ruler and shore up the deficit of legitimacy that politicians suffer everywhere when they abandon the traditional missions of economic and social protections of the state.”

Phew… that was a devil to transcribe. You can read Wacquant’s The penalisation of poverty and the rise of neo-liberalism here and a paper coauthored with Bourdieu entitled Neoliberal Newspeak : Notes on the new planetary Vulgate here.

The perverse functionality of the American penal system has been widely recounted, for which reason the privatization of the prison industry shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The United States spends roughly $70 billion per year on prisons. According to MSNBC, “California now spends more incarcerating 167,000 adults than it does to educate 226,000 students in its 10-campus University of California system.” As Bruce Western and Becky Pettit note in their article Incarceration & social inequality, the penal system functions more as an institution of social stratification rather than as a mechanism for crime control. The U.S. prison population is overwhelmingly male, African American and lacking in a High School diploma. Mass incarceration reproduces these inequalities as the time spent in prison is time outside of the job market, outside of education, and away from family. As prisons are privatized it is inevitable that incarceration rates will continue to climb. How else can surplus value be extracted from the market?

NPR has scanned through hundreds of pages of finance reports and lobbying documents which indicate that the private industry helped to draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070. 

That private industry is working with law makers to pass legislation which protects their bottom lines is hardly a surprise. The United States Supreme Court recently deemed the unlimited donation of corporate money to political campaigns as protected free speech.

By: Will C