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50 pages 1 hour read

Angela Y. Davis

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “The Prison Industrial Complex”

Davis defines the prison industrial complex as the complex and manifold relationships between prisons, corporations, governments, and the media that perpetuate rising incarceration rates. She argues that the dramatic increase in prison populations isn’t due to an exponential increase in crime but rather because prisons are “driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit” (84). Davis describes the enduring connections between the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex, using the “Law Enforcement Technology in the 21st Century” conference as an example. Beyond technology, Davis sees similarities between the prison system’s profits and the military’s profits, which come at the expense of social damage—usually to communities of color. The relationships within the prison industrial complex are so vast, Davis states, that entities who appear far-removed from the justice system are invested in increasing incarceration. A major field that profited from full prisons was medical research, which until 1974 used prisoners for experiments with minimal restrictions.

Davis then notes the social changes in the 1980s that spurred corporate interest in prisons. Deindustrialization—and social welfare cuts—left many people without reliable means of survival. Davis contends that the government and corporations use the prison system to control a growing group of destabilized people. Davis cites statistics from the 2001 US Department of Justice year-end report on the country’s 2,100,146 prisoners. The report shows a staggering increase in prisons and prisoners over the previous decade. Davis argues that this growing body of prisoners provides a “reservoir” of cheap labor for corporations. As prisoners are disproportionately Black and Latino, Davis notes the irony between minorities’ necessity within prisons but their dispensability in the “free world.”

In private prisons, governments pay companies by the body to house inmates, meaning that companies profit by retaining prisoners for as long as possible. Private companies also profit by selling goods for inmates to consume. Davis shares statistics of various states’ public/private prison ratios, using the Texas private prison system to demonstrate how lucrative the business is. A 1997 tape of Brazoria Detention Center—run by Capital Corrections Resources Inc.—showed the public the cruel reality of private prisons, which perpetrate abuse, maltreatment, and intimidation on their prisoners behind closed doors. Davis notes that private prisons have become a global trend.

In a globalized system, the US influences justice in other nations, as is evident particularly in the increase in supermax prisons around the world. Both Turkey and South Africa want to introduce or have successfully introduced supermax prisons, which prominent human rights groups have called unethical and inhumane. As people of color are the largest demographic in US prisons, Davis fears that growing global prison systems will spread racism around the world. Davis asserts that activists of all kinds—antiracist, antisexist, and more—must include prison abolition in their agendas for true progress.

Chapter 5 Analysis

Davis alludes to the prison industrial complex in previous chapters, but here she fully defines the system and how it came to be. Davis states:

The term ‘prison industrial complex’ was introduced by activists to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit (84).

In other words, the prison industrial complex is not just the increased infrastructure of prisons in America but the distorted purpose of prisons that looks away from justice and toward economic profit for corporations—usually at the expense of Black and minority communities. Davis cites concurrent changes in American society that led to the conditions of the prison industrial complex: deindustrialization, welfare “reform” (reduction), the privatization of government entities, and new “draconian sentencing practices” (91). Davis argues that these changes created a “human surplus” under the US capitalist system, as untrained people had fewer job options, had less access to life-saving welfare and healthcare, and were pushed to crimes of survival, like stealing, which became more harshly punished. Davis notes that prisons thus became depositories for this “human surplus” that could control them and use them as labor. The government, prison corporations, and media work together to make crime seem more rampant than it is to justify ever-increasing rates of incarceration. Therefore, Davis cites the lucrative prison industry—and the greed of those invested—as the true cause of rising incarceration. 

Davis compares the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex to show how the two industries profit from community damage. Davis believes that the two industries “mutually support and promote each other” (86) by sharing technologies and structures. She includes an excerpt from the “Law Enforcement Technology in the 21st Century” conference, which shows the direct transfer of military technologies and innovations into police departments, like minicomputers that allow for “speedy booking of prisoners, as well as quick exchanges of information” (88). She cites an article from the Wall Street Journal naming various corporations—like Westinghouse Electric Corp., and Alliant Techsystems Inc.—that evolved from the national defense industry to the “crime fighting” industry because the latter became more lucrative as it grew. The technologies that these industries developed focused on efficiency and high success rates of capture, illustrating how policing evolved into incarcerating as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Both those invested in the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex “generate huge profits from processes of social destruction” (88). Davis asserts that the money spent on these defense and policing technologies “might otherwise be available for social programs such as education, housing, childcare, recreation, and drug programs” (88), showing that these industries don’t really care about improving communities’ safety.

The author returns to the theme of racism and legacies of slavery in her discussion of convict labor. Convict leasing and chain gangs were eradicated—though briefly reintroduced in the 1990s in some states—yet corporations that want to make quick profits still employ convicts to perform cheap, nonunionized labor. As prison populations remain disproportionately Black and Latino, exploitative convict labor practices “are reminiscent of the historical efforts to create a profitable punishment industry based on the new supply of ‘free’ black male laborers in the aftermath of the Civil War” (93-94). Referring to Chapter 2, Davis believes that the rapid switch from predominantly white to predominantly Black prison populations after the Civil War “set the historical stage for the easy acceptance of disproportionately black prison populations today” (94). Corporations that get paid by the number of bodies in their beds therefore benefit from white supremacist beliefs in Black criminality, as the success of racial profiling and strict sentencing directly affects corporate profits.

Davis illustrates how far-reaching the relationships in the prison industrial complex are by listing several nonadjacent industries that have a direct stake in heightened prison use. These corporations include “Archer Daniel Midlands, Nestle Food Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the communications companies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech” (99); these companies profit by either selling their goods to prisons for consumption or using prison labor to make their products. Another field that has historically benefited from prisons is academic and medical research. Davis names one researcher, Dr. Albert Kligman, as her main example of experimentation on prisoners for professional advancement—which was common before 1974 regulations outlawed the practice. Dr. Kligman, a dermatologist, used prisoners in Holmesburg Prison as the “raw material” for his Retin-A experiments in the 1950s and 60s because the prison offered “perfect control conditions” (90) for experimentation. Kligman’s comment upon entering the prison—that he saw only “acres of skin” (90)—demonstrates the dehumanization common in prison experimentation, which denies prisoners their humanity and bodily rights. Davis affirms that corporations like Johnson and Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical continue to “[reap] great material benefits” (90) from this unethical experimentation that left many prisoners injured and/or with physical changes.

To counteract potential fears that the prison industrial complex is too great a hurdle for activists to overcome, Davis includes several examples of successful antiprison activist movements that directly challenged the expansion of prison systems. A protest led by the Prison Moratorium Project and students on 50 university campuses forced Sodexho Marriott—a university caterer—to divest its holdings in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a private prison operator. This example shows how industries that appear distant from the prison system, like catering, are directly invested in its continuation. In another example, Davis describes how prison activists in Australia successfully forced the government to give up its contract with CCA in Melbourne years before the contract was due to expire. These movements show how the abolitionist cause can be fought in small steps by attacking various relationships within the prison industrial complex, as Davis explores more fully in Chapter 6.

Davis shows how the US’s repressive prison system has begun to expand throughout the world, describing how other countries have adopted the US’s prison infrastructure and ideologies. She lists Turkey and South Africa as countries that introduced US-styled supermax prisons into their systems. In Turkey, this announcement met vehement opposition from prisoners who understood that “mistreatment and torture are far more likely in isolation” (101). As a result, 50 prisoners died from starvation during “death fasts” (100-01), and guards killed 30 others in riots. South Africa constructed a supermax-style prison after apartheid, which Davis views as being in direct opposition to a country “that has just recently initiated the project of building a democratic, nonracist, and nonsexist society” (102). As US-style prisons deeply connect to racism and structures of social oppression, Davis views the spread of these prisons worldwide as a simultaneous spread of global racism and inequality.

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