Julian Duncan
Opinions Editor
The so-called “War on Drugs” has been a center of controversy in the United States since its inception in the 1980s. The number of Americans incarcerated in 2014 was a staggering 2.4 million, a 500% increase over the last thirty years. To put these numbers into global perspective, the United States, which constitutes about 5% of the world’s total population, hosts about 25% of the world’s total prison population. Many of these prison sentences are for non-violent drug related issues such as possession of marijuana. The sting of irony accompanies these revelations, which hit hard at the core self-identity of a nation that prides itself on bedrock traditions of freedom and opportunity. Yet still more deeply rooted, and fraught with the wounds of history, is the racial divide in America’s prison system. This problem is worsened by the incentives toward harsh punishment created by private, for-profit prisons.
According to a 2013 Pew Research Center study, 45% of Americans said that the country has made “substantial progress” toward racial equality while 49% said that “a lot more” needs to be done. While in many ways racism has been combated in American culture, institutional racism is still largely pervasive. In 2010, black men were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. Furthermore, black men will spend an average of 20% longer behind bars for the same crimes than white men, according to the US Sentencing Commission.
The growing number of private prisons in the United States does little to abate this problem. Rather, this kind of profiteering off of the excesses of the bloated American justice system worsens divides. This is summed up in a 2010 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Comission by the Corrections Corporation of America which stated “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices.”
About 8% of US prisoners are held in private, for-profit prisons owned by corporations such as the Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America. Together, these corporations generate a $3.3 billion dollar revenue annually. Some private prisons maintain contracts with the government requiring a minimum occupancy of 90%. Treating prisoners as commodities in this way provides incentive on the part of the government to lock-up more Americans to line the pocketbooks of corporate prison wardens.
While the debate is ongoing as to whether it is cheaper to use private prisons than public prisons, it is clear that the aim of private prisons is primarily centered around maximizing profits. This means that private prisons make less effort to provide essential services for their inmate population. A study based on Bureau of Justice statistics and published in the Radical Criminology Journal by University of California-Berkley doctoral candidate Christina Petrella looked at private prisons in nine different states and found that they were more likely than to bring in more young, healthy prisoners than public prisons. This results in higher rates of violence and increased recidivism, but also in less expenditure on necessities such as medical care. Services most beneficial to a younger prison population usually aren’t required by law, making younger prisoners cheaper to house than older prisoners who require more expensive care.
These results expose a racial divide between America’s private and public prison systems. In Texas, for example, 69% of private prison inmates are people of color, compared to 57% in public prisons. In California, this ratio is 89% to 76%. According to the study, this is because older prisoners skew more white, while younger prisoners, who are most often found in private prisons, tend to be non-white.
Some of these problems have been met with action in recent years. In 2014, while introducing his “My Brother’s Keeper” project, President Obama called the racial disparity in the US prison system “an outrage.” The year before, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) compared the drug war to the Jim Crow laws of the American South. More substantially, in 2010 Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which sought to lessen the sentencing disparity between the selling and possession of crack, which is used more often by blacks, and powder cocaine, which is used more often by whites. Still, these measures are only small steps. While much work remains to be done to clean up the American justice system and narrow the racial divide which has plagued America for centuries, putting a stop to corporate profiteering through mass incarceration would be a clear move in the right direction.
