On January 26, 2021, Joe Biden signed an executive order to phase out private prisons by refusing to renew federal contracts with them. This decision is logical, considering that privately owned prisons are rife with abuses. Driven primarily by profit motives, private prisons are uninterested in actually rehabilitating the people locked within their walls. According to a 2016 report from the U.S. Justice Department Inspector General’s office, private prisons had twice as many inmate-on-inmate assaults as public prisons and nearly 40 percent more attacks on guards. Staff frequently have violent altercations with incarcerated people. Facilities are often understaffed and in disrepair. Resources are limited. As prison populations continue to grow due to the crackdown on nonviolent drug-related offenses, overcrowding is a significant issue that leads to squalid conditions and the spread of infectious diseases. Mental health crises abound, partially as a result of social isolation, and are treated with militant force, not compassion. Under the oversight of profit-hungry companies, private prisons serve neither incarcerated individuals nor their employees who are underpaid and overworked.
Furthermore, incarcerated people can legally be coerced into labor under the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This manifests in businesses such as McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Victoria’s Secret outsourcing manufacturing tasks to prisons, where imprisoned people are compensated for their labor with pathetic “wages,” making only pennies on the hour. In America, a country which prides itself on being “the land of the free,” slavery is still legal as long as the laboring people have been convicted of a crime.
Then, consider that two to ten percent of the two million people currently in prison have been wrongfully convicted, according to the Chicago Tribune. And according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, another 50 percent are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes, immigration or drug offenses. It is chilling to imagine how many innocent people are currently being exploited, their bodies contracted out to companies ever-hungry for cheap labor. The legality of prison slavery is a boon to corporations, who can even morally justify this exploitation by labeling all incarcerated people as miscreants and monsters. The collaboration between prison, private industry, and public perception creates horrific abuses and facilitates modern slavery. It is abundantly clear that ending private prisons is in America’s best interest.
Unfortunately, Biden’s executive order does not apply to state and local prisons, nor does it apply to the for-profit facilities in which thousands of immigrants are currently detained. This hardly makes sense, considering that non-federal prisons are fraught with the same problems as federal ones. Just a few weeks ago, a man named Preston Chaney died of COVID-19 in a Houston jail while awaiting trial for stealing food. As U.S. representative Ayanna Pressley pointed out, his ultimate “crime” was simply being poor. This maddening tragedy prompted Pressley to write, “Mass incarceration is a public health crisis,” and I concur. Immigrant detention centers suffer from the same issues as private prisons: negligence, poor conditions, and insufficient resources. Biden isn’t even banning private prisons; just revoking federal support for them. But even if he moved more decisively to end private prisons, it wouldn’t be enough to end the corruption and injustice that incarceration creates.
Our current response to crime is locking people away, placing them under constant surveillance, controlling every aspect of their lives, and socially isolating them. This approach is, unsurprisingly, damaging to mental health. It breaks apart families, weakens social connections, fosters resentment, and makes it incredibly difficult for people to re-enter society. Ex-convicts also face discrimination in the hiring process, meaning they often end up in poverty and in situations where they are more likely to resort to crime for survival. Contrary to popular belief, increased incarceration does not deter crime, nor does it keep society safer. The harmful mental effects of imprisonment make recidivism more likely, as does the stigma placed on anyone who has committed a crime or is thought to have done so.
Recent studies uphold the paradoxical finding that increased incarceration is useless at best and detrimental at worst in curbing crime rates. According to a study from the Vera Institute of Justice, increased incarceration rates do not affect violent crime rates and may even increase them. While harsher sentences and higher incarceration rates have a mild deterrent effect on property crimes, that effect diminishes every year. The United States currently spends a staggering 182 billion dollars a year on mass incarceration, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Are minimal to nonexistent improvements in public safety really worth this exorbitant cost?
Making people suffer for their crimes is a disservice to everyone. Centuries of punitive justice have not significantly improved public safety, and come at an outrageous cost to American taxpayers. It is time we abandon the antiquated institution of incarceration and reinvest in preventative methods, like ending poverty and alleviating the desolate conditions which drive people to crime in the first place. Physical and mental health care must be made free and universal, as well as addiction rehabilitation services. Only through rehabilitative justice and compassion can we truly create a safer society for everyone.
Mass incarceration is irreconcilable with American ideals of liberty and justice. Then again, America rests on land stolen from indigenous people, and to many, the American empire has no credibility or legitimacy at all. However, by practically every metric, America’s current system of incarceration is cruel and unjust. Non-incarcerated people must use their freedom to promote that of other human beings. America cannot be called a free country while the horrific institution of imprisonment exists.