One thing that locking up a couple of million people gets you is a chunk of the economy dependent on keeping people locked up.
The American prison system is massive. So massive that its estimated turnover of $74 billion eclipses the GDP of 133 nations.
In many areas—especially areas where other parts of the economy are weak—towns and cities have actively courted the construction of big prison complexes and expansions of local jails, treating the incarceration of thousands of fellow Americans as dependable source of income. Of course, like any other industry, competition for those jobs can be fierce.
County officials across Mississippi are warning of job losses and deep deficits as local jails are being deprived of the state inmates needed to keep them afloat. The culprit, say local officials, is state government and private prisons, which are looking to boost their own revenue as sentencing and drug-policy reforms are sending fewer bodies into the correctional system.
And that’s not even the worst of it. What happens if… if… what happens if we actually lock up fewer people!
As the wave of mass incarceration begins to recede, the Mississippi controversy has local and state officials talking openly about how harmful locking up fewer people up will be for the economy, confirming the suspicions of those who have argued that mass incarceration is not merely a strategy directed at crime prevention. …
“I don’t think it necessarily started out this way, but the inmate population has become the backbone of some of these counties that are involved,” said Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Marshall Fisher as the controversy heated up.
Because… Mississippi. You probably won’t be shocked to find that in a state which has turned locking its citizens up into a revenue source, the rate of incarceration is 50% higher than the national average. Only Louisiana and Oklahoma outpace the Magnolia State when it comes to parking people for profit.
However, this isn’t a problem that’s restricted to Mississippi. In too many places, housing people in intentionally miserable conditions, and using them as everything from assembly line workers to help line operators at rates that would be laughably low in the worst third world economy, has become a major source of revenue.
The workers at these facilities deserve the same protections as workers everywhere. The speculators, not so much. Some parts of the economy, we should be glad to see disappear, and to have officials talking about how “harmful” it would be to lock up fewer of their fellow citizens… maybe they could solve the problem by sitting down in those empty cells.