As a community, we are horrified by what ICE is doing: the cruelty, the violence, the sheer barbarism. We are horrified to know that immigrants are being thrown into detention centers with the threat of deportation hanging over them, and daily human rights abuses. With tens of billions of dollars that ICE will have to burn, we can surmise that a lot of corporations are going to make a bundle off of this administration’s obsession with terrorizing, locking up, and deporting immigrants. But how aware are we of the groundwork laid for current actions in our nation’s recent history of mass incarceration?
The United States notoriously has a grotesquely high rate of incarceration, currently ranking fifth in the world for the percentage of the population behind bars. A disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black, brown, and indigenous. We could invest money in communities, ensuring that everyone has a decent home, enough food, healthcare, and a good education. We could enact policies that prevent corporations from profiting off the poor. Instead, we spend billions of dollars locking people up and allow a range of corporations to rake in record profits off of human misery.
Mass incarceration in the United States has been going on for decades. Jail capacity grew by 277% between 1970 and 2017, according to Worth Rises, The Prison Industry: How it Works and Who Profits. Our national obsession with locking people up, often with ridiculously long sentences and often for minor offenses, has laid the groundwork for the increase in detention of immigrants. It has played directly into the massive increase in budget for seizing, detaining, and deporting immigrants. Given a choice between compassion and cruelty, we consistently choose cruelty. But even if the rights of prisoners and detained immigrants do not move people emotionally, the insane amount of money being wasted should.
A decade ago, the total annual budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was less than six billion dollars; now it is $85 billion. We, rightly, direct our anger at CoreCivic and GEO Group for running for-profit detention centers that treat immigrants abysmally. But they are not the only groups profiting off of our system of mass incarceration and detention.
Most of the information in this and my next blog on this topic comes from that recently released book by Bianca Tylek and Worth Rises, The Prison Industry: How it Works and Who Profits. Albeit a painful read, the book is packed with history, statistics, quotes, and anecdotes illustrating how corporations profit from designing and building prisons and detention centers, managing and staffing them, free or extremely low-cost labor within the prisons, providing telephone and financial services, food, healthcare, transportation, and more. Worth Rises is an organization that seeks to stop corporations from profiting off of our criminal legal system, and through advocacy and organization “to protect and return the economic resources extracted from affected communities” (https://worthrises.org/). Imagine that. Instead of plundering communities of color, actually allow and assist them to prosper.
Less than ten percent of prisoners are held in private facilities, but that figure ignores all the other corporations involved in profiting from prisons. The sums spent on various aspects of incarcerating people add up: $4.6 billion spent each year building facilities; $5.8 billion annually to run them, $1.8 billion in commissary sales, $4.1 billion for food services, $1.5 billion for telecom services and $12 billion for health care (half of which goes to private companies), and so on. It’s easy to see why so many corporations are eager to get involved with the prison and detention industry.
Detention of immigrants, meanwhile, is far more privatized than of prisoners. While in 2017, 72% of immigrants in detention were held in private facilities, that number rose to 90% in 2023.
Debra Efroymson
Whenever I visit immigrants in detention at Torrance County Detention Facility (you can read more about my experiences in the above post), we meet them in a room with vending machines along the wall. I can only imagine how much they must crave a snack or drink from those machines. Many of them purchase food from the commissary to supplement the inadequate food they are given. (I’ve heard much louder complaints about the quality of the drinking water than about the food; not to say that the food is good, but that the water is truly appalling.) If they wish to speak to their families, they have to spend money on phone calls. The practice of making people in prison and detention cough up funds for basic services is widespread in the US, if not internationally (there are only two countries in the world that have cash bail). Prisoners can also be charged for probation and parole services, co-pays for health care, and even…get this…for their room and board. There are two obvious sources for funds for those in prison and detention: their own labor, and money sent by their families.
We’ve all been choking on wildfire smoke recently. Firefighters can make $91,000 a year to fight fires; prisoners forced to do so are paid from $2.90 to $5.12 per day in California. Some custodial jobs done by prisoners pay as little as $0.14 an hour, or $221 a year. If that person made $7.25 an hour, they would earn $44,484 in a year, or 52 times as much.
Alabama, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Texas pay nothing for prisoner labor, while others states pay as little as ten cents an hour (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/wage_policies.html). Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi pay nothing for work in facility operations and maintenance. According to one study, not only would paying those incarcerated for their work help with reentry, it would result in net economic benefits of $18.3 billion to $20.3 billion per year.
I will continue in a later blog on this topic. Let me for now reiterate my main points: for far too long we have ignored the horrible and racist consequences of mass incarceration. There has been too little outcry against the policy of locking up people of color for decades (if you wonder how tiny the crime can be to garner decades-long sentences, read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow). And now government has simply extended the concept of “criminal” to include immigrants living here without full permission. We absolutely must abolish ICE and stop the cruel and absurdly expensive detention and deportation of immigrants. But we must also go farther. The question isn’t only “Who will they lock up after the immigrants?” but “Who have they been locking up for decades?” We must identify and counter the corporations that profit off of incarceration so as to reduce and even eliminate financial incentives for mass incarceration and detention. It’s a critical part of the enormous task ahead of us in not only taking back our country, but making it better than it has ever been before.
