Prison Industry/Prison Industrial Complex

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Connexions Library

Addiction and Control
Skorodin, Morton
Article
2009
Prisons are very profitable. There are private prisons nowadays. The people that own them have, as their mission, first and foremost, the making of money. They need as many people as possible in priso...
Business is Booming for the Prison Profiteers: The GEO Group Cashes In
Kilgore, James
Article
2012
Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut) is hardly a household name, they are a major player in the private corrections sector, combining a self righteous amorality in profiting from human misery with a ruthle...
Can We Talk?: Censorship, Pedophilia, and Panic
Nair, Yasmin
Article
2005
Pederasty and pedophilia have been topics of debate in works about gay and straight history, given long-standing traditions of intergenerational sex between and among men and women. The right uses th...
Color of Violence : The INCITE! Anthology
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (ed.)
Book
2006
An anthology of critical writings demanding that we address violence against women of color in all its forms, including interpersonal violence, such as sexual and domestic violence, and state violence...
Connexions: Volume 7, Number 1 - March 1982
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1982
Convict Labor in America: Book review
Ortiz, Paul
Article
1998
Convict labour, like antebellum slavery, was an American way of life, a cultural practice that tied northern capitalists, plantation owners, university-trained social reformers, federal officials and ...
Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Six-part article
Fitts, Catherine Austin
Article
2006
Inside the Financial World, Government Agencies and their Private Contractors Lies a Hidden System of Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking and Rigged Stock Market Riches.
Dividing the Races to Benefit the Rich: Prison Populism?
Washington, Linn Jr.
Article
2010
Race baiting broadcast agitators like Beck and Rush Limbaugh have their audiences believing the factually flawed foolishness that the reason they are falling behind economically is because the federal...
Drugs, Race & the Gulag Industry: Against The Current vol. 153
Kilgore, James
Article
2011
Across the country corrections department officials and captains of the incarceration industry are in crisis. Though the nation’s over bloated prison system is far from breaking, the halcyon days of p...
End the Prison-Industrial Complex, Now!: A Moral and Political Crime
Urie, Rob
Article
2012
In both political and moral terms, ending this prison industrial complex system is an imperative. As in the 1950s and 1960s, we must organize, mobilize and go into the streets. The existing system is ...
The Fortress Economy: The Economic Role of the U. S. Prison System
Lichtenstein, Alexander C.; Kroll, Michael A.
Book
1990
The economic role of the US Prison System examined.
40 Reasons Our Jails and Prisons Are Full of Black and Poor People: It's Not Just About Crime!
Quigley, Bill
Article
2015
Quigley provides a list of reasons why the majority of prisoners in US jails are Black and poor people.
From Iron Mines to Iron Bars
Garvey, John
Article
2010
Exploring some of the consequences of the long-term decline in union membership and the significant shift in membership towards public sector workers.
Going up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation
Hallinan, Joseph T.
Book
2001
On the prisons in America, their unprofitable nature, and their ineffectiveness. Hallinan also explores the workings of mostly-white towns that host prisons of predominately black inmates.
History is a Weapon: Lockdown America in 22 Minutes
Parenti, Christian
Audio
2001
A talk by Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police And Prisons in the Age of Crisis, about the thirty year explosion in prisons in the United States, at the Stop The ACA(American Correcti...
How Private Prisons Game the Immigration System
Fang, Lee
Article
2013
With huge profits at stake, CCA and the Geo Group are pushing discreetly for enforcement-heavy immigration reform.
How Private Prisons Profit From the Criminalization of Immigrants: Lobbying for Lock-Up
Carlsen, Laura
Article
2012
How a nation uses its power to deny a person’s freedom has always been a critical measure of authoritarian rule. Massive incarceration based on race, ethnic origin or nationality, political beliefs, c...
Lock 'Em Up: The Prison State
Yates, Michael
Article
2010
Without a doubt, most of those enmeshed in the (in)justice system are not dangers to society and would not have been in it at all in a society that wasn't so racist and so shot through with every kind...
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
Parenti, Christian
Book
1999
Why is criminal justice so central to American politics? Lockdown America not only documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the federalization of...
Mass Incarceration: New Jim Crow, Class War, or Both?
Lewis, Nathaniel
Article
2018
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, Lewis analyzes racial and class disparities in incarceration.
Mass Incarceration for Profit
Dolinar, Brian; Kilgore, James
Article
2015
In the face of growing public criticism and improved technologies, companies like Securus search for new ways to remain competitive while marketing themselves as providers of a quality service that ke...
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Alexander, Michelle
Book
2010
Argues that Jim Crow and legal racial segregation have been replaced by mass race-based incarceration as a system of social control.
The New Jim Crow: A talk
Alexander, Michelle
Article
2010
Nothing short of a broad-based social movement can address this problem. Such a movement has to be multi-racial: Latinos and women, especially women of color, are the fastest growing segment of the pr...
A New Way of Life and the New Underground Railroad: Making a Break for Freedom During the Era of Mass Incarceration
Moore-Backman, Chris
Article
2014
This radio documentary is the third segment in Truthout's serialization of Chris Moore-Backman's Bringing Down the New Jim Crow based on Michelle Alexander's book of the same name. The series explores...
Our Generation: Volume 21 Number 2
Roussopoulos, Dimitrios
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1990
The Penal State in an Age of Crisis: Published in Monthly Review Volume 61, Number 2 - June 2009
Holleman, Hannah; McChesney, Robert W.; Foster, John Bellamy; Jonna, R. Jamil
Article
2009
We may be approaching a moment where it will be possible to open up a debate on the obscenity and absurdity of the present order and its punitive social control mechanisms. Smashing the penal state is...
A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America
Drucker, Ernest
Book
2011
Drucker sees prisons as the problem, not the solution.
The Politics of Prisons and Prisoners
Martinot, Steve
Article
2015
They are getting ready to activate another super-max prison. Like Pelican Bay, Marion, and Florence, this prison will be dedicated to holding people in solitary confinement. They say it is for "the wo...
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Schlosser, Eric
Article
1998
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars "the majority of them nonviolent offenders" mean jobs for depressed regio...
Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor
Herivel, Tara; Wright, Paul
Book
2002
Essays on the cruelty and inhumanity of the American prison system.
The Resistable Rise and Predictable Fall of the U.S. Supermax: Published in Monthly Review Volume 61, Number 6 - November 2009
Eisenman, Stephen F.
Article
2009
The modern supermax regime is an aberration in American corrections. Based upon a penitentiary model that was dismissed as unsound more than 150 years ago, it was resurrected in the late 1970s and ’80...
The Return of Commercial Prison Labour
Scherrer, Christoph and Shah, Anil
Article
2017
Prisons are seldom mentioned under the rubric of labour market institutions such as temporary work contracts or collective bargaining agreements. Yet, prisons not only employ labour but also cast a sh...
The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System
Khalek, Rania
Article
2011
The United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners, and for the last 30 years America’s business entrepreneurs have found a lucrative...
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Blackmon, Douglas A.
Book
2008
An account of how African Americans were forcibly enslaved by a corrupt legal system in the southern States, from the end of the Civil War through WWII.
'Worse than Slavery': Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
Oshinsky, David M.
Book
1997
After the abolition of slavery the white rulers of Mississippi developed a new system for keeping the ex-slaves in line: laws were passed to maintain white supremacy, including the system of convict l...

Connexions Directory of Groups & Websites

Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade
COAT is a national network of individuals and organizations in Canada that began in late 1988 to organize opposition to ARMX '89, which was the country's largest weapons bazaar. COAT has continued to ...

Sources Experts & Spokespersons

Sources Library

Inside Halden, the most humane prison in the world
Amelia Gentleman visits Halden, the high-security jail in Norway
Gentleman, Amelia
2012
A look into the flagship prison of Norway, where recidivism after two years is only 20%, and the focus is on rehabilitation rather than punishment.
Privately run prisoner transport company kept detainees schackedl for 18 days
Jan, Tracy
2018
The inhumane treatment of people by a prisoner transport company puts into question the use of privately hired companies, where incentive to pick up as many detainees as possible for financial gain su...