By Michael Ryan
A Nation of Prison Houses (Part 1) – Tallying the Damage Done
If Tsarist Russia was “a prison house of nations,” the modern U.S. might be called “a nation of prison houses.” The explosion in the U.S. prison population has unfolded in lockstep with the neoliberal experiment launched by the Reagan administration in 1979. So disastrous has the situation become that President Obama felt obliged to weigh in in late 2015 and release 6,000 nonviolent drug offenders.[1] Not even a drop in the bucket!
There are numerous ways to parse the numbers and they all add up to a breathtaking disaster. A decade and a half ago, at a time when crime was actually declining in the U.S., the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant reported that “with two million persons behind bars and 740 inmates per 100,000 residents – [the U.S. has] six to twelve times the rate [of incarceration] of other advanced societies.”[2] By 2010, that figure had inched up to 750 per 100,000.[3]
For comparative purposes, in 2010, Germany held 93 per 100,000 citizens in prison.[4] In 2015, “Cuba has 510 per 100,000 people in prison, Russia has 467, and Iran has 290,”[5] and in pure numbers, the U.S. imprisoned 800,000 more people than China, which has a population approximately 1 billion larger than that of the U.S. – and it’s not like China’s known as a soft on crime sort of place.[6]
This is only one way of looking at the numbers. In 2002, Loïc Wacquant reported an increase in the U.S. prison population “from about 380,000 in 1975 to 2 million in 2000 and some 2.4 million [by 2002].” [7] In late December 2014, Chris Hedges reported the slightly lower number of 2.3 million, pointing out, however, that this meant that the U.S. was holding “25 percent of the world’s prison population.”[8] As the Real New Network’s Eddie Conway would put it two weeks later, in early 2015, “this number represents a 500 percent increase over the past 30 years.”[9] The result is that “the United States now boasts an incarceration rate that is six to ten times greater than that of other industrialized nations.”[10]
Nothing in the U.S., however, can be meaningfully analyzed without taking race disparities into consideration. In 2001, Loïc Wacquant wrote, in “1989 … for the first time in national history, African Americans make up a majority of those walking through prison gates every year. Indeed, in four short decades, the ethnic composition of the US inmate population has reversed, turning over from 70 percent white at the mid-century point to nearly 70 percent black and Latino today, although ethnic patterns of criminal activity have not been fundamentally altered during that period.”[11] And this, as he points outs elsewhere, in spite of the fact that black men, the most disproportionately affected “make up only 7% of the country’s male population.”[12]Writing a decade later, Michelle Alexander pointed out that “the United States imprison[ed] a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.” To illustrate, she adds, “In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. Similar rates of incarceration can be found in black communities across America.”[13]
Summing the impact up in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The incarceration rate for black men is somewhere around 4,000 per 100,000. So if you think the incarceration rate for America is bad, for black America it’s somewhere where there is no real historical parallel.”[14] Or, put another way: “In 2014, the Justice Department reported, 6 percent of all black men age 30 to 39 were in prison; the rate was 2 percent for Hispanic men and 1 percent for white men.”[15] In practice this means that “one in every three black men is expected to serve time during their lives.”[16] Of the close to 160,000 prisoners serving life sentences in the U.S. (50,000 with no chance of parole) – those who are least likely to be affected by the current milquetoast proposals for prison reform – 47% are black.[17] This sort of thing can’t help but have a sort of ripple out effect. In a 2015 article entitled “Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the United States,” authors Hedwig Lee, Tyler McCormick, Margaret T. Hicken and Christopher Wildeman tell us, “44% of Black women (and 32% of Black men) but only 12% of White women (and 6% of White men) have a family member imprisoned.”[18] The same year, lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson reported that “one in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.”[19]
As staggering as these numbers are, prisoners only constitute a small percentage of American citizens who are under some form of carceral control. In 2015, Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law reported that “almost 7 million people, or 1 in 35 adults, were under the supervision of adult correctional systems at the end of 2013. This means that 1 in 35 adults were in prison or jail, or on probation or parole supervision in the community,” an increase of “58.6 percent in the last three decades.”[20] Writing that same year, Bryan Stevenson tells us: “There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole.”[21]
But even this only touches the surface. In 2015, James Kilgore shined a light an even more far-reaching form of carceral intervention: “Jails are the local face of mass incarceration. Each year, the nation’s jails record nearly 12 million admissions.”[22] In early 2015, Eddie Conway reported: “There are 750,000 people in county jails, and many of them are there because they can’t pay their way out.” – in short three-quarters of a million people are being held in inadequate, poorly serviced local lockups because they are poor.[23] Providing us with some context, Mike Ludwig writes:
In Alexander City [Alabama], where nearly 30 percent of the city’s 15,000 residents live below the poverty line, people who receive a fine for traffic violations and misdemeanors in court are told by the judge to go to the “back room” behind the judge’s bench. In the back room, which is not open to public, they must pay the fine in full before the end of business hours, or they are booked into the jail located in another part of the same building.[24]
Ludwig illustrates the situation with the example of Amanda Underwood who
returned to court with another traffic ticket in June. She was out of a job and had no money to pay the $230 fine, so she went to jail, where each day spent behind bars earned her $20 toward the fine. She earned an extra $20 each day washing police cars and cleaning cells and a break room used by police officers. She was released after five days.[25]
Once more we find the disturbing race disparity: “In Alexander City … Black people make up about one-third of the population and white people make up about two-thirds, but two-thirds of the people arrested over the past two years were Black, according to data compiled by the SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center].”[26]
In 2013, the U.S. held 231 per 100,000 of its population in jails (down from the 2007 peak of 259). In 2011, $22 billion dollars went into jailing American citizens. Much of the explosion of jailing is based on antisocial laws meant to criminalize poverty:
Rules against selling goods on the street and “aggressive” panhandling have left vulnerable populations with little legal means of generating income. Silicon Valley even passed an ordinance against living in a car, while Las Vegas prohibited sharing food in public, a blow against efforts to feed the hungry by Food Not Bombs.[27]
Once in jail, increasingly prohibitive bail conditions are keeping more people there longer. “In 1990, money bail was being set in 53 percent of felony cases. By 2006, that figure had jumped to 70 percent.”[28] The actual cost of bail has also substantially increased: “According to the Justice Policy Institute, the average bail for a person with a felony charge in a large urban area rose by $30,000 from 1992 to 2006.” Again the race discrepancy is in evidence: “According to a Pre-Trial Institute study, African-Americans’ bail averaged 35 percent higher than whites with similar charges. Latinos’ bail was 15 percent higher.” The degree of this jailing is perhaps best reflected by the fact that the Los Angeles County jail is designed to house 20,000 people. [29]
As the state has increasingly adopted a “street ‘em” model for the treatment of mental illness, jail has become an increasingly popular alternative for housing the mentally ill. “A 2006 report from the Bureau of Justice estimated that 75 percent of women and 63 percent of men in jails suffered from some form of mental illness,” with “less than 20 percent of these people receiv[ing] treatment.” A 2009 study “of 20,000 people in five different jails found 17 percent fell into the category of serious mental illness.” The kicker – “according to a 2009 study by the Treatment Advocacy Center, there is not a single county in the United States where a psychiatric facility holds more people with mental illness than the county jail.”[30]
To add one final layer, let’s look at Americans with criminal and arrest records. Matthew Friedman of the Brennen Center for Justice tells us: “Today, nearly one-third of the adult working age population has a criminal record.” So large is this number, that “the number of Americans with criminal records today is larger than the entire US population in 1900”[31] – which, just for the record, was 76,094,000.[32]
Then there’s arrested Americans. All arrest records are forwarded to the FBI. The FBI now holds arrest records for more than 70 million citizens. If arrested Americans were a nation, they would be the eighteenth largest in the world, and holding hands they could circle the Earth three times. The reality is that “nearly half of black males and almost 40 percent of white males are arrested by the age 23.” In the overall population, this is one in three Americans.[33]
***
How this explosion of Americans under carceral control occurred is no mystery. Beginning with the Reagan presidency, a succession of policies adopted by U.S. administrations has quite intentionally fuelled runaway imprisonment. The cornerstone is undoubtedly Reagan’s 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. The act:
established extremely long mandatory minimum prison terms for low-level drug dealing and possession of crack cocaine. The typical mandatory sentence for a first-time drug offense in federal court is five or ten years. … State legislatures were eager to jump on the “get tough” bandwagon, passing harsh drug laws, as well as “three strikes” laws mandating a life sentence for those convicted of any third offense.[34]
The FBI reports that “more than half of those in prison are there for nonviolent offenses, with a whopping 46.6 percent being drug offenses.” That compared to a combined total aggregate of 10.8 percent for all of “those convicted of homicide, aggravated assault, kidnapping, and sexual crimes.”[35] The result: “There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.”[36] That for the record is an 1100% increase.[37]
The War on Drugs rests on the myth that it targets so-called drug kingpins. The truth is that the majority of arrestees are not charged with a serious offense. In fact, “most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence or significant selling activity.” Fitting the pattern, those arrested on these minor drug charges are disproportionately likely to be black, in spite of the fact that “studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.” To the degree that there is a distinction, it is that “whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in drug dealing than people of color.”[38] But you already knew that from the preponderance of white corner boys on TV, right? Add to that the fact that:
Studies consistently indicate that drug markets, like American society generally, reflect our nation’s racial and socioeconomic boundaries. Whites tend to sell to whites; blacks to blacks. University students tend to sell to each other. Rural whites, for their part, don’t make a special trip to the ‘hood to purchase marijuana. They buy it from somebody down the road. White high school students typically buy drugs from white classmates, friends, or older relatives.[39]
Nonetheless, “black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men. And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records.”[40]
The War on Drugs was supported by the military arming of the police under Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. The arms build-up among state and local police forces in the nineties was truly staggering:
According to the Cato Institute, in 1997 alone, the Pentagon handed over more than 1.2 million pieces of military equipment to local police departments. Similarly, the National Journalreported that between January 1997 and October 1999, the agency handled 3.4 million orders of Pentagon equipment from over eleven thousand domestic police agencies in all fifty states.[41]
There is a tendency to see the Republicans as the tough on crime party in the U.S., with the Democrats cast as a more liberal option, but this is simply not borne out by the facts. For example, in his 1994 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton threw himself behind a “three strikes and your out” law, introducing a $30 billion crime bill that “created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces.” As the Justice Policy Institute has put it: “The Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.”[42]
Those who expected something from Obama would also be sadly disappointed. Rather than begin to dismantle the War on Drugs, as so many of his supporters had anticipated he would, in his Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Obama included $2 billion for local drug squads,[43] something he said was “critical to creating the anti-drug task forces our communities need.”[44]
Some thirty years into the War on Drugs and the concomitant “tough on crime” policies, the U.S. prison system finds itself facing an unprecedented crisis. From 2007 to 2010, the number of prisoners aged sixty-five and older increased ninety-four times faster than the rest of the prison population.[45] From 2009 to 2013, this amounted to a 25% increase in the number of people older than fifty in federal prisons. As Victoria Law reports, “At the end of 2013, aging people comprised 26 percent of those held in minimum-security prisons, 23 percent in low-security prisons, and 33 percent in prison medical centers.”[46] This has created a health care crisis for the prison system, with service increasing becoming both insufficient and costly. A Human Rights Watch report argues that “‘tough on crime’ policies including lengthy mandatory minimum sentences and reduced opportunities for parole mean that many older prisoners will remain locked up even after they become too old and too infirmed to threaten public safety.”[47] A case in point is seventy-year-old John MacKenize, who, on August 4, 2016, hanged himself at the Fishkill Correctional Facility in upstate New York after being denied parole for the tenth time, although he has been eligible since 2000.[48]
***
Unsurprisingly, the rapidly expanding prison population has been accompanied by exploding prison budgets. In 2010, Loïc Wacquant wrote that annual “prison and jail expenditures in America jumped from $7 billion in 1980 to $57 billion in 2000 and exceeded $70 billion in 2007” (the figure is now $80 billion),[49] while annual “criminal justice expenditures grew sevenfold, from $33 billion to $216 billion” – a “budgetary boom of 660 percent.” The rising cost of caging people in the three decades from 1980 to 2010 kept pace with the neoliberal cutbacks initially set in motion by the Reagan administration:
In 1980, the country spent three times as much on its two main assistance programs ($11 billion for Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC] and $10 billion for food stamps) than on corrections ($7 billion). By 1996, when ‘‘welfare reform’’ replaced the right to public assistance by the obligation to accept insecure employment as a condition of support, the carceral budget came to double the sums allocated to either AFDC or food stamps ($54 billion compared to $20 billion and $27 billion, respectively). Similarly, during the 1990s alone, Washington cut funding for public housing by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent)[50] and boosted corrections by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), effectively making the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the poor.[51]
Lauren-Brooke Eisen tells us that “the country’s criminal justice costs – mostly policing, jails, prisons, and courts – rose from $35 billion in 1982 to more than $265 billion in 2012 – a growth of over 650 percent.” As Loïc Wacquant correctly points out: “The so-called ‘prison-industrial complex’, incarceration is not a profitable ‘industry’ for society because its costs are astronomical … and it generates no wealth.”[52] In an October 2015 interview, James Kilgore said:
Keeping people in prison is expensive. The costs vary from state to state – maybe as low as around $20,000 a year to about $60,000, or even more for people with serious medical issues. For $60,000, you can go to Harvard for a year. That’s outrageous, especially since virtually all of that money comes from tax dollars – federal and state income taxes and local property taxes are the major sources.[53]
In an excerpt from his book Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time published that same month, Kilgore separated these costs down into three general categories:
1. Building the infrastructure. Whether in the public or private sector, those who will run the prison must pay architects, engineers, and contractors to design and build the cells, security fences, guard towers, visiting rooms, offices, et cetera.
2. Employing staff. Once the prison is built, the major operating costs for prisons and jails are wages and salaries. These are paid not only to guards but to counselors, case managers, administrators, accountants, maintenance people, cooks, drivers, secretarial staff, doctors, nurses, and a host of other employees. All told, staffing costs generally consume at least half of expenditure on corrections.
3. Supplying goods and services to people in prison. Each prisoner needs food, clothing, water, and medical services. Most prisons also have some kind of recreational equipment, televisions, telephones, and a store where prisoners can buy supplemental food, clothing, and hygiene items.[54]
Breaking this down further, Kilgore tells us that prison construction costs were “an average of $2.8 billion per year from 2001 to 2012,” with a “medium- and high-security prisons the state built at that time
[costing]
around $200 million.” In California, where the costs ran particularly high, the per bed price tag was $92,000, more than three-quarters of the average $115,000 a house in that state was selling for.[55]
The massive expansion of the prison system and the repressive apparatus connected to it has meant skyrocketing employment in the sector. By 2010, Loïc Wacquant could report that the prison system was “the third largest employer in the nation, behind only Manpower Inc.[56] and Wal-Mart, with a monthly payroll of $2.4 billion.”[57] In 2015, Lauren-Brooke Eisen wrote: “A recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that corrections is currently the third-largest category of spending in most states, behind education and health care. In fact, somewhat disconcertingly, 11 states spent more of their general funds on corrections than on higher education in 2013.”[58] Writing in 2015, James Kilgore tells us that “approximately 2.4 million people work in the justice system, about one per prisoner.” This figure includes administrators, office staff, professional services, and support staff, but fully 50% are guards. In 2013, the national average salary of a prison guard was $39,950, ranging from $29,180 in Georgia to more than $100,000 in California, where overtime runs rampant. Guards’ unions play an important role in keeping this gravy train running. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association, for example, has aggressively supported sympathetic political candidates, a case in point being its $2 million donation in 2002 to “tough-on-crime” gubernatorial candidate Gray Davis. [59]
Under the circumstances, the cost of meeting prisoners’ basic needs is, of course, astronomical, and increasingly prisons are simply passing the cost on to the prisoners themselves. James Kilgore tells us that
many state and local corrections departments have begun to operate along business lines, imposing user fees on people behind bars for everything from a booking fee to co-pays for health care to clothing. Some states even impose a charge to people who are put in solitary confinement.[60]
Indeed. Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennen Center for Justice writes, “10 million people owe more than $50 billion in debt resulting from their involvement in the criminal justice system,” the result of directly charging prisoners for “police transport, case filing, felony surcharges, electronic monitoring, drug testing, and sex offender registration.”[61] Perhaps most shockingly, forty-three states charge prisoners room and board, while thirty-five charge for medical care. The latter discourages many prisoners from seeking necessary medical care, often with disastrous results for the individual and, in the case of epidemics, for the entire population of a prison.[62] Thirteen states even charge prisoners for public defenders, with the inevitable result that many poor prisoners simply waive their right to representation – in one poor county in Michigan, for example, 95% of defendants waived their right to representation.[63] Some states have even begun charging prisoners for basic items like shoes, blankets and toilet paper, as well as adding surcharges to necessary purchases. New Jersey, for example, imposes a 10% surcharge on commissary purchases and stamps. In some states, prisoners have to pay for a fifteen-minute deathbed visit with an immediate family member or a fifteen-minute funeral home visit. Costs can run in excess of $900. [64]
This is a situation that continues even after a prisoner is released. James Kilgore tells us that “parole divisions often add a monthly tariff so the former prisoner pays to be supervised, drug tested or placed under house arrest with an electronic monitoring device.”[65] To which Lauren-Brooke Eisen adds: “As more and more counties face strapped budgets, and in an attempt to save taxpayer dollars, private probation companies have profited from requiring probationers to pay out of their own pockets for drug treatment, electronic monitoring, and myriad other services they are required to participate in as a condition of their supervision. Probation fees often run about $80 to $100 a month.” This, of course, presumes nothing beyond the average accumulation of incidental costs and small fees. If an electronic monitoring system is used, the cost can rise to “as much as $300 a month.”[66]
In some cases, state prisons go after a prisoner’s assets directly, targeting prisoners with a net worth of more than $10,000. A case in point is Johnny Melton, a statistic in the War on Drugs. When Melton won a $31,690 settlement in the wrongful death of his mother, “the Illinois Department of Corrections sued Melton and won nearly $20,000 to cover the cost of his ‘care, custody, treatment or rehabilitation’ during his 14 months served at the state’s Logan Correctional Center.” After being paroled in 2015, Melton ended up in a homeless shelter and went on food stamps. Melton died destitute a few months later.[67]
When prison officials reading Melvin Moore’s mail found out he had inherited $14,000 from his grandmother, the State of Illinois sued him for “$338,650 to cover the cost of over two decades in prison.” The court ruled in the state’s favour, obliging Moore to turn over all of the inheritance, except the $4000 protected by law.[68]
Charging prisoners for their stay has class-tiered the prison system in some states. In California for example, people sentenced to jail time on a misdemeanour can pay an upgrade fee to avoid serving their time in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jail – $100 a day in Burbank, $82 a day in Orange County and a whopping $155 a day in Fremont. The Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio “website even provides a phone number for their pay-to-stay coordinator, and also explains that they have contracted with Intellitech Corporation for collection services and inmates will receive a bill upon release from the collections company.”[69]
This
is, of course, only one slippery slope on the hillside of corporate
imprisonment. In a subsequent posting, I will examine a number of other
aspects of the carceral corporatization.
[1] Emily Atkin and Carimah Townes, “Remember When Obama Released 6,000 Federal Prisoners? Here’s How One Is Doing Now,” ThinkProgress, January 19, 2016, accessed at: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/01/19/3736410/obama-prisoner-release-update/
[2] Loïc Wacquant, “Four Strategies To Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment In The United States,” Studies in Political Economy 69, Autumn 2002, 19.
[3] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010), accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[4] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[5] Les Leopold, “Why Does America Have More Prisoners Than Any Police State?” Alternet, October 28, 2015, accessed at: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-does-america-have-more-prisoners-any-police-state?akid=13618.7338.vp6QnR&rd=1&src=newsletter1045000&t=4
[6] Ta-Nehis Coates, “The Clock Didn’t Start With the Riots,” The Atlantic, April 30, 2015, accessed at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins baltimore/391904/
[7] Loïc Wacquant, “Class, race & hyperincarceration in revanchist America,” Dædalus Summer 2010, 75.
[8] Chris Hedges, “The Prison State of America,” Truthdig, December 28, 2014, accessed at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_prison_state_of_america_20141228
[9] Eddie Conway, “Do Prisons and Mass Incarceration Keep Us Safe? (Part 1)” Truthout, January 12, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/28489-do-prisons-and-mass-incarceration-keep-us-safe
[10] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[11] Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh,” Punishment and Society, Vol. 3(1) (2001): 96.
[12] Loïc Wacquant, “The Prison is an Outlaw Institution,” The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 51, No. 1 (February 2012), 4.
[13] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[14] Coates, “The Clock Didn’t Start With the Riots,” accessed at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins baltimore/391904/
[15] Erik Eckholm, “Prison Rate Was Rising Years Before 1994 Law,” New York Times, April 10, 2016, accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/us/prison-rate-was-rising-years-before-1994-law.html?emc=edit_th_20160411&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=73364733&_r=0
[16] Leopold, “Why Does America Have More Prisoners Than Any Police State?” accessed at: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-does-america-have-more-prisoners-any-police-state?akid=13618.7338.vp6QnR&rd=1&src=newsletter1045000&t=4
[17] Kali Holloway, “There Is Talk of Prison Reform, But for the 150,000 People in Jail for Life, There Is No Reform on the Horizon,” Alternet, July 15, 2016, accessed at: http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/there-talk-prison-reform-150000-people-jail-life-there-no-reform-horizon
[18] Hedwig Lee, et al., “Racial Inequalities in Connectedness to Imprisoned Individuals in the United States,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Vol. 12, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 269.
[19] Bryan Stevenson, “The Collateral Damage of Mass Incarceration,” Truthout, April 29, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30487-the-collateral-damage-of-mass-incarceration
[20] Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” Brennen Center for Justice (2015): 2.
[21] Stevenson, “The Collateral Damage of Mass Incarceration,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30487-the-collateral-damage-of-mass-incarceration
[22] Victoria Law, “Understanding Mass Incarceration and Bringing It Down: An Interview With James Kilgore,” Truthout, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33046-understanding-mass-incarceration-and-bringing-it-down-an-interview-with-james-kilgore
[23] Eddie Conway, “Do Prisons and Mass Incarceration Keep Us Safe? (Part Two),” Truthout, January 13, 2015, accessed at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28520-part-two-do-prisons-and-mass-incarceration-keep-us-safe
[24] Mike Ludwig, “Across the South, Many Jails Are Illegal Debtors’ Prisons,” Truthout, September 17, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32832-many-jails-are-illegal-debtors-prisons
[25] Ludwig, “Across the South,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32832-many-jails-are-illegal-debtors-prisons
[26] Ludwig, “Across the South,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32832-many-jails-are-illegal-debtors-prisons
[27] James Kilgore, “Jails: Time to Wake Up to Mass Incarceration in Your Neighborhood,” Truthout, March 4, 2016, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29322-jails-time-to-wake-up-to-mass-incarceration-in-your-neighborhood
[28] Kilgore, “Jails,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29322-jails-time-to-wake-up-to-mass-incarceration-in-your-neighborhood
[29] Kilgore, “Jails,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29322-jails-time-to-wake-up-to-mass-incarceration-in-your-neighborhood
[30] Kilgore, “Jails,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/29322-jails-time-to-wake-up-to-mass-incarceration-in-your-neighborhood
[31] Matthew Friedman, “As Many Americans Have Criminal Records as College Diplomas,” Truthout, November 23, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33758-as-many-americans-have-criminal-records-as-college-diplomas
[32] “Resident Population – Estimates by Age, Sex, and Race: July 1, 1900,” United States Census Bureau, accessed at: http://www.census.gov/popest/data/national/asrh/pre-1980/tables/PE-11-1900.pdf
[33] Friedman, “As Many Americans Have Criminal Records as College Diplomas,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33758-as-many-americans-have-criminal-records-as-college-diplomas
[34] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[35] Lizabeth Paulat, “New Study Confirms Race Plays Role in Sentencing Nonviolent Offenders,” Truthout, March 10, 2016, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35166-new-study-confirms-race-plays-role-in-sentencing-nonviolent-offenders
[36] Stevenson, “The Collateral Damage of Mass Incarceration,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30487-the-collateral-damage-of-mass-incarceration
[37] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[38] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[39] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[40] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[41] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[42] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[43] Angie Drobnic Holan, “Byrne grants get $2 billion from stimulus,” Politifact, April 3, 2009, accessed at: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/promise/224/restore-funding-for-the-byrne-justice-assistance-g/
[44] Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[45] Candace Smith, “Growing Old on the Inside: America’s Aging Prison Population,” Sociology Lens, June 11, 2013, accessed at: http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/06/11/growing-old-on-the-inside-americas-aging-prison-population
[46] Victoria Law, “Aging People in Prison Face Continuing Denial of Compassionate Release,” Truthout, July 26, 2016, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36970-aging-people-in-prison-face-continuing-denial-of-compassionate-release
[47] Smith, “Growing Old on the Inside,” accessed at: http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2013/06/11/growing-old-on-the-inside-americas-aging-prison-population[48] “After Being Denied Parole 10 Times, Elderly Prisoner Allegedly Commits Suicide at Fishkill Prison,” Democracy Now! August 10, 2016, accessed at: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/8/10/after_being_denied_parole_10_times?utm_source=Democracy+Now%21&utm_campaign=ff8e850a39-Daily_Digest&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fa2346a853-ff8e850a39-191727937
[49] Stevenson, “The Collateral Damage of Mass Incarceration,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/30487-the-collateral-damage-of-mass-incarceration
[50] This particular cutback came during the Clinton administration’s tenure, see: Alexander, The New Jim Crow, accessed at: https://peacelawandjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/newjimcrow-ch-1.pdf
[51] Loïc Wacquant, “Class, race & hyperincarceration in revanchist America,” Dædalus, Summer 2010, 76-77.
[52] Wacquant, “The Prison is an Outlaw Institution,” 5.
[53] Law, “Understanding Mass Incarceration and Bringing It Down,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33046-understanding-mass-incarceration-and-bringing-it-down-an-interview-with-james-kilgore
[54] James Kilgore, “Even in GovernmentRun Prisons, the Profiteering off of Human Lives Is Staggering,” Truthout, October 4, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33063-even-in-government-run-prisons-the-profiteering-off-of-human-lives-is-staggering
[55] Kilgore, “Even in GovernmentRun Prisons,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33063-even-in-government-run-prisons-the-profiteering-off-of-human-lives-is-staggering
[56] In 2011, Manpower Inc. changed its name to ManpowerGroup.
[57] Wacquant, “Class, race & hyperincarceration in revanchist America,” Dædalus, Summer 2010, 76.
[58] Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” 1.
[59] Kilgore, “Even in GovernmentRun Prisons,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33063-even-in-government-run-prisons-the-profiteering-off-of-human-lives-is-staggering
[60] James Kilgore, “Private Prisons: Just Bit Players in Mass Incarceration,” Truthout, October 19, 2015, accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33286-private-prisons-just-bit-players-in-mass-incarceration
[61] Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” 1.
[62] Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” 4.
[63] Caitlin Munchick, “The Costs of Incarceration: How Prison Fees Maintain the Social and Economic Order of America,” Counterpunch, July 15, 2016, accessed at: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/15/the-costs-of-incarceration-how-prison-fees-maintain-the-social-and-economic-order-of-america/
[64] Hedges, “The Prison State of America,” accessed at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_prison_state_of_america_20141228
[65] Kilgore, “Private Prisons,” accessed at: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33286-private-prisons-just-bit-players-in-mass-incarceration
[66] Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” 1-2.
[67] Andrew Emett, “Prison Officials Spying on Inmates to Find Net Worth, Suing Anyone Worth Over $10K for Stay in Jail,” Alternet, December 1, 2015, accessed at: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/prison-officials-spying-inmates-find-net-worth-suing-anyone-worth-over-10k-stay?akid=13727.7338.eRPmld&rd=1&src=newsletter1046632&t=22
[68] Emett, “Prison Officials Spying on Inmates to Find Net Worth,” accessed at: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/prison-officials-spying-inmates-find-net-worth-suing-anyone-worth-over-10k-stay?akid=13727.7338.eRPmld&rd=1&src=newsletter1046632&t=22
[69] Eisen, “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration,” 3–4.
