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Text Box: Randall G. Shelden University of Nevada-Las Vegas Crime pays - for big business and the "crime control industry"! Actually it is a good thing we have crime and plenty of criminals, otherwise profits would go tumbling and thousands would be jobless! The criminal justice system alone provides a steady supply of career possibilities, as police officers, prison guards, probation officers and many more. Most of these jobs offer not only good starting pay, but excellent benefits and a promise of future wage increases and job security. Many have formed unions, some of which have become stronger than any union heretofore. A multitude of businesses, ranging from small "mom and pop" security businesses to huge corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange, have found it profitable to "invest in crime." We have witnessed in the 20th century the emergence of a "crime control industry." The police, the courts and the prison system have become huge, self-serving and self-perpetuating bureaucracies, which along with corporations, have a vested interest in keeping crime at a certain level. They need victims, they need criminals, even if they have to invent them, as they have throughout the "war on drugs" and "war on gangs"(Baum, 1997; Gordon, 1994; Shelden, et al., 1997). A big part of this complex is the prison industrial complex. A close look at the modern American prison system suggests a form of "Gulag," roughly the equivalent of the Russian Gulag (Christie, 1993; Richards, 1990). Indeed, the American prison system has many of the same characteristics of Gulags. Prisons are literally found in just about every part of the country, with the bulk of them (especially those built during the past 20 years) in rural areas. There is also a great deal of human rights abuses in American prisons (and also jails and juvenile correctional facilities) such as cruel and unusual punishment (e.g., long periods in solitary confinement) and extreme brutality and violence. Moreover, there is much forced (and cheap) labor, much of which produces great profits for corporations (Conquest, 1995; Harris, 1997). The size of this system is so huge that it is almost impossible to estimate the amount of money spent and the profits made. Many observers have suggested that the criminal justice industrial complex has taken over where the "Military Industrial

Text Box: Complex" left off – since we no longer have many external enemies, we must now have internal enemies. The new enemy is crime, especially crimes committed by minorities. The specific focus has been on drug offenses and the behaviors of those identified as "gangs" (the definition of which is racially biased) (Shelden et al., 1997; Klein, 1995). During the past 20 years expenditures on crime control have increased twice as fast as military spending (Donziger, 1996: 85-98; see also Lilly and Knepper, 1993). One can clearly see the size of this complex by first noting the annual expenditures of the three main components of the criminal justice system (or more correctly, the "criminal justice industrial complex"): police, courts, and prisons. Since 1980 these expenditures have increased by more than 200%, with the largest increase being for prisons, an increase of more than 250% (the federal prison system alone went up by over 300% during this time). The most recent estimates indicate that the total expenditures now exceed $100 billion annually. During this period of time annual payrolls went up 142% (up 183% within the federal system), while employment increased by 44% (prisons and jails led the way with an increase of 96%). It now costs about $20,000-40,000 per year to house one inmate in the U.S. prison system (McGarrell and Flanagan, 1986: 2; Maguire and Pastore, 1995: 4; Donziger, 1996: 85). One of the most obvious effects of the "get tough" policies on crime is that African-Americans are finding themselves behind bars in record numbers. For the first time in American history African-Americans constituted the numerical majority of prisons in the early 1990s. This may be mostly the result of the "war on drugs." (Coight, 1998: 2; Proband, 1998a; Proband, 1998b; Gilliard and Beck, 1998). On the other hand, given the fact the drug war has been ongoing for more than a decade, the reason for the increase in the number of African-Americans incarcerated may be more sinister than simply the result of a failing drug war, and questionable racist laws (e.g., crack v. powder cocaine). It may be plausible to argue that the "war on drugs" (and the "war on gangs") has actually been a "success" if the aim was to control the "surplus population," especially African-Americans. The result is clear: institutional segregation or what I would call the new form of "apartheid."(I am calling this the "new" American apartheid to distinguish from another form of "apartheid," namely residential segregation. For

Text Box: The Prison Industrial Complex and the New American Apartheid

Critical Criminologist