Prisons Are Not Built For Profit

In a startling departure from contemporary left-wing analysis on the American prison system, the Black Myths Podcast, by Black Power Media (BPM), recently released a three-part series perceptively deconstructing the myth that prisons are built for profit. Any American who considers themselves a revolutionary is encouraged to listen to this insightful lecture series.

According to a common abolitionist argument, the imprisonment exception clause in the thirteenth amendment, the war on drugs, and the rise of mass incarceration are all connected in an effort to reconstitute slavery in a new, more disguised form. But as BPM argues, this analysis falls woefully flat against the rocky shores of reality. The following facts will illustrate the problem:

• Private, for-profit prisons are in the considerable minority of prisons, holding only around 7-8% of total inmates (U.S. Department of Justice, 2023).
• About two-thirds of prisoners (comprising 800,000 individuals) have jobs. Of those prisoners, about 80% of their labor is consumed non-productively in the maintenance of the prisons themselves (The Guardian, 2022).
• The annual cost of running prisons is estimated to be about $85 billion — not even including the other costs of policing, the so-called judicial system, or other relatively minor costs (Prison Policy Initiative, 2017). On the other hand, prison labor produces about $11 billion in value, leaving a net deficit of $74 billion (The Guardian).
• Productive prison labor therefore accounts for less than half of a percent of US GDP (gross domestic product).

As the facts clearly show, and as BPM argues, it won’t suffice to explain the policies of mass incarceration on the basis of the profit motive. That’s not to say that the prison industrial complex isn’t real and that no one is profiting from prisons; it’s certainly true that there are individuals profiting and that the costs of the prison system are socialized while their profits are privatized. Furthermore, plenty of third-party contractors earn a profit in the construction of the prisons, the delivery of food, etc. Yet, so far as the motivations behind mass incarceration are concerned, profit only suffices to account for around 7% of the problem. How do we explain the other 93%?

The Real Reasons

Analysis of the prison system needs to account for the fact that this system is a massive expenditure. What motivates our ruling class to spend so much money on prisons? According to BPM, the primary purpose of prisons are: social control, counterinsurgency, and labor discipline. Political prisoners are isolated from their communities, surplus laborers are swept off the street and concentrated out of sight, and the threat of these outcomes keeps the proletariat working diligently. That really is to say that prisons are a tool of the state, which is a body whose function is to repress the working class and prevent them from rising up. 

One can clearly see the primarily punitive purpose of prisons as early as 19th century England, during which prisoners were sentenced to hard labor on devices like the penal treadmill and the crank machine. These devices did not produce anything, they merely forced the prisoner to remain physically active by operating machines designed only to create resistance. At other times and in other places, prisoners have indeed been sentenced to perform actually productive labor, but even in these cases the product was merely a secondary-effect and not the main purpose.

Jumping forward to the mid 20th century, and we start to see policies of mass incarceration and the war on drugs take off in America. John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s assistants, confessed in an interview that the war on drugs was really a war on Black people and the anti-war movement:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

The so-called war on crime in the following decade was similarly deceptive. In the transition from Keynesian welfare-capitalism to neoliberalism, capitalists needed a scapegoat to explain the loss of the social safety net. They chose to blame, in BPM’s words, “unruly blacks,” welfare queens, and rampant crime. As decreasing quality of life and increased radicalism produced social and political crisis, much of the social spending that had been previously going towards welfare and labor benefits was instead transferred to prisons and the police. Any problem – from political dissidents to the unemployed and homeless – would be solved by concentrating them in prisons away from the rest of society. 

BPM expands further on the history of prisons, both at the federal and state level, but the bottom line in their analysis is that prisons are built to punish. Not to rehabilitate, not to produce profit, but to create an atmosphere of terror around those who would consider fighting back or breaking the law.

The Consequences Of Bad Analysis

The unspoken implication of the conventional analysis is that if the American prison system were abolished (or substantively shrunk), then the empire would collapse after losing the core of its industrial foundation. On the contrary: if closing US prisons were to catastrophically  impact the economy, it would more than likely do so on the basis of a flood of surplus labor rather than a deficit of production. This misconception leads to ill conceived strategy and a program that misunderstands the needs of inmates.

Yes indeed: prisoners are underpaid (when paid at all), captive, subject to brutal conditions, and have their civil rights suspended. They are super-exploited. But they’re not slaves – at least, not in the same way slavery had existed in this country. Their very own lives, not to mention the lives of their offspring, are not the property of any other. So far as profit-generating labor is concerned, the work is voluntary and, as underpaid as they are, they are paid a wage nonetheless. According to BPM, conflating prison labor — as oppressive as it is – with the conditions of chattel slavery is an insult to their ancestors who lived through it.

More to the point, the focus on profit as the driving force of the prison system insinuates that if only prisons were nationalized and decommodified, or if prison labor were put to an end, then the prisons would either be fine or would naturally come to an end. By focusing on profit, which only defines a small fraction of the problem, other fundamental issues with incarceration are left ignored and sidelined. Does profit explain solitary confinement, for example? Negative. Moreover, not only do non-profit prisons already exist, but they’re generally no more humane than their for-profit cousins.

Modern Revisionism: Is Slavery Efficient?

A recurring pseudoscientific distortion of capitalist political-economy has been mainstreamed for so long that even many self-professed Marxists take it for granted. This is the idea that the bourgeoisie would prefer slaves over wage-workers, and that slave-labor would be more efficient, productive, and profitable than wage-labor. This is often expressed indirectly in sentiments like “of course the Egyptians were able to build the pyramids [whereas we couldn’t today], they had slaves!” Nothing could be a more harmful distortion of Marxism than the idea that less developed and more barbaric forms of exploitation would be more efficient!

Quite the opposite: it’s not an arbitrary coincidence that the proletariat grew in proportion to the bourgeoisie, and it’s not a simple matter of contingency that capitalism has produced rockets and computers where former modes of production had only produced simple mechanical machines. The comparative freedom of wage labor is not a fetter on production; increased freedom has, on the contrary, yielded the greatest productive gains in history.

So why would the bourgeoisie prefer proletarians over serfs or slaves? Some people mistakenly believe that slave labor is “all profit” since a slave is sold once and for all, and not rented by the hour. Yet, it’s easy to forget that even the slave-master must provide for the subsistence of their slaves. Whether in the form of direct allocation or in the indirect form of a wage, the cost of reproducing and expanding the labor force is a given in any mode of production. Though, of course, a slave-master will certainly provide a lower standard of living than the bourgeoisie could typically get away with, it’s not as though the use of slaves is so much cheaper than the employment of proletarians. 

Furthermore, slaves are vastly more prone to rebellion, and hence slaves are routinely prohibited from education and literacy, two things that are necessary for the industrial laborer to work with modern machinery. If you tried to make a slave operate a tractor or work on a conveyor belt, for example, they would quickly sabotage the equipment. That’s why Marx commented in the first volume of Capital that:

[There is a] principle, universally applied in this [slave-based] method of production, only to employ the rudest and heaviest implements and such as are difficult to damage owing to their sheer clumsiness. In the slave-states bordering on the Gulf of Mexico, down to the date of the civil war, ploughs constructed on old Chinese models, which turned up the soil like a hog or a mole, instead of making furrows, were alone to be found.

Hence the productive output one can expect to extract from a slave is actually substantially lower than for a proletarian. There are numerous other reasons why capitalists prefer wage workers, some of which BPM covers in their podcast; however, I trust that the reasons given are sufficient to at least bring light to the problem.

Just as the prison is an institution not founded for the pursuit of profit, it’s likewise the case that if and when the bourgeois actually does use slave labor — say, for example, in Nazi concentration camps — the purpose of doing so is not to increase productivity. This analytical revisionism also perpetuates historical revisionism: the Union, which was the state of the Northern industrial and merchant capitalists, would not have waged a revolutionary war against Southern slavery if they had really been envious of their slaves. The fact that the North abolished slavery by force should demonstrate unequivocally that the (non-fascist and non-aristocratic) bourgeoisie are not in favor of slavery.