Origin of Everything

(host) Today, the U.S. imprisons and in terms of number of people incarcerated than any other country in the world.

Of approximately ten million people currently incarcerated worldwide, over two million of them are imprisoned in the U.S., with a rate of around 655 people imprisoned for every 100,000 residents.

And this rise in the number of incarcerated Americans also aligns chronologically with another trend in the justice system-- the rise of private prisons.

Many people are wary of the practice of privatizing our penal system because of news stories over the years about corrupt dealings between lawyers, judges, and prison owners and managers who arrange to have people incarcerated in exchange for cash.

But there's also a series of deeper moral and historical questions that stem out of this topic.

And the primary questions are: What is the purpose and function of a prison?

Are they designed to punish, to isolate those who break the law from the rest of the population, or are they actually places where justice, reconciliation and reform can happen?

If prisons are now the responsibility of the state and the private sector, then what responsibility do they have to the populations they house?

And does privatizing them change those responsibilities?

[soft music] Even though private prisons in the U.S. have a relatively short history, with the first modern private prison opening in 1984 in Tennessee, the U.S. penal system's relationship to private money stretches back much further than that because the initial relationship between incarceration and private industry didn't focus on governments paying prison operators to house prisoners.

Rather, it focused on extracting free labor from incarcerated populations.

Up until the 18th century in Western Europe and the U.S., most of the conversations about the role and function of prisons centered heavily on punishment.

Prisoners were to be isolated from the rest of the population for their crimes and were expected to suffer acutely.

Think dungeons, corporal punishment, and executions.

The prisons themselves are more of a way station for the ultimate punishment.

But extracting money from prisoners, either through fines or labor, was also a common practice beginning in the medieval period in Western Europe, then later in the US.

This usually came in the form of debtors' prisons where people unable to pay their bills were held until they could come up with the money or work off their literal debts to society with unpaid labor.

Debtors could, in theory, leave the prisons once the debts had been repaid in full.

But debtors' prisons were slowly abolished until they were closed entirely in the U.S. and Europe in the mid 19th century because they disproportionately targeted the poor.

Meanwhile, the 19th century also saw the emergence of a few key changes in the philosophy and functions of prisons.

First, many prisons became places of long-term captivity, in effect, becoming the primary home of punished populations and not just holding zones until other harsher punishments could be netted out.

The second major shift in the discussion of prison cultures in the 19th century also came in the form of prison reform.

Reform took two major strands-- living conditions and ideologies.

Prison reformers like Dorothea Dix lobbied to improve the living conditions of long-term prisoners, many of whom were mentally ill and abused by the guards tasked with their care.

At the same time, other reformers focused on the mission and purpose of incarceration, claiming that prisons had a moral responsibility to rehabilitate incarcerated people and reintegrate them into society.

Even after the U.S. outlawed debtors' prisons as inhumane in 1833, the relationship between state power, criminal punishment, and money continued throughout the 19th century.

One of the primary vehicles for this was the convict leasing system.

In her book, Professor Mary Ellen Curtin details the rise of the convict leasing system after the Civil War.

The U.S. Southern states found themselves in financial ruin.

There was infrastructural damage caused by the battles, and their economy had been anchored by the practices of legal slavery.

After legal abolition, they looked to other ways to recover financially from the ravages of war, while also severely limiting the legal rights and protections of newly emancipated Black citizens.

As a result, they expanded the convict leasing system.

Under convict leasing, private businesses could lease a prisoner from the state.

In exchange for housing, clothing, and feeding the convict, the contractors, which ranged from big factories to coal mines to private plantations, paid the government a small fee.

Convict leasing effectively reinstated the terms of legal slavery under a different name.

In order to increase their revenues, states began arresting African Americans at increased rates for crimes that were vaguely defined, such as vagrancy or thefts.

And even though some of these crimes were a result of overwhelming poverty and lack of opportunity in the region, many of them were charges that were designed to target poor Black communities and poor white communities, although in smaller numbers overall.

As a result, prisons in Alabama that were primarily housing white prisoners before the war became overwhelmingly filled with poor Black prisoners by the 1870s.

As convict leasing became a source of cheap labor for business owners, and a steady stream of revenue for Southern states determined to rebuild, the system expanded.

Although it was primarily used in Southern states, Northern states weren't entirely opposed to the system since it was financially profitable, even though it effectively reinstated legal slavery.

For prisoners, time spent under the dominion of contractors could be excessively brutal, with sentences often unofficially extended far past when their terms of service were supposed to be over.

Under the guise of building a new South from the ashes of conflict, convict leasing really desired to return to the same South, grounded in the premise of class and racial inequality with a large unpaid workforce underpinning the social structure.

As convict leasing became less common in the early 20th century before ending altogether, it did give way to other forms of profiting off of the labor of convicts, like the chain gangs famously depicted in films and literature.

Professor Angela Davis in her book details the connections between early precedents, like convict leasing, and the rise of what prison abolitionists have termed the "prison-industrial complex" of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The prison-industrial complex is a term to describe the relationship between private industries and incarceration.

Davis points out that at the beginning of her career as a prison-rights advocate and prison abolitionist in the late 1960s, there were close to 200,000 Americans in prison.

By the early 2000s, that number had skyrocketed to 2 million.

In part, it was associated with a domino effect of policy decisions in the latter half of the 20th century that disproportionately targeted vulnerable populations.

So, our social behaviors and shifts in the law created a context in which more people were considered criminals or subject to being held prisoner.

Just like with convict leasing after the Civil War, the government turned to private contractors and business owners to find a place to house a new influx of created criminals.

Beginning in the 1980s, the government looked to private prisons as a potential relief, in addition to building many new publicly run prisons.

These policy changes effectively swelled the number of people considered criminals and saw a huge increase in the number of residents placed in prison.

Individual states from the 1960s through the end of the century began to increase the number of facilities they built.

And starting in the 1980s, the prison population swelled as a result of Reagan-era "War on Drug" policies that targeted nonviolent drug offenders with hefty jail sentences in order to tackle the rising specter of drug addiction in this country.

These same policies were continued through subsequent Republican and Democratic administrations in the 1990s.

As a result, many poor people and people of color began to fill prisons at an increased rate since those populations were also more likely to be surveilled for nonviolent drug offenses.

Additionally, there was a move towards de-institutionalizing psychiatric patients that took place beginning in the 1950s and 1960s.

Many long-term care facilities for people with ongoing mental-health issues up until that point operated largely in the same way as prisons.

Facilities were overcrowded, patients were detained without consent or the ability to leave, and in some cases suffered abuse at the hands of their caregivers.

But as state-funded psychiatric facilities closed, the number of people in need of long-term care essentially shifted into the prison system.

This was in part because many of these newly released patients became homeless and could be picked up for things like squatting or committing petty crimes in order to survive.

When patients suffering from mental-health issues are brought into emergency rooms where they can usually only remain for around 72 hours, there isn't a consistent bridge between emergency care and long-term care, especially because the country as a whole has a limited number of beds in safe psychiatric facilities.

And by some counts, there are approximately twice as many people suffering from mental illness in U.S. prisons than there are in U.S. psychiatric hospitals, even though many medical experts agree there is no positive correlation between mental health and committing violent crimes.

So, private prisons were looked to as a way of cutting the cost of increased incarceration that occurred as a result of major policy shifts.

But it's unclear if private prisons actually serve their intended purpose to save the government money.

However, they do make up a relatively small percentage of the overall number of prisons in the country.

In 2016, privately owned prisons only accounted for about 8.5% of the total prison population according to The Sentencing Project.

Today, we see a return to conversations and debates about the two primary roles of prisons and jails, their ideologies and how those ideologies align with their responsibilities to the incarcerated.

As reports of widespread abuses at public jails like Rikers Island in New York have hit the headlines in the early 2010s, we turn again to why a country with a relatively small percentage of the world's population claims such a large percentage of its incarcerated population.

And these debates have returned in large part to the same terms they were focused on during 19th century reforms.

As prison abolition activists focus on the decline of private and state-run prisons, others have argued that there could be potential ways forward through restorative justice.

Restorative justice advocates are looking to practices that center the wellbeing of both the victim and the accused by seeing if there are ways forward besides incarceration and social isolation.

At the heart of it lies the question: What does it mean to forgive someone for a crime they committed after they have paid what we refer to as the metaphorical "debt to society"?

And can true justice look different than just conviction and incarceration?

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.