¶ … Nils Christie in his book Crime Control as Industry: Towards Gulags, Western Style, a person has difficulty knowing who are the worst criminals -- the men and women prisoners or the individuals who run the penal industry. The book details how the United States relies on the criminal justice system to enrich business interests by following the model of corporate America. The disciplinary system is supposedly designed to control so-called dangerous populations that challenge the prevailing social order. Yet increasingly, the criminal network is used more to build economic growth for private concerns than to enhance public safety and well-being. This entrepreneurial penal complex will continue to expand exponentially unless stopped by the American public -- a population where the majority of uninformed people wear blinders as to what is occurring in the area of crime prevention.
Relying on his expertise as an economist, Christie explains why private companies are becoming involved in the running of prisons. As with any individual or group that invests in an enterprise, the desire is to make a profit -- and the bigger, the better. In addition, given the way the penal system works today, these investors have an unlimited supply of raw materials -- the prisoners.
On December 31, 2002, there were 2,033,331 people in United States prisons and jails. That consists of a rise of 3.7% for one year, more than twice the growth rate of the previous 12 months. The average annual increase since 1995 has been 3.6%. In fact, based on population, the United States places more people in prison cells than any other country in the industrialized world, except Russia and maybe China. Employment figures are just as outstanding: the prison system employs more people than any Fortune 500 company with the possible exception of General Motors, based on USA Today figures that are already over six years old.
Profits will be the main motive regardless whether a private firm is an outsource of the government, for building the prisons, supplying the equipment or providing the services, or the firm is the actual organization running the institutions. Naturally, rehabilitating the inmates, lowering the crime rate or incarceration time, or reducing the number of prisoners does not rate as a high priority since each of these individuals represent monetary gain.
How much pain should be delivered within a society to those who are labeled as socially deviant? Christie questions. How much punishment should one country met out at risk of becoming a Western Gulag? The answer lies in the individuals who make up the society. "A suitable amount of pain is not a question of utility of crime control, of what works. It is a question of standards based on values. It is a cultural question."
Christie explains there are two ways of approaching this cultural problem. The first is to create penal theories that are based on unquestionable lines of authority. The church, for example, comes from the highest of authorities -- God. However, he warns, the non-utilitarian of this type is only a spokesman for God, exactly the way the utilitarian is for the state. One does not have to go back too far in history -- only to Hitler or Stalin -- to see how the cultural perspective can be gained by the state.
The other alternative is to view the foundations of justice and law as always existing, but where the concrete formulations have to be continually recreated. Justice does not consist of paint-the-number principles to be designed using the methods applied in law or in the social sciences. In contrast, it is based on common knowledge that is converted into legal principles by each generation. In short, the measure of a civilization is the way that it delivers pain to its wrongdoers. The amount of punishment is determined by societal values, a mirror of standards that reign in a culture. Each person must ask him/herself "is this in accordance with my own set of values to live in a state which represents me in this way?" number of other criminologists, researchers and social scientists agree with Christie's conclusions about the prison system and fears of privatization. Over 15 essays in the book Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment discuss the results of the recent "three strikes you are out" and "get tough on crime" campaigns that highlighted the late 1980s and 1990s. They talk of the negative effects on society including the loss of public assistance by drug offenders even after completing incarceration, large
Randall Robinson's book The Debt (2000) about the condition of blacks in America, he states that the United States owes reparations to the descendents of slaves. In The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, written two years later, he moves the emphasis of obligation to other blacks in America. He urgently requests that black leaders and those who have made their way up the socio-economic ladder to work
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