Often these point to various light or service industry enterprises utilizing prisoners as a labor force, and sure its bad news. 2 articles in The Atlantic Monthly last year touted a revolving door between private prison industry boardrooms and prison bureaucracy as further evidence not as often sited in the press of the radical left. An interesting aside to this is that the fellow who wrote the articles in The Atlantic actually called the organizers of Critical Resistance: Beyond The Prison Industrial Complex, an important and well attended conference in the Bay area to complain that they stole his term (Prison Industrial Complex).
Anyway, not having read Christian Parenti's new book which I am told deals with this very question I am interested in how people feel abou the term "Prison Industrial Complex."
Clearly it is not a "<bad thing> industrial complex" in the sense that dear old Ike meant when he coined the term "Military Industrial Complex." While some say that it is on its way to that, I think such a development is a long way off to say the least.
It seems to me that much of the material floating around out there about the "Prison Industrial Complex" speaks of the cheap labor of prisoners in one paragraph and then about how it costs more to keep a person in prison than to keep them in yale for the same period. (Hence the subject line, maybe I am on to something).
matt capri