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Privatizing Prisons from the USA to SA: Controlling Dangerous Africans across the Atlantic By William G. Martin <wgmartin at prairienet.org> ACAS Bulletin, #59, Winter 2001
The average Black male; Live a third of his life in a jail cell --Dead Prez, Police State, on Let’s Get Free CD
>From SA:
The policeman said to me son They won’t build no schools anymore All they build will be prison, prison --Lucky Dube, Prisoner, on Prisoner CD
Convicted of robbery, the seventeen-year old prisoner was recovering from stomach surgery for a shotgun wound. This didn’t prevent the prison guards from forcing him onto a concrete floor, kneeing him in the back, and watching him writhing in pain—until part of his intestines leaked out his open wound and into his colostomy bag.
South Africa under apartheid? No, a US prison for juvenile offenders under the control of a private corporation, the Wackenhut Corporation headquartered in Miami.
Forced to light by private protests, federal investigations, and court orders, a litany of similar sexual and sadistic abuses has led state governments to terminate contracts with Wackenhut, as well as with its leading competitor in the drive to privatize US prisons, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Local and national student protests against the prison industrial system have publicized these actions; national financial press reports have reported them as well given their impact on corporate profits. 1999 and 2000 were not good years for Wackenhut or CCA.
None of this prevented the South African government, in the midst of its own privatization drive, from signing in August a $250 million deal with Wackenhut for a new prison in Louis Trichardt. Does the South African government know something that the apparently more liberal Louisiana and Texas officials do not? Even more pointedly: is the South African state following far too closely in the footsteps of US state, marking a new phase in US-African relations and US-African policy?
Containing and Criminalizing Africa: Clinton’s Legacy At first glance there seems to be little direct connection between the Wackenhut deal and US policy or corporate movements towards Africa. Most commentary on Clinton policy towards Africa has solidly focused upon the trade vs. aid debate. This is understandable: as during previous administrations, the Clinton years have been marked by declining levels of aid and rising neo-liberal promises of development through increased trade and investment. While tourist trips to Africa by politicians and federal officials have been many, the appearance of Africa in substantive congressional legislation or executive action has largely been limited to one bill: the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, which passed this last year.
As other articles in this special issue reveal, however, US corporations retain strong interests in Africa. Even if these remain largely extractive and commercial interests, rather than new productive investment—as in the removal of oil and natural resources, or the distribution and sale of goods exported to but not produced in Africa, or buying up state enterprises being sold fast and cheap—they nevertheless represent significant profit centers for large and well-connected US corporations.
What even these activities leave unnoticed, however, is how corporate interests are interwoven with a second major theme of US policy towards Africa: the containment of dangerous Africa and Africans. And here Wackenhut’s recently announced deal reveals a new era, where profits from privatization merge with a racially-stratified, global security system.
As departing Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Susan Rice recently put it to the Congressional Black Caucus:
We have consistently articulated two clear policy goals: a) integrating Africa into the global economy through promotion of democracy, economic growth and development, and conflict resolution; and b) combating transnational security threats, including terrorism, crime, narcotics, weapons proliferation, environmental degradation and disease.1
Africa has not often figured upon transnational security threat lists. Words of war and even cruise missiles have, of course, occasionally been launched at Libya and Sudan, but these actions are usually cast within the well-known pattern of official Washington’s fear and loathing of Islamic radicals in the Middle East.
Yet Clinton’s actions have spread farther, including support for North African governments that wage war on Islamic challengers, to the arming of sub-Saharan African armies surrounding the Sudan (an effort that backfired of course as the previously-hailed Renaissance leaders of Uganda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea turned this training and equipment upon other neighboring states). US military training missions have extended as well to friendly armies in West, Central and Southern Africa; here the explicit aim, following the Powell doctrine, is to avoid any possible commitment of US peacekeeping troops (as in past calls of support for efforts in Rwanda, Somalia, Sierra Leone, the D.R. Congo, etc.) while retaining control over any multilateral and especially African peacekeeping efforts.
These same aims and limitations underline the new US-controlled African Crisis Response Initiative and the Department of Defense’s African Center for Strategic Studies war college in Dakar. Equally new and notable are such projects as the FBI’s training of South African police at Quantico, and the establishment by the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of a new International Law Enforcement Academy in Gaborone, Botswana.
As these last examples suggest, something new is afoot: it would be a mistake to focus purely upon military and intelligence work as the only security engagement of the US in Africa. For Africa is increasingly depicted as a direct threat to the people of the United States for non-military reasons: Africa, we are told, is a major source of international crime, narcotics, and disease. And this elicits a security response of a new order.
Americans have been apparently sleeping in the face of this rising threat. Speaking in September 1999 to the well-connected organizers of the National Summit on Africa, Assistant Secretary Rice accordingly asked:
How many of you know that 30 percent of the heroin intercepted at U.S. ports of entry in recent years was seized from African-controlled couriers? How many of you know that Americans lose over $2 Billion a year to African white-collar crime syndicates...?2
Worse of all for most commentators is the AIDS threat, with a constant drumbeat telling us in the United States that all aid and policy towards Africa should center upon AIDS, and the only solution is US drugs, supplied by US multinationals, at prices no African nation can afford much less administer—in which case the US has now offered African governments loans to buy the drugs—increasing Africa’s intolerable debt burden (see Meredeth Turshen’s article in this issue).
Indeed of all the initiatives launched by the Clinton administration the creation of Africa as a direct disease, drug, and terrorist threat to Americans stands out as the most novel, and in all likelihood most lasting, contribution to African policy.
The Prison Industrial Complex: from U.S. to Africa? But what does this have to do with private corporations? Simply put: security and prisons are a big business—and one that draws upon fears of Africa and Black youth. As Bulletin readers are surely aware, instilling fear of crime and criminalizing African-Americans has been an accelerating and profitable feature of the US landscape. By mid-1999 nearly 1.9 million persons, 1 out of every 147 persons in the United States, were in prison,3 with strikingly disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino young men being detained, arrested, and imprisoned. As the Bureau of Justice reports:
Among the almost 1.9 million incarcerated offenders, more than 560,000 were black males between 20 and 39 years old. Overall, black men and women were at least 7 times more likely than whites and 2 times more likely than Hispanics to have been in prison or jail.4
And from imprisonment flows political disfranchisement, for many states permanently withhold the right to vote from all persons with felony convictions: one in fifty adults, 3.9 million people, have lost the right to vote—and over 70 percent of these persons are no longer in prison. African-American men are especially targeted: in nine states, between 25 and 31 percent of African-American men have lost the right to vote for life. Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project estimate that if these trends continue, by the next generation 40 percent of African-American men could be permanently deprived of the right to vote in the fourteen states that disfranchise ex-offenders.5
Wackenhut in Louis Trichardt This became publicly announced on August 11, 2000, when South Africa’s Minister of Correctional Services, Ben Skosana, announced a 1.7 billion Rand ($230 million) deal with US multinational Wackenhut International for the building and management of a new high security prison in Louis Trichardt. With over 3,000 beds, this would be one of Wackenhut’s largest prison operations in the world.
When matched to the ANC government’s commitment to the neo-liberal principle of selling off state enterprises, privatizing prisons becomes a low-cost response to popular demands for attacking the crime problem. Here the drop in the US crime rate has led some South Africans to tout the US imprisonment model. As South Africa’s Mail and Guardian editorialized, The case of the US demonstrates to South Africa that even amid poverty and inequality it is possible to reverse the trend towards greater crime... the propensity of [U.S.] courts to convict and imprison criminals has made a major contribution to the fall in crime.11 Few US observors would draw such conclusions, given the lack of evidence for any correlation between crime and imprisionment, especially for the large number of persons, especially poor and black youth, imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses.
What is Wackenhut International doing in Louis Trichardt? For Wackenhut, the answer making money is obvious. For the South African state, the answer surely lies in privatization and a seemingly no-cost response to popular demands to deal with crime.
Yet this not just a local story, or even the story of one multinational’s expansion into Africa. For Wackenhut’s expansion is part of wider trends: rampant neo-liberalism with the shrinking and shirking of state responsibilities, and the escalating numbers of the poor, and especially black youth, denied education and employment—and all too often being destined for a violent life in prison or the fields of war. This scenario fits all too well the stark, new depiction of Africa and Africans put forward by US politicians and policy makers. Far from being the home of civilization, post-apartheid, post-Cold War Africa is no longer targeted for modernization but rather fear, a source of terror, disease, crime and drugs. This generates in turn a profitable opportunity: the construction of an overlapping set of prisons, detention centers, and security check points. Such is the apparent cost, and profit, of protecting behind fortress walls the rich and predominantly white world, whether it be the Hamptons in New York, the Gold Coast in Chicago, or Sandton in South Africa.
Endnotes and Links * Thanks to Jim Cason and Michael West for comments on an earlier version.