> I also wonder what effect this has on the historical and current
> interpretation of unemployment statistics. I assume persons in prison don't
> count, because they aren't looking for work, and of course the people
> employed by prisons do count, and make up an ever-increasing percentage of
> the workforce. So what would the unemployment rate be without this huge
> trend upward in incarceration over the last four decades and has anybody
> written about this? It would obviously be higher, but significantly so?
> And, if so, what does that mean, if anything at all?
I seem to recall reading a study several years ago that concluded the U.S. unemployment rate would be only slightly lower than the rates of major European social democracies like France, thus challenging the common right-wing assumption that high unemployment is the necessary result of generous social welfare programs. I don't know if the authors counted employment associated with mass incarceration, however. Either way, I bet the results still hold in 2007.
> Incidentally, there is no doubt that the "frontlash" theory is correct,
> although I imagine there are other factors at work as well. Prisons and the
> criminal justice system are (1) a tool for warehousing people extraneous to
> capitalist production in order to better control them and keep them
> disorganized and (2) a tool to maintain white supremacy and keep the white
> middle class aligned with the ruling class. "Criminals" did not become a
> class of its own until it no longer became feasible to control "blacks" as a
> class.
I used to buy the whole "prisons are warehouses for people whose labor can't be effectively exploited by the capitalist system" theory, but I'm finding it less convincing. As I understand it, it basically states that prisons are a substitute for genocide: So whereas it used to be acceptable to simply exterminate those who were extraneous to capitalist production (e.g. the American Indian population), since norms have changed we just incarcerate those whose labor can't be effectively exploited (e.g. that of African American men).
The problem I have with this theory is that it fails to explain how African Americans' labor suddenly changed from extremely desirable to extremely undesirable to white capitalists. A few laws get passed giving a little bite to African Americans' formal equality and all the sudden no one wants to hire black people? That sounds unlikely to me given the long and sordid history of the effective exploitation of black labor, but maybe I just fail to appreciate how traumatic the civil rights movement was for the white middle class.
-WD