>The increase in incarceration is surely
>going hand in hand with the increase in private
>operation of prisons and use of convict labor by
>corporations.
Not so surely. Private prison construction is a quite small part of overall prison construction and it goes hand in hand with increased incarceration, not the other way 'round. Use of convict labor is also overblown. Here's Christian Parenti on both questions in an interview and essay, both from 1999:
>I'm not arguing that prisons are a profit center. I'm not arguing
>the same thing as manning marable, that prison is hyper-profitable
>and that's why it's being pushed forward. actually, I don't think
>that's the case, I don't think that most prisons are
>profitable.There are 72,000 prisoners working. It's a lower
>percentage of the overall prison population than was working in
>1980. the vast majority of prisoners work for state-owned prison
>industries. the vast majority of those state-owned prison industries
>do not create a surplus for the state or for the prison system. in
>other words they have to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars.the main
>point of prison labor is not extracting wealth; it's about making
>prison look efficient. There are only 2500 prisoners that work for
>private corporations. And it's not for lack of effort. there's been
>enormous effort to try and draw capital into prison, but the thing
>is private corporations don't want to exploit prison labor for a
>number of reasons.one, which we on the left should keep in mind
>there is still a moral stigma attached to using convict labor. two,
>there's so much cheap labor everywhere in the world, including the
>United States, and much of it militarily disciplined, why would you
>ever need prison labor? Third, prison is not just for prisoners, but
>for everyone else there a bureaucratic nightmare. So you can't
>operate a sweatshop with total flexibility inside prison because
>you're going to have prison guards strip-searching your workers,
>shutting down your operations, doing economically irrational stuff
>like not letting people walk across a yard when it's foggy.All of
>these things are keeping private capital out of prison labor. What
>happens too much on the left is that people look for corporate
>smoking guns, as opposed to looking at the class system in general.
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>While private prisons are profitable, they don't lower the cost of
>incarceration for state governments. They merely gouge at the other
>side by taking all amenities and services from prisoners and by
>hiring often incompetent, unqualified guards. The private jailers
>are bad but they only control 5 percent of all prison beds and they
>have not hijacked national corrections policy the way military
>contractors have. Besides they are increasingly unpopular -- even
>with many Republicans. Therefore it seems that private prisons are
>not pushing criminal justice policy in the way that arms
>manufactures do with defense policy.
http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/pareinterwar.html
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=852