Jordan wrote:
>Certain industries do, right? Those who build prisons, for instance.
Sure. But the analogy to the military overstates the scale.
>The Wikipedia page is pretty good on this:
That page also has this from Christian Parenti:
"Another writer of the era who covered the expanding prison population and attacked “the prison-industrial complex” was Christian Parenti, who later disavowed the term before the publication of his book, Lockdown America (2000). “How, then, should the left critique the prison buildup?” asked The Nation in 1999. “Not, Parenti stresses, by making slippery usage of concepts like the ‘prison–industrial complex.’ Simply put, the scale of spending on prisons, though growing rapidly, will never match the military budget; nor will prisons produce anywhere near the same ‘technological and industrial spin-off.’"
>I don't think it's significantly the 'labor' part ...
But I think that's the message people get.