Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit

Evidence

If we combine Howard’s emphasis on disciplined selfreflection with Bentham’s ideas regarding the technology of internalization designed to make surveillance and discipline the purview of the individual prisoner, we can begin to see how such a conception of the prison had far-reaching implications. The conditions of possibility for this new form of punishment were strongly anchored in a historical era during which the working class needed to be constituted as an army of self-disciplined individuals capable of performing the requisite industrial labor for a developing capitalist system. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Mass incarceration did not lower crime but bred more prisons; Corporate outsourcing destroys communities and produces prison candidates; Racism and profit, not crime, drive prison expansion (+10 more)

Related

• Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. (similarity 0.90)
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.89)
• Prison growth began when crime rates were already falling (similarity 0.86)
• Private prisons require a steady supply of prisoners as raw material. (similarity 0.86)
• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation (similarity 0.85)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus (similarity 0.85)
• Per-inmate fees give private prisons a structural incentive to keep people locked up (similarity 0.84)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself (similarity 0.83)
• Public prisons now function as profit sources nearly as much as private ones do (similarity 0.82)
• Prisons demonstrably fail to reduce the crime rate (similarity 0.81)
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal (similarity 0.81)
• Private prisons profit by keeping inmates incarcerated as long as possible (similarity 0.81)
• Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding (similarity 0.80)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism (similarity 0.79)
• Prisons function as criminal training centers and a just society would not need them (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Per-inmate fees give private prisons a structural incentive to keep people locked up #expands (0.75)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus #expands (0.70)
• Prison disciplined workers for industrial capitalism #expands (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 115
• Racism and profit, not crime, drive prison expansion #expands (0.65)