Public prisons now function as profit sources nearly as much as private ones do

Evidence

Among the many businesses that advertise in the yellow pages on the corrections.com Web site are Archer Daniel Midlands, Nestle Food Service, Ace Hardware, Polaroid, Hewlett-Packard, RJ Reynolds, and the communications companies Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, and Ameritech. One conclusion to be drawn here is that even if private prison companies were prohibited—an unlikely prospect, indeed—the prison industrial complex and its many strategies for profit would remain relatively intact. Private prisons are direct sources of profit for the companies that run them, but public prisons have become so thoroughly saturated with the profit-producing products and services of private corporations that the distinction is not as meaningful as one might suspect. Campaigns against privatization that represent public prisons as an adequate alternative to private prisons can be misleading. It is true that a major reason for the profitability of private prisons consists in the nonunion labor they employ, and this important distinction should be highlighted. Nevertheless, public prisons are now equally tied to the corporate economy and constitute an ever-growing source of capitalist profit. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 265

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier material on how private prison firms profit; here Davis reframes the private/public binary itself. — connects to: Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 234; Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 235; Public prisons are as profit-saturated as private ones.

Related

• Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. (similarity 0.88)
• Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding (similarity 0.86)
• Private prisons require a steady supply of prisoners as raw material. (similarity 0.83)
• Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit (similarity 0.82)
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.81)
• Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation (similarity 0.81)
• Private prisons profit by keeping inmates incarcerated as long as possible (similarity 0.81)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Public prisons are as profit-saturated as private ones. #corroborates (0.90)