Punishment is so corporatized that mainstream companies now stake themselves in its perpetuation

Evidence

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 266 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These relationships constitute what we now call a prison industrial complex. The term “prison industrial complex” was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argued, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit. Social historian Mike Davis first used the term in relation to California’s penal system, which, he observed, already had begun in the 1990s to rival agribusiness and land development as a major economic and political force. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 225 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Corporate outsourcing destroys communities and produces prison candidates; Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 235; Punishment’s meaning is fashioned through institutional symbiotic relationships — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 283 (+4 more)

Related

• Corporate profit motives entrench a prison system that would otherwise be obsolete. (similarity 0.88)
• Punishment follows politics, corporate profit, and media, not crime itself (similarity 0.88)
• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges (similarity 0.86)
• Punishment’s meaning is fashioned through institutional symbiotic relationships (similarity 0.85)
• Prisons proliferated while crime rates were falling due to corporate profit (similarity 0.85)
• Per-inmate fees give private prisons a structural incentive to keep people locked up (similarity 0.85)
• Rehabilitation has been displaced by incapacitation as prison’s goal (similarity 0.85)
• The prison industrial complex term contests crime as the root cause of imprisonment (similarity 0.84)
• Private prisons require a steady supply of prisoners as raw material. (similarity 0.83)
• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.83)
• Military and prison industrial complexes are symbiotic, sharing technologies (similarity 0.82)
• Public prisons now function as profit sources nearly as much as private ones do (similarity 0.81)
• The penitentiary was framed as a progressive reform of its era. (similarity 0.81)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus (similarity 0.81)
• Imprisonment became the primary punishment because it suited capitalist bourgeois ideology, not superior merit. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Reform rhetoric bolsters prison permanence and cannot meet corporate-era challenges #corroborates (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 266
• The prison industrial complex term contests crime as the root cause of imprisonment #expands (0.60) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 225
• Subtler punishment masked sovereign power rather than making it more humane #complicates (0.40)