Racism and profit, not crime, drive prison expansion

Evidence

In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term “racial capitalism” to refer to this development and to the subsequent structure as a historical agency. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Prison expansion correlates with falling crime, exposing profit and racism as drivers (similarity 0.87)
• Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned (similarity 0.83)
• Prison reform rhetoric reinforces the prison’s permanence. (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalist expansion pursued racial directions, not the rationalization Marx expected (similarity 0.83)
• Prison expansion undermines democracy and normalizes incarceration for people of color (similarity 0.82)
• Imprisonment converts bodies of color into profit sources that drain public welfare funding (similarity 0.82)
• The prison system is racism’s most reliable institutional refuge. (similarity 0.82)
• The prison boom was a way to concentrate and manage a capitalist human surplus (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones (similarity 0.81)
• Mandatory crack sentencing drove explosive growth in the Black prison population (similarity 0.81)
• Prison growth began when crime rates were already falling (similarity 0.81)
• Marx presupposed a coherent racist and imperial ordering of world capitalism (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalists are opportunistic adapters, not the germ of a new rational order (similarity 0.79)
• Racism supplied non-Black workers a fictive status in place of material well-being. (similarity 0.79)
• Prison is an ordinary life dimension in poor communities of color (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Prisons preserve racist and misogynist practices society has nominally abandoned #corroborates (0.80)
• Capitalist expansion pursued racial directions, not the rationalization Marx expected #complicates (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115