At 2.1 million people incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails, the United States continues to hold the world’s highest incarceration rate. This paper will be concerned with the development of America’s prison-industrial complex, which for our purposes we may define as a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that use surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems. By first drawing upon historical analysis of the past in order to explore the prison-industrial complex and the emergence of mass incarceration in the United States, I will then examine the argument made by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and subsequently present examples within the United States via the analysis of American Marxist criminologist Richard Quinney. I will argue that through a Marxist approach to crime that it is centered on the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is possible to explain the exponential growth of America’s incarceration rate in the past four decades. Finally, at its conclusion this paper will present ideas on what it would take to bring down the U.S. incarceration rate.
In order to chronicle the rise of mass incarceration in America, an examination of past government policies is important. Beginning in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, crime rates soared in the United States. This prompted the government to implement a series of “get tough” policies to ease the worries of the American public that continued in the 1980s and into the 1990s. These policies included sentencing laws, mandatory minimums, mandatory drug sentences, life sentence without possibility of parole, and the three-strikes law. For example, Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill implemented policies that enforced mandatory minimum sentencing. Clinton proposed and succeeded in getting Congressional approval for the “three-strikes” statute, which imposed life sentences on persons convicted of three or more violent felonies or serious drug offenses. Not to mention, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) committee members consisting of politicians and corporations, was a driving force in drafting much of legislation. Such legislatively driven policy changes can be said to have driven incarceration growth due to the fact that it is through American public policy that so many Americans are in prison. More importantly, these policies support the Marxist idea that because the capitalists control the political state, they also control the prison system. The system appears to serve the interests of the proletariat, but reality proves that it is actually used against them by the ruling class. As Steven R. Donziger, head of the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons—and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower.” Thus, through a historical analysis of the past, it is possible to show that the Marxist approach to crime is relevant to explain the development of the prison-industrial complex.
From a Marxist point of view, crime is thought of as an adaptation of capitalism. In his work Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970), Althusser adds to Marx’s concept of the State as a “machine” of repression. According to Althusser’s concept of the State, there are two forces/practices of state apparatuses: the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). According to Althusser, every society is made up of ISAs and RSAs, both of which serve instrumental in the spread of the dominant ideology of that given society. As part of Althusser’s theory, the government, police force, and the prison system fall under the RSAs because of their function as a unified force that controls its subjects via direct violence or threat of violence. Furthermore, as defined in Marxist theory, Althusser argues that through the process of interpellation or hailing, the State transforms individuals into subject positions that configure us into people such as criminals and delinquents:
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation…which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’
In the case of the United States, Richard Nixon's war on drugs and Bill Clinton's three-strikes legislation allowed for the “interpellation” of an increasingly large numbers of black Americans to prison. The police force became a state of repression as they arrested people, particularly those of color, for low-level offenses. With this, the war on drugs transformed into a crime issue rather than a health issue. The transition to Reagan’s administration further exacerbated the crime issue when Reagan criminalized the problem of drug abuse into the form of a war on drugs. As a result, crime became a political tool. All of this can be traced to ALEC, the ruling class elite, who used the State as a means of furthering their own Capitalist interest. The State, in turn, employed the police force that served to protect and preserve the Capitalist order.
What follows is that the working-class people sent to prisons become institutionally branded as a particular class of individuals in accordance with the ideology of citizenship taught to us by law enforcement. This means that a prisoner’s criminal record serves as a negative credential representing their place in the stratification order of society. As a result, the state certifies particular individuals, specifically ethnic minority groups, in ways that qualify them for discrimination or social exclusion. In this way, the government and police force are operating in accordance with Althusser’s theory that “every State Apparatus, whether Repressive or Ideological, ‘functions’ both by violence and by ideology, but…the Repressive State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology. By profiling a part of the population and which kinds of behavior to target, laws regulated ethnic minorities, African Americans especially, to permanent second class status. Combined with legislatively driven policy changes such as mandatory sentencing penalties for nonviolent offenders, racial and ethnic minorities became heavily overrepresented in the news and in prisons. In 2004, approximately one-fifth of state prison inmates and one-quarter of federal prisoners were Hispanic while less than half of both state and federal prisoners were African American. As a result, it is this type of criminalization that likely spurred the era of mass incarceration.
Those who disagree with the notion of selective law enforcement may claim that crime exists across all social strata since both the rich and the poor commit crimes. While this is true, Marxists say that the crimes by the ruling class not only go unpunished but also cause many more problems that the street crimes by the working-class. I find this claim especially plausible when comparing the different types of crimes committed by the ruling class and the working class as well as the sentencing disparities between the two classes. To begin with, corporate crime, that is crime committed by the elite in a business environment, is arguably a more serious type of crime than street crime, that is crime committed by ordinary people such as the working-class. For example, the financial mismanagement of a corporate executive after the 2008 financial crisis resulted in not a single criminal charge being filed. In fact, even though the total cost of the financial crisis estimated between $6 and $14 trillion, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged a total of $2.73 billion in fines and out-of-court settlements. This happens because only elites commit white-collar crime and thus are able to use their power and financial resources to evade punishment. In contrast, innocent working-class or ordinary people, are forced to sit in jail for the simple reason that they cannot afford to get out. Therefore, the fact that white-collar criminals receive lenient punishments such as imposed fines and their crimes are not prosecuted disproves the notion that the Capitalist elite does not make laws and employ selective law-enforcement to work in their interests since it is evident that money shapes the outcomes of trials. In other words, the criminal justice system works in favor of the rich and guilty elite as opposed to the poor and innocent working class.
Further support for this claim comes from American Marx criminologist Richard Quinney in his book Class, State and Crime: On the Theory and Practice of Criminal Justice (1977). Quinney argues that “the criminal justice movement is…a state-initiated and state-supported effort to rationalize mechanisms of social control. The larger purpose is to secure a capitalist order that is in grave crisis, likely in its final stage of development.” Quinney’s claim seems most plausible when thinking about the 13th amendment of the Constitution, which abolished slavery in the United States, “except as a punishment for crime.” Such a phrase created a “loophole” for President Nixon and his administration to use the power of the state, namely the police, courts, and corrections, to legitimize the system of mass incarceration, a mechanism of designed social control. The result of this loophole meant forced labor for criminals through the privatization of prisons and prison labor. In other words, corporations would profit off punishment. Since prison labor is now legal in America, inmates across the nation go to work for major corporations such as Microsoft and Victoria’s Secret as part of the Federal Prison Industries program operated on the federal by the Bureau of Prisons. In a form of modern day convict-leasing, it is estimated that at least twenty-seven states currently make use of private prisons, and approximately 90,000 inmates are being held in prisons run for profit.
Marxists would argue that labor has developed into a commodity in the prison industry system. The incarcerated workforce is subject to the exploitation of the ruling class, namely the private prison industries. In lieu of physical punishment, the State now subjects its prisoners them to increased surveillance in prisons, a much more invasive as a means of social control. By adopting a Marxist perspective on crime, one can see how capitalism generated the prison system, the prison system inspired capitalist interests, and capitalist interests transformed it into a profitable industry.
In conclusion, I have argued that it is possible to explain the emergence of mass incarceration in the United States through a Marxist approach to crime. The systemic problems with law enforcement and the law including legislatively driven policy changes and the use of the police force as a repressive apparatus fostered the explosion of the U.S. prison population. The prison-industrial complex has evolved into our modern system of mass incarceration that allows prisons to be run by for-profit companies and subjects prisoners to alienated conditions while working under cheap labor. This broken prison system requires a closer look at its layers, particularly through reconstruction as opposed to reforms that produce only temporary solutions to a continuing problem.