The North American Gulag

A SHOCKING LOOK AT AMERICAN PRISONS

 The North American Gulag

x Alejandro Nadal: Only in the country of the most advanced capitalism could such perverse confusion arise between prison repression and private business

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote Gulag Archipelago between 1958 and 1970. It is a literary investigation [which won the Nobel Prize although he had nothing but a poetic license] based on the writer's experience of forced labor camps in the former Soviet Union. The Gulag was the acronym for the central administration of the fields that operated between 1930 and 1960. The term became popular when the Solzhenitsyn book was published in 1973.

Several years ago the Gulag archipelago arrived in the Americas. More precisely, he arrived in the US, which of all the countries in the world is the one with the most prisoners in his prison system. The Chinese population is 1,400 million people, but in its prison system it has approximately 1.6 million people. In contrast, the US, with a population of 320 million, has more than 2.2 million people in its federal, state and local prisons.

The US has about 5 percent of the world's population, but is responsible for 25 percent of the world's jailed population. And the prison system in the US took an extraordinary turn since the 1970s, when the prison population began to grow at an alarming rate.

But the American Gulag has its own label, that of business. With those impressive numbers of people behind bars, it is not surprising that capitalism has seen good profitability opportunities. That is why the privatization of prisons in the United States (which already had a long tradition) gained momentum in the 1990s. Today about 19 percent of the prisoners in that country are located in prisons managed by a private commercial company.

Private prisons are big business. To private prison management companies, the federal government grants a subsidy of $ 23,000 per year per inmate (the minimum wage is $ 15,000 annually). And if the cells are empty, the government grants the same subsidy. The three main companies in the prison administration business are CoreCivic, Geo Group and MTC and their earnings have grown exponentially in recent years. For example, the first of these two companies saw their revenues increase from 280 million to more than 1.7 billion dollars between 2000 and 2017 (an increase of more than 500 percent). The private prison industry receives an estimated income of 5 billion dollars annually. Not surprisingly, these companies receive generous loans from Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan and US Bancorp.

These companies invest a lot of money in lobbying in the US Congress so that this privatization policy not only does not end, but continues to grow. Although the data here is more difficult to obtain, an organization in the US found that between 1999-2010 CoreCivic allocated $ 1.4 million for federal-level lobbying.

Of course, what really suits these companies is that the incarcerated population continues to increase. And for that more stringent laws are needed, with longer sentences for all types of crimes and with more difficult-to-reach freedom of speech schemes. More inmates and longer sentences, is the recipe for higher profits of these private companies. And to reduce costs in this new adventure of capitalism, the important thing is a mixture of poor diet and bad health services. All seasoned with abuse of all kinds and widespread violence.

The prison population says a lot about American society. An African-American citizen is six times more likely to go to jail than his white counterparts. The racism of the prison system is a reflection of what happens in the country that praises freedom so much.

In 2014, several reports on the alarming rates of violence in private prisons led to calls to reform and eliminate this privatization of the prison system. Some reforms were approved with Obama but these changes only affected federal prisons. And with Trump's electoral victory this incipient trend was reversed and there was even a sharp increase in the value of the shares of Geo Group and CoreCivic.

In the summer of 2018, inmates in the US launched a nationwide protest movement. Hunger strikes and acts of disobedience that were severely repressed could finally break the siege of solitary confinement. Today the electoral debate has begun to focus on the issue of criminal and prison reform in the US. We will have to see if this new edition of the Gulag archipelago can disappear. Perhaps only in the country of the most advanced capitalism could such perverse confusion arise between criminal repression and private business.

@anadaloficial. Excerpted by La Haine.