Richard K. Moore
on the
NEW PRISON LABOUR SYSTEM

  • The nature of the penal system is rapidly changing in America, reflecting the anticipated further increase in social unrest, and justified by the propaganda mythology. A formidable prison capacity is being built -- prison construction is the largest growth industry at present in the U.S. -- and the concept of who the prisons are for is undergoing radical change.

  • It used to be the case that punishment was a response to a crime, and when the "debt to society" was repaid, the offender was expected to join the ranks of the responsible citizenry. Increasingly, prisons are being seen as a place to house certain segments of the population: those who can't or won't fit into society. That's what "three strike" laws and mandatory sentencing (and soon, preventive detention) are all about. Under a neoliberal, megacorp-centered system, there are two kinds of people: megacorp members (employees, contractors, etc.) on the one hand, and the redundant, on the other. Without social services, the redundant become a starving, potentially dangerous under-class, and stiff laws and numerous prisons are being implemented as the final solution to this problem.

  • In a very literal sense, prisons are to be the concentration camps of the neoliberal regime -- a place to isolate those redundant to corporate needs. Never wanting to waste an exploitable resource, the elite in America are now developing an extensive prison-labor system, renting out inmates to fill lower-rung corporate labor needs. Thus, in the "land of the free", we see the development of a network of slave-labor concentration camps, without the fact seeming to reach public awareness. Again, fascism seems to be the most descriptive word available to describe the situation.

  • In terms of America's traditional "class ladder" system, what's happened is that the lower part of the ladder has been shoved down into the mud. As feudalistic social arrangements are being re- introduced by neoliberalism, there comes also a re-introduction of slavery, with, as it turns out, a familiar ethnic bias. It is disproportionately blacks who are confined to crime-likely life scenarios by corporatisation, and it is largely blacks who seem destined to populate America's slave-labor prisons.

    Source -- -- Irish activist Richard K. Moore, 14 October 1996, "America and The New World Order",
    Contact and ftp library for Richard K. Moore articles
    rkmoore@iol.ie - Wexford, Ireland
    Cyberlib: www | ftp --> ftp://ftp.iol.ie/users/rkmoore/cyberlib

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