There is a very direct link between corporate globalization and the prison industrial complex. The same corporations that benefit from mass incarceration domestically benefit from economic domination in the Third World. Some prison companies benefit even more directly from globalization, like Wackenhut (headquartered in South Florida), who opened a super maximum prison in South Africa in 2002. Both the PIC and corporate globalization predominantly impact and target the same classes of people: poor or working class people of color.

Like Prisons? You’ll Love Globalization. Like Globalization? You’ll Love Prisons

by Dan Berger with Lars Din, Zein El-Amine, and Kenyon Farrow

The connections between the prison industrial complex and corporate globalization

The past five years have seen a dramatic upswing in activism in the United States against the varied manifestations of both the prison industrial complex (PIC) and corporate globalization. This activism has included the mass demonstrations in Seattle, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and elsewhere against global trade ministerials. It has also included local organizing to stop prison construction, fight cutbacks in social services, support prisoners, and connect mass incarceration to systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and global capitalism.

A Little Background

Both the globalization movement and the prison abolitionist movement have their roots in the political, economic, and social policies dating back to post World War II but that have intensified exponentially in the past twenty years. Following the national liberation struggles that swept the world in the 1960s and 1970s (and the domestic revolutionary movements of the same time), the powers that be moved toward an increasingly militarized police force inside the United States and an international neo-liberal economic policy that maintained a semi-colonial presence in the Third World without the formal veneer of classic colonialism. The goal with both strategies was the maintenance and consolidation of what cultural critic bell hooks calls the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

After World War II, the Western global powers formed international trade consortiums to establish and maintain dominance over “undeveloped” countries. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were two of the earliest and most famous of these institutions. In recent years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have joined the ranks of these global corporate-political organizations. Now, the United States is pioneering the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which some have called “NAFTA on steroids.” The FTAA would increase U.S. domination over the entire Western hemisphere. People in Latin America have spearheaded the campaign to stop this dangerous proposal.

Domestically, the rebellions and mass movements of the 1960s and 1970s led to increased funding and power for police organizations. With the economic downturn of the late 1970s and 1980s, the country entered into a process of “deindustrialization,” where major corporations fled to impoverished countries to avoid paying higher wages and dealing with unions. Concurrent with deindustrialization was a right-wing attack on welfare, education, and other social programs, and an exponential increase in “tough-on-crime” rhetoric and laws. Whereas deindustrialization left millions without jobs, the attack on social programs assured that the government was not going to help its citizens after capital had left them high and dry. Police and prisons became a main way to control the “unwanted populations”: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, queer folks, and poor/working class people of all races.

On Valentine’s Day in the year 2000, the United States locked up its two millionth person. Just three years later, the prison population has surpassed 2.1 million, making this country by far the one with the highest incarceration rate in the world. While only four percent of the world’s population, the United States has almost twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population.

Corporate Globalization and Prisons: A Match Made in Heaven

There is a very direct link between corporate globalization and the prison industrial complex. The same corporations that benefit from mass incarceration domestically benefit from economic domination in the Third World. Some prison companies benefit even more directly from globalization, like Wackenhut (headquartered in South Florida), who opened a super maximum prison in South Africa in 2002. Both the PIC and corporate globalization predominantly impact and target the same classes of people: poor or working class people of color. This is as true in Argentina as it is in Alabama, in Kenya and in Kansas. MCI, Halliburton, the Carlyle Group, IBM, General Electric, and many other corporations are leading the way in this corporate domination of the world.

There is an entrenched power structure at work here, and those on top gain economically and politically from the domination of those at the bottom. This power structure is a network composed primarily of multinational corporations in the military/ weapons, media/ communications, global finance, and oil industries, with politicians to support their agenda.

This power structure benefits from cheap or free labor inside U.S. prisons and inside Third World sweatshops. Overseas, countries trapped in debt due to the austerity measures of the International Monetary Fund (called Structural Adjustment Programs) cut social services and put people to work in factories of Western-based companies. Domestically, the swelling of prison budgets and the reliance on prisons as a means to “solve” social problems results in domestic austerity programs where jobs, social services, and education spending are all cut, leading people on a one-way track into prison. Besides benefiting from cheap or free labor, these companies benefit from selling products (at an inflated rate, of course) inside the prison and inside Third World countries.

Domestic Structural Adjustment follows a similar path as it does in the Third World, only we have police and prisons instead of military and sweatshops. Social programs are cut, more money goes into policing and prisons to control the now unemployed and unemployable sectors of the population. This process of “deindustrialization” has led to a rise in the domestic service (rather than manufacturing) economy, and a boom in prisons. If people can’t be employed or won’t get any help by the government, they have to go somewhere. Nowadays, that somewhere is prison. Prison, along with an increase in militarized policing, are the way the United States controls its domestic poor/working class people and people of color. (Abroad, globalization is enforced through military might, often backed with training and weapons supplied by the United States.) In this way, the prison industrial complex constitutes a form of “internal globalization.” Only by fighting the PIC, corporate globalization, and the ideologies and structures underlying both can we hope to achieve our dreams of a free and just world.

Next Steps in Florida for Prison Abolition and Stopping Corporate Globalization

Over the summer of 2003, the Florida legislature allocated an emergency $66 million for new prison beds in the state. This funding increase for incarceration came at the same time as a massive budget crisis, with education and other social services struggling to survive, and with state crime rates at their lowest in thirty years. Despite this, Florida has surpassed New York in terms of total number of incarcerated citizens, making it second only to California and Texas.

At the same time, the FTAA has decided to converge upon Miami in the middle of November for their latest rounds of talks aiming at expanding U.S. dominance of the entire Western hemisphere. Taking lead from globalization struggles in the Global South, people across Florida and the United States are organizing to put a stop to the FTAA meeting. Miami police chief John Timoney – who pioneered the beating and mass arrests of hundreds of nonviolent protesters during the 2000 Republican National Convention protests in Philadelphia – has promised to greet protesters with more beatings, arrests, and rubber bullets. The Miami City Council has passed an ordinance prohibiting the possession of certain items (for instance, gas masks) for a three-week period in November.

Critical Resistance seeks to build an international movement to end the PIC by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. We believe that basic necessities such as food, shelter, and freedom make our communities secure. As such, our work is part of global struggles against inequality and powerlessness. CRFlorida, a new chapter of the group, is having a statewide meeting on November 1 to strategize on how we can respond to the state’s prison crisis. For more info, email crfl at criticalresistance.org or call 372-8457. CR South can be reached at 4041 Tulane Ave., Suite 103, New Orleans, LA 70119, crsouth at criticalresistance.org, 504-488-2994. For more on prison issues, check out www.criticalresistance.org or www.prisonactivist.org.

Alachua for Global Justice is a Gainesville-area group that is part of the Florida-wide organizing to stop the FTAA in November. We are organizing an action camp November 6-8 to prepare people for the protests in Miami, starting November 15. Contact us at alachua at ziplip.com. For more on anti-FTAA organizing, contact the 800 million vs. 34 coalition at n20 at hushmail.com or Root Cause at www.therootcause.org or at 305-757-3880.

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