by Dr. Sinclair Grey III
Dec. 23, 2013
Why do we have prisons? To protect members of society from rapists, murderers, and people who seek to do harm. Without a doubt, there are people who need to be behind prison bars; however, there’s a problem when prison is viewed as a ‘rites of passage’ for so many men and women, especially our younger generation. Here’s another reason why we have prisons. Because it’s extremely profitable. Think about it for a moment. Isn’t prison supposed to be about ‘corrections?’ Correcting attitudes and behaviors of individuals who’ve made wrong decisions. However, prisons for the most part have become warehouses. The minority community (African-Americans and Latinos) face it with great difficulty.
There’s a term that needs to be discussed. It’s been discussed among those in the academic arena and tossed around with people who have no clear understanding of its term. The term is ‘Prison Industrial Complex.’ Well, what is the Prison Industrial Complex? Unless you know what it means, you’re bound to fall into the trap of ignoring what’s happening within communities all over the world. According to Wikipedia, the prison industrial complex or (PIC) is ‘used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies.’ In simpler terms, the prison industrial complex is about making profits for small and big businesses at the risk of locking up people for a profit. Without inmates, there’s no profit. Without crime and criminal activity, businesses who depend on providing goods and services to prisons suffer.
During a panel discussion with current mayors of Los Angeles, Houston and New Orleans in 2012, NPR’s Michele Norris offered a chilling report which claimed, “The prison industrial complex will look at the test scores of a city’s third grade population. If the test grades are low they know that they’ll have to start building a prison.”
When you have schools with limited resources, how can you explain the frustration of teachers who care but are unable to do what is needed to make a difference? In addition to this, can you imagine the frustration of students who (at no fault of their own) cannot get the adequate education they want, need, and deserve? And sadly and sinfully, big businesses and corporations profit from what’s happening to the disadvantaged.
To better understand this perspective, let’s look at the state of California for a moment. Since the 1980’s they have built 23 prisons and only one school campus. Something seems wrong when a state that has decreased their prison population according to reports, continues to spend more on prisoners. “California has more than 130,000 prisoners, a huge increase from the state’s 1980 prison population of about 25,000. Prisons cost California taxpayers close to $10 billion, compared with $604 million in 1980.”
The question that needs to be raised is what has happened? Why have we failed our children? Has greed become more important than the lives of human beings? Unless people begin to care about the welfare of each other and stand up to the injustice(s) of the prison industrial complex and big businesses, we will continue to see numbers skyrocket in prisons. It’s unfair and it’s unjust.
For the next few weeks, I will be discussing how we can bankrupt the prison system. It will be provocative and progressive. I hope that a meaningful dialogue will come out of this and in the process, we can make a difference. This is not to be the perfect solution; it’s designed to initiate a beginning to make a difference.
Source: Atlantic.com, Huffington Post, and Wikipedia.
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Dr. Sinclair Grey III is an inspirational speaker, motivator, author, organizer and liberator of persons from all intellectual, social and cultural walks of life. He is a committed advocate for communal change. Email: drgrey@sinclairgrey.org. Follow on Twitter @drsinclairgrey
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