Literature Review

    The prison system of the United States is the largest in the world. No other country has a higher percentage of its citizens incarcerated than the United States. The rapid expansion of the prison population began in the early 1980’s and coincided with President Reagan’s “war on drugs”. Since then, many prisons have become privatized, built and run by private corporations.  In addition, most prisons contract prisoner labor to large manufacturing companies for profit, while paying them far less than minimum wage. This relationship between the penal system and private industry is known as the prison-industrial complex.
    Most of the literature on the prison-industrial is written by authors who wish to reform the justice system. Angela Y. Davis, who is credited with coining the phrase “prison-industrial complex”, argues for the abolition of incarceration as the primary form of punitive justice in her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?. Matthew Mulch argues that the benefits of prison privatization are fleeting at best and advocates alternative forms of punishment, such as restorative justice in his 2009 paper, Crime and Punishment in Private Prisons. Smith and Hattery point out the racialized aspect of the prison-industrial complex in their 2010 essay, African American Men and the Prison Industrial Complex.
    Other literature on the prison-industrial complex highlights the root causes of the prison problem in the United States.  Erik Schlosser addresses the ways in which non-violent crimes are frequently punished as harshly as violent ones in his 2003 book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.  Schlosser is one of the scholars who, in addition to Angela Davis was instrumental in identifying the prison-industrial complex as one of the major problems in American society today.  In The Prison Industrial Complex: A Deliberation, the authors argue that we must examine global capitalism and the economic and military dominance of U.S. politics to fully understand the root cause of the prison-industrial complex (do Valle, Hung, and Spira).