The Perpetual Prisoner Machine by Joel Dyer, 2000, Excerpts

During the 1980s, nearly every state in the union began to reach the economic limits of its ability to build new prisons. Hard-on-crime changes to the sentencing guidelines had filled prisons and jails to overflowing. States had exhausted their corrections budgets to build and operate nearly 600 new facilities.

All across the nation, bond issues earmarked for prison construction were being placed on the ballots. Voters in one jurisdiction after another began to make it clear that the expansion would have to be greatly curtailed or even stopped. They made their opinion known by defeating an ever-increasing number of the prison bond issues at the polls. The majority of Americans may still have been emotionally, even intellectually, supportive of hard-on-crime measures, but concern over their pocketbooks had apparently become an equal or even more important priority.

If the states couldn’t afford to continue to build new prisons because the majority of their taxpaying voters were unwilling to support the sale of bonds for that purpose, then the prison-industrial complex kept the expansion going by paying to construct the new facilities itself. Private prisons underwrite the cost of prison construction through the sale of bond-like financial instruments that don’t require voter approval. The use of private prisons renders voters incapable of stopping the flow of their tax dollars into the prison expansion.

Once the corporations have spent their own money to build the prisons, they then charge a hefty fee per inmate in exchange for allowing a jurisdiction to use their facilities and thereby comply with court ordered limits on overcrowding.

Diverting Funds

The market intrusion into the justice system means that politicians divert tax dollars out of existing programs such as education, child welfare, mental-health care, housing, and substance abuse programs to repay the market and its investors for having put up the money to construct the prison facilities.

Although all taxpayers, rich and poor, are paying their share of this massive increase in expenditures in proportion to their overall tax bill, those who constitute the upper third of the economy, a.k.a, the investor class, are having their tax burden more of less subsidized by their ability to profit as shareholders in corporations.

Because much of the funding for corrections is now coming at the expense of social programs that have been shown to deter people from criminal behavior in the first place, the more future prisoners we create.

Public education is being gutted to fund prisons. Those at the top of the economy don’t send their children to public schools anyway. Consequently, the decay of public education resulting from increased corrections spending is occurring most rapidly in urban districts and has virtually no impact on those benefiting from the prison expansion.

The way to expand the prison system without raising taxes is by diverting a larger and larger portion of the tax money already being collected and used for other programs into prisons. This means that since the cost of corrections has gone up $20 billion a year, a good portion of this $20 billion annual expenditure is being culled from the social wealth.