Prison Industry Series

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine by Joel Dyer, 2000, Excerpts

Living in poverty is the most important factor in determining who is most likely to wind up in prison. America’s prison population is being harvested from our growing fields of urban poverty. Since these fields are disproportionately composed of minority citizens, so too is the new prison population. By 1992, one out of every three black men in the United States between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine was under the supervision of the criminal-justice system.

Information about poverty’s role as the major influence on most criminals is almost never discussed by the press, nor are the demographic realities of violent crime, such as the facts that violent crime is extremely rare, that it occurs for the most part in isolated low-income communities, and that, as a rule, the victim and the perpetrator knew each other.

We have created political and economic circumstances that guarantee that a large number of people of color will live in an environment that breeds crime. We have then surrounded these same people with an overwhelming police presence far beyond what exists in other, lighter-skinned communities. And finally, when the citizens in these occupied neighborhoods succumb to the temptation dangled before them, we lock them away for incredibly long periods of time. – periods much longer than those prescribed for white people who commit the same crimes.

Institutionalized Prison Racism

The current prison expansion is financially benefiting investors in the upper one-third of the economy, a demographic group that is overwhelmingly white, while impoverished blacks, Hispanics, and other ethnic minorities are being incarcerated at a greatly disproportionate rate to whites.

 “It troubles the commission that the size of the American prison population and the number of people living in poverty both increased dramatically in the 1980s. Worse, the growth of each seemed to feed off of the growth of the other. This is because funding for prison expansion came largely at the expense of programs designed to alleviate poverty.” Nations Criminal Justice Commission, 1995

America’s prison population is 94 percent male. A full 65 percent of prisoners never completed high school. Thirty-three percent were unemployed and another 32 percent were making less than $5,000 per year at the time of their arrest. Seventy-one percent of all prisoners have been convicted of nonviolent crimes, mostly for drug related and property-offense violations. Poverty is the single greatest influence over criminal behavior.

African Americans constitute only 13 percent of all monthly drug users, yet they account for 35 percent of all arrests for the possession of drugs, 55 percent of all drug convictions, and a shocking 74 percent of all those receiving drug-related prison sentences. Some states already have as many as five black males in prison for every one in college, and this differential is increasing.