The American carceral state is an abomination. ‘The Land of the Free’ locks up more of its own population than any country on earth and has more than twenty percent of the global prisoners despite having only five percent of the population. The explosion of prisoners has far outpaced population growth and doesn’t even reflect increases in crime.

And while a Senator, Joe Biden was instrumental in creating the mass incarceration problem we face today.

The over two million people in American jails or prisons cost the taxpayers $80,000,000,000 a year. And they’re not just sitting in six-by-eight cells trying to stay sane and alive; they’re working.

They’re working for corporate America, the states they’re serving in, and the military-industrial complex for pennies an hour and sometimes nothing at all.

People often say that slavery never ended, it just changed form. It was made illegal, but crucially, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” opening the door for chain gangs and the corporate exploitation we see today.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently released a report that details how these prison laborers are creating $11 billion in value and getting little to nothing in return, inside or outside of the institutions.

The ACLU says the cash bail system means, “There are twice as many people incarcerated in local jails awaiting trial and presumed innocent than in the entire federal prison system.”

It is too easy to ignore the plight of people behind bars. With a litany of other issues, it is especially difficult for a politician to champion their cause. But tireless work from activists and the utter inhumanity and exploitation of the system has finally made it a large enough issue that things are slowly happening at a local level, and Democratic Party politicians have to pay lip service to it.

The Washington Post reported that, as a candidate, “Biden says he will work to repeal federal mandatory minimum sentences, end cash bail, stop the use of solitary confinement, suspend sentences for drug use and instead divert defendants into drug courts, expand alternatives to detention, knock down barriers to reentry, and liberally use clemency to secure the release of inmates facing overly long sentences for drug and nonviolent offenses.”

Obviously, none of that happened. In a semi-functioning society, those are no-brainers. Mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, and ‘broken windows’ policing have all led to a 500% increase in the prison population since 1970. The ACLU says the cash bail system means, “There are twice as many people incarcerated in local jails awaiting trial and presumed innocent than in the entire federal prison system.”

Again, it’s just so inhumane.

America puts more of its own citizens behind bars than any ‘authoritarian regime of the month.’ And it’s not like Americans are more prone to commit crimes, the US is just a settler-colonial state and violence is the only language the country speaks.

The answer is always more police, rather than addressing any underlying poverty-related causes.

Poor communities in desperate need of economic investment, better schools, better teachers, counselors, community centers, jobs programs, after-school programs, maternity leave, healthcare, mental health services, and green spaces receive nothing but a larger and more militarized police force to patrol their poverty-stricken streets.

Community activists, researchers, and academics know the answers to these crime problems, and candidate Biden also showed his team understands the issue better than one would expect, promising on the campaign trail, “to establish a $20 billion grant program that would incentivize states to shift from incarcerating offenders to addressing the underlying causes of crime through funding for counseling for mental health, addiction and child abuse, as well as a range of social services and early-childhood education.”

But again, none of that happened. Campaign rhetoric obviously has very little to do with what policies are actually implemented.

Poor communities in desperate need of economic investment, better schools, better teachers, counselors, community centers, jobs programs, after-school programs, maternity leave, healthcare, mental health services, and green spaces receive nothing but a larger and more militarized police force to patrol their poverty-stricken streets.

As with everything in America, follow the money. The rise of private prisons has been well documented. It’s another testament to the dystopia we live in that the state spends more per inmate than per student or that a corporate conglomerate can own a prison, have a contract with the government to maintain a certain level of detainees, and make billions of dollars a year.

The inmates themselves and their families are also relentlessly squeezed. Mint Press News recently reported on the connection between the military-industrial complex and prison labor, going into the details of the level of extortion.

Incarcerated people now regularly have to pay for essentials like soap, toothpaste and shampoo as well as phone calls with loved ones. Others require medical co-pays to see a doctor or for room and boarding costs, to be garnished from earned wages…Often just being sent to a correctional facility incurs a $100 “processing fee” prisoners must pay, while visitors are regularly charged for background checks. Prisoners’ friends and families transfer $1.8 billion into correctional facilities every year. Faced with no other choices, they are forced to accept money transfer fees up to 45%. Financial corporations like JPay and JP Morgan Chase partner with correctional facilities in order to ensure the best deal for them — and the worst deal for the prisoners. — Alan Macleod

Not only are the most vulnerable populations in America over-policed and over-incarcerated, but they’re also ruthlessly over-charged and extorted to speak to or see their loved ones.

Of course, it gets worse because along with the ruthless corporate shakedown, the prisoners are forced to work for the facility, the state, or a corporation for no money in seven states or thirteen to fifty-four cents an hour, and if they say no, are often punished.

There are roughly 800,000 people that have jobs in state or federal prison, and as the title suggests, the ACLU estimates they create $11 billion in value.

Bodies on the streets of Detroit or Newark or East New York are not worth anything in the eyes of the corporate state. But if you lock them in a cage, they have the capacity to generate fifty or sixty thousand dollars per year for these corporations. So in that sense, it is a complete continuum [since slavery].” — Chris Hedges

American prisoners are doing everything from working in call centers to making textiles, electronics, office equipment, and even subcontracted parts for weapons or all manner of clothing for the military-industrial complex.

The list of corporations that use prison labor is long and ever-changing. Often with bad press, they’ll adjust from prison labor to using whatever other cheap labor they can. Or like corporate accountability with sweatshops, I’m sure some subcontract a subcontractor’s subcontractor and don’t ask too many questions while making sure they have plausible deniability.

As of 2018, it was reported that the following corporations used prison labor — again, it might have shifted slightly in the years since and a complete list can be hard to come by. Here’s a sampling: Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart and Wendy’s.

That’s billions in value being created for the largest corporations in the world using neo-slavery.

As the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges says, the poor are worth nothing to the corporate state. When the decent unionized industrial jobs that could once sustain a family were systematically sent overseas, starting in the early seventies, no alternative was offered. Instead, the state started ramming more and more individuals into the prison-industrial complex to work for corporations in slavery-like conditions.

The corporate-owned private prison can get $30,000 per inmate from the government while corporate America gets the billions in revenue from their labor and also an extra billion or so in fees from their poor families.

…the prisoners are forced to work for the facility, the state, or a corporation for no money in seven states or thirteen to fifty-four cents an hour, and if they say no, are often punished.

For all of America’s pearl-clutching about human rights abuses and forced labor abroad — feigned concern that usually only emerges when geopolitically convenient — there is very little looking in the mirror.

The corporate media rarely reports on the true barbarity of the American carceral state, and ineffective lawmakers can’t get anything passed beyond corporate tax cuts or transfers of wealth from taxpayers to corporations so addressing mass incarceration at a federal level is a pipe dream.

And it’s only going to get worse.

Corporate domination is the defining issue of our time. Those who stand in the way of the orgy of profits and systematic destruction of the planet will be labeled ‘terrorists’ and put behind bars to join the nearly million prison laborers.

America has been hollowed out from the inside. The American people are a complete afterthought.

The only motivation is how much value can corporations extract for the most minimal input. Owning the workforce and not paying them would maximize profits but is currently illegal, except as punishment for a crime.

So America will continue to erect private prisons and detention centers while ramrodding the ever-expanding class of the desperate into those prisons to work for thirteen cents an hour for the corporate overlords.

The slow destruction of Uncle Sam, the planet, and the case for civil disobedience continue unabated.