The U.S. war on drugs is big business -- a multi-billion dollar public/private venture that radically inflates the value of illegal drugs and criminalizes the poorest people of color, trapping them in a vicious cycle of addiction, unemployment and incarceration:

• $27 billion for interdiction and law enforcement, $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia in 2000.
• $9.4 billion in 2000 to imprison close to 500,000 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses, 75% of whom are Black.
• $80 to $100 billion in lost earnings.
• Untold billions in homeless shelters, healthcare, chemical dependency and psychiatric treatment, etc.

Black women are the fastest growing segment of the prison population and Native American prisoners are the largest group per capita.(1) Approximately five million people -- including those on probation and parole -- are directly under the surveillance of the criminal justice system. The prison industrial complex profits from racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Black and brown bodies are the human raw material in a vast experiment to conceal the major social problems of our time.

The racially disproportionate demographics of the victims of the war on drugs will not surprise anyone familiar with the symbiotic relationship between poverty and institutionalized racism. Economic inequality and political disenfranchisement have been inextricably intertwined since the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The racist enforcement of the drug laws is just the latest example of institutionalized racism.

As political economist John Flateau graphically puts it: "Metaphorically, the criminal justice pipeline is like a slave ship, transporting human cargo along interstate triangular trade routes from Black and Brown communities; through the middle passage of police precincts, holding pens, detention centers and courtrooms; to downstate jails or upstate prisons; back to communities as unrehabilitated escapees; and back to prison or jail in a vicious recidivist cycle."(2)

From Plantation to Prisons: Where Does the Money Go?

According to the United Nations International Drug Control Program, the international illicit drug business generates as much as $400 billion in trade annually. Profits of this magnitude invariably lead to corruption and complicity at the highest levels. Yet the so-called war on this illegal trade targets economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities and indigenous people in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

Putting aside the question of legality, there is no evidence of a "trickle-down effect." These substantial profits are not enriching the low level players who constitute the vast majority of drug offenders. To the contrary, the black market drug economy undermines non-drug-related businesses and limits the employability of its participants. Discussing the "legal apartheid" that keeps the developing world poor, Peruvian economist, Fernando De Soto observes that "[t]he poor live outside the law . . . because living within the law is impossible: corrupt legal systems and warped rules force those at the bottom of the world economy to spend years leaping absurd hurdles to do things by the book."3 "In a criminalized economy, the risk of imprisonment is almost 'a form of business license tax.'"(4)

Who is Profiting?

In the United States, prison architects and contractors, corrections personnel, policy makers and academics, and the thousands of corporate vendors who peddle their wares at the annual trade-show of the American Corrections Association - hawking everything from toothbrushes and socks to barbed-wire fences and shackles. And multi-national corporations that win tax subsidies, incentives and abatements from local governments -- robbing the public coffers and depriving communities of the kind of quality education, roads, health care and infrastructure that provide genuine incentives for legitimate business. The sale of tax-exempt bonds to underwrite prison construction is now estimated at $2.3 billion annually.(5)

Last year, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation - which manages or owns 37 prisons in the U.S., 18 in the U.K and Australia and has one under contract in South Africa -- tried to convert a former slave plantation in North Carolina into a maximum security prison to warehouse mostly Black prisoners from the nation's capital. Promising investors to keep the prison cells filled these corporations dispatch "bed-brokers" in search of prisoners - evoking images of 19th century bounty-hunters capturing runaway slaves and forcibly returning them to the cotton fields.

Corporations that appear to be far removed from the business of punishment are intimately involved in the expansion of the prison industrial complex. Prison construction bonds are one of the many sources of profitable investment for leading financiers such as Merrill Lynch. MCI charges prisoners and their families outrageous prices for the precious telephone calls which are often the only contact inmates have with the free world. Many corporations whose products we consume on a daily basis have learned that prison labor power can be as profitable as third world labor power exploited by U.S.-based global corporations. Both relegate formerly unionized workers to joblessness, many of which wind up in prison. Some of the companies that use prison labor are IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing. But it is not only the hi-tech industries that reap the profits of prison labor. Nordstrom department stores sell jeans that are marketed as "Prison Blues," as well as t-shirts and jackets made in Oregon prisons.(7)

Racism & Poverty: The Free Market and Prison Economies

Today there are over 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. Studies demonstrated that two-thirds of state prisoners had less than a high school education and 1/3 were unemployed at the time of arrest. Over the past decade states have financed prison construction at the expense of investment in higher education. At the same time, access to education in prison has been severely curtailed.

Officially, 8.3% of working-age Blacks in the U.S. are unemployed(9) but taking into account the "incarceration effect," the rate is significantly higher. Research confirms the obvious - the positive relationship between joblessness or low wages and recidivism. The stigma of prison has been codified in laws and licensing regulations that bar people with criminal records from countless jobs and opportunities, effectively excluding them from the legitimate workforce and forcing them into illegal ventures. As economists Western and Petit point out, "[T]he penal system can be viewed as a type of labor market institution that systematically influence's men's employment . . .[and has a] pervasive influence . . . on the life chances of disadvantaged minorities."

Like slavery, the focused machinery of the war on drugs fractures families, as it destroys individual lives and destabilizes whole communities. It targets Native Americans living on or near reservations and urban minority neighborhoods, depressing incomes and repelling investment. "The lost potential earnings, savings, consumer demand, and human and social capital . . . cost black communities untold millions of dollars in potential economic development, worsening an inner-city political economy already crippled by decades of capital flight and de-industrialization."(12)

The Case for Racial and Economic Justice

This reality is not the result of unintended consequence from otherwise well-reasoned policies. It is the logical, inevitable consequence of "tough-on-crime" laws and punitive sentencing polices that elected leaders and public officials embrace to avoid addressing the pressing social problems caused by institutionalized racism and political and economic exclusion.

By incarcerating high proportions of low income Black, Latino and Native American residents and maintaining surveillance over them for even longer periods of time, the "war on drugs" and its criminal justice apparatus perpetuate a social segregation policy that intentionally isolates historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and communities, ensuring a capital divestment policy that builds neither social capital nor economic infrastructure.

According to the United States Department of State's 2000 report to the United Nations Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), "discrimination in the criminal justice system" is a "principal causative factor" hindering progress toward ending racial discrimination in [U.S.] society. If the United States takes seriously its mandates of equality and peace with justice, then the war on drugs and the prison industrial complex must be dismantled and reparation made for the devastation they have wrought. Decimated communities must be rebuilt and enriched and barriers torn down in order to guarantee Blacks and other ethnic minorities a fair playing field. Only then can the United States begin to acknowledge responsibility for the damning impact of slavery and its perpetuation through the institutionalization of racism and poverty.

Notes:

1. United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs>
2. John Flateau, The Prison Industrial Complex: Race, Crime and Justice in New York, Medger Evers College Press (1996).
3. Miller, Mathew, The Poor Man's Capitalist: Hernando de Soto, The New York Times Magazine, July 1 2001, paraphrasing de Soto. Though de Soto is wrong when he separates and distinguishes this "legal apartheid" from the "legacy of colonialism," which as the above discussion shows are opposite sides of the same coin.
4. Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America profits from crime citing Ken Silverstein, "America's Private Gulag," originally appearing in CounterPunch, November 14, 1997 <http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/America.html>.
5. Angela Y. Davis, Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex
6. Official government labor statistics as reported by the Justice Policy Institute in Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders.
7. Western, Bruce & Becky Pettit, Incarceration and Racial Inequality in Men's Employment, March 2000.
8. Ibid.
9. Street, Paul, Color Blind: Prisons and the New American Racism, Dissent (Summer 2001).