Download Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration

Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass
Incarceration: Toward a New Political
Economy of the Postwar Carceral State
Alex Lichtenstein
Pick up any recent textbook on modern U.S. history, turn to the last few chapters, and you
will find an outline of key developments that have shaped the past four decades or so of the
nation’s domestic history. Some chapter headings include “The Decline of Manufacturing,”
“Retreat from Liberalism,” “The Beleaguered Social Compact,” “The Rising Tide of Conservatism,” “The Problem of Inequality,” “The End of the Long Boom,” and “Conservatism
in the Courts.” Yet few of these textbooks pay attention to one of the most dramatic social
transformations of this period. Only Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty! includes as subheadings
“The Spread of Imprisonment” and “The Burden of Imprisonment,” signaling to students
that one of the changes that makes the world they inherit radically different from that of
their parents is the huge numbers of Americans behind bars. As many scholars of crime
and punishment have pointed out, only a generation ago the nation’s incarceration rate had
remained steady for a century—at about 100 prisoners per 100,000 people—and many
criminologists believed that prisons were obsolete and would gradually be supplanted by
“community corrections,” treatment facilities, and other alternatives for all but the most incorrigible or violent offenders. Yet, contrary to those optimistic expectations, since 1970 the
number of felons confined in state and federal prisons has multiplied by a factor of eight,
and the overall prison incarceration rate in the United States has zoomed to nearly 500
per 100,000 people, a fivefold increase. As late as 1977 the prison population had barely
surpassed 300,000; the latest Bureau of Justice Statistics figures show that in 2010 the U.S.
prison population reached its historic peak of over 1.5 million inmates, after the country
had embarked on “the steepest and most sustained increase in the rate of imprisonment
that has been recorded since the birth of the modern prison in the nineteenth century.”1
Alex Lichtenstein is an associate professor of history at Indiana University.
I would like to thank the two anonymous JAH readers and Heather Ann Thompson for their comments and
guidance in improving this essay.
Readers may contact Lichtenstein at [email protected].
1
Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (2 vols., New York, 2011), II, 1022, 1023, 1038, 1152. James
L. Roark et al., The American Promise: A Compact History (2 vols., Boston, 2010), II, 754; Jacqueline Jones et al.,
Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States (2 vols., New York, 2003), II, 910; David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Mel Piehl, The Brief American Pageant (Boston, 2008), 656. For a recent survey of African
American history that makes mass incarceration an important element in its final chapter, see Deborah Gray White,
Mia Bay, and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans (Boston, 2012), 791–92,
797. U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners at Midyear 1981 (Washington, 1981), http://
www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/pm81.pdf, p. 3; Lauren E. Glaze and Erinn J. Herberman, Correctional Populations
in the United States, 2012 (Washington, 2013), http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus12.pdf, pp. 2–3; David
Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago, 2001), esp. 14.
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav308
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June 2015
The Journal of American History
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To be sure, historians are joining the growing ranks of social scientists, attorneys,
journalists, and even politicians who recognize “mass incarceration” in the United States
as one of the defining (and most troubling) features of our time. In a groundbreaking
2010 article in the Journal of American History, Heather Ann Thompson insisted that
since “mass incarceration mattered a great deal to the way that the postwar United States
evolved; it must then also matter when we write the history of that period.” The work of
Thompson and other historians of crime and punishment has moved the penal question
to the center of historical debates about the origins of the urban crisis, the erosion of the
power of organized labor, the criminalization of poverty, the “war on drugs,” the revitalization of the American Right, immigration policy, and the resurgence of post–civil rights
forms of racial inequality. Nevertheless, we still lack a synthesis that does for the problem
of mass incarceration what a previous generation of scholarship on punishment and society did for the history of convict leasing and chain gangs in the New South.2
In that earlier instance, a group of scholars interested in the remaking of social and
economic relations in the American South during the half century following Reconstruction examined criminal justice as a central element in the region’s history. These historians argued that the New South’s brutal penal system helped restrain post-Reconstruction state spending, was a powerful tool of racial dominance, and became an engine of
economic development and regional resuscitation. This scholarship from the 1980s and
1990s maintained an acute awareness of the worrisome national trends that foretold a return to the kind of penal practices that had made convict leasing and chain gangs of an
earlier period so notorious. These trends included growing racial disparity in incarceration rates; an abandonment of rehabilitation in the name of retribution; an increase in
long sentences for petty offenses that targeted racial minorities (drug convictions, in this
case); and a renewed attraction to privatized corrections to reduce the cost increased punishment entailed for states in a period of austerity. By the time mass incarceration had
emerged as a salient political issue, the scholarship on southern punishment had become
fully recognized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning piece of popular history—Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name—accompanied by a pbs film.3
2
A sampling of work on mass incarceration includes Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration
in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, 2012); Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York,
2007); Glenn C. Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (New
York, 2007); Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney López, and Jonathan Simon, eds., After the War on Crime: Race,
Democracy, and a New Reconstruction (New York, 2008); and Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, N.C., 2009). U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Mass Incarceration in
the United States: At What Cost—Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, October 4, 2007 (Washington, 2008). Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American
History, 97 (Dec. 2010), 703–34, esp. 734; Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (New
York, 2010); Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York,
2012); Robert T. Chase, “‘Slaves of the State’ Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and a Prison-Made Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1980,” in Life and Labor in the New New South, ed. Robert H. Zieger (Gainesville, 2012), 177–213.
3
On the New South’s penal system, see Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy
of Convict Labor in the New South (New York, 1996), xiii–xiv, 192–93. On southern punishment, see Matthew J.
Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928 (Columbia, S.C., 1996); David
M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York, 1997); Karin
A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871–1896 (Chapel
Hill, 1998); Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville, 2000); and
Vivien M. L. Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs (Gainesville, 2012).
The apotheosis of this scholarship is Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York, 2008). Slavery by Another Name, dir. Samuel Pollard (tpt
National Productions, 2012).
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
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This essay seeks to ground the emergence and impact of the modern “carceral state” in
the changing political economy of the post-1965 period. My intention is to bring recent
U.S. carceral history into a common frame with a discussion of sun belt development,
much the way a previous generation of scholars regarded chain gangs and convict leasing
as integral to the political economy of the New South. I focus on a similar regional specificity by moving away from a discussion centered on the declining urban cores and racialized ghettos of the rust belt and calling attention to a significant, but too-often-overlooked
aspect of the prison boom: leading states in the recent astronomical growth in American
imprisonment tend to be those in the most dynamic, expansive, and future-oriented sections of the country rather than in its abandoned urban-industrial core. The huge increase
in the number of prisoners can be understood as congruent with the new dominance of
the sun belt in the country’s politics, social mores, and economic capacities.4
Of course, the embrace of punitive corrections over the past few decades has been a national trend, driven by a set of ideas from the world of criminologists, police chiefs, prosecutors, federal policy wonks, victims’ rights groups, and state legislators all determined
to “get tough on crime.” Many historians and social scientists, for example, trace the roots
of the mass incarceration crisis to the formation of the 1965 President’s Commission on
Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, the creation of the Law Enforcement
Assistant Administration (leaa), and the passage of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control
and Safe Streets Act. Coming in the immediate wake of the successes of the civil rights
movement, and, indeed, with the leaa passing the same year as the Voting Rights Act of
1965, it would seem that crime policy “both responded to and moved the agenda on racial equality.” Many scholars have regarded these developments as a central component of
the racialized “southern strategy” pursued by the Republican party to secure the allegiance
of disgruntled white voters.5
But like many other contested social policies—from welfare to abortion to education
to gun laws—penal systems remain governed largely at the state level and have thus always been deeply marked by local politics and regional characteristics. No matter how often federal officials try to set the national agenda for crime control, in the end states pass
the laws, appropriate most of the resources, pass the construction bonds, hire the staff,
lease the facilities to private contractors, and construct the prisons that make mass incarceration possible and uphold its logic. Federal prisons have seen their population balloon
nearly tenfold since 1970, primarily as a function of the federal war on drugs. But stateby-state incarceration rates continue to vary quite widely, from a low of 184 per 100,000
people in Minnesota to an astonishing 865 per 100,000 in Louisiana in 2010. To fully
understand the carceral state, one must focus on the regional and the state levels. In the
4
A forthcoming work, which grew out of an important conference at Southern Methodist University in 2012
may shift the terms of this discussion. See Robert Chase and Norwood Andrews, eds., Sunbelt Prisons and the Carceral State: New Frontiers of State Power, Racial Oppression, and Resistance (Chapel Hill, forthcoming). On the conference, see http://www.smu.edu/Dedman/Academics/InstitutesCenters/swcenter/Symposia/Past/SunbeltPrisons.
5
Vesla M. Weaver, “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development, 21 (Fall 2007), 230–65, esp. 230–31; Naomi Murakawa, “The Origins of the Carceral Crisis:
Racial Order as ‘Law and Order’ in Postwar American Politics,” Race and American Political Development, ed. Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren (New York, 2008), 234–55; Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” 731–32; Alexander, New Jim Crow, 22; Robert Perkinson, “Guarded Hope: Lessons from the Prison
Boom,” Boston Review, July 14, 2008, http://www.bostonreview.net/robert-perkinson-guarded-hope-history-of-the
-prison-boom. Although most scholars note the coincidence of the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act and the
Voting Rights Act, few mention the simultaneous passage of the 1965 immigration reform legislation. Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (1965).
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June 2015
half century since the passage of the leaa, by nearly any measure—total numbers of prisoners, expenditures on corrections, employment of personnel, privatization of prisons,
and new prison construction—the states of Florida, California, and Texas (what I will call
Flocatex) have set the pace for mass incarceration nationally.6
Certainly, these three states persistently have the largest prison populations, in part
because they are the largest and fastest-growing states. Their incarceration rates, however,
while high, fall across a spectrum, with Texas at 646 per 100,000 people far above the
U.S. 2010 average of 500 prisoners per 100,000, and California, at 438, still slightly below it (although the incarceration rate in California’s “Golden Gulag” has seen the sharpest increase of these three states since 1980, due in part to the notorious “three-strikes”
law passed in 1994). It is also the case, however, that, as the Prison Policy Initiative study
of state incarceration shows, western and southern states have consistently maintained
the highest regional incarceration rates—and had the most rapid increase in that rate—
during the mass incarceration boom. Nevertheless, the significance of the sun belt model
of penology lies in more than just the number of prisoners behind bars or incarceration
rates.7
By 2000, these three states had also come to exemplify the growth of the “carceral state”
as a qualitatively distinct new formation in American governance closely tied to the triumph of a neoliberal political economy linked to what Kirkpatrick Sale dubbed a “power
shift” from the Northeast to the nation’s “southern rim.” The prison boom coincided
with a tectonic shift in the nation’s political economy, as population, resources, economic
development, and political power steadily flowed south and west into new channels cut
by the regional social transformations captured under the rubric “sun belt.” Given that
the penal systems of both Florida and Texas have deep southern roots, we can trace the
origins of sun belt incarceration, at least in part, to this “southern” tradition. As Robert
Perkinson notes in Texas Tough, when one looks for the roots of the “labor control, racial
division, and corporal debasement” that define American penality today, one finds “more
of a southern story than has generally been realized.” At the same time, it was California’s
Ronald Reagan who became in 1966 the first politician to ride a “law-and-order” campaign to the state house, setting the stage for his 1980 presidential victory that effectively
merged western and southern conservatism in a new political coalition. Meanwhile, the
antigovernment revolt that helped reduce California’s tax base and pass anti-immigrant
legislation also secured the punitive three-strikes law that expanded the carceral state in
a place once known as a model of rehabilitative penology. In tracing both the origins and
consequences of the “rightism, racism, and repression” characteristic of sun belt politics
by the 1970s, Sale noted (even before the rapid ascent in prison populations began in earnest), that “prisons too loom large on the southern rim.” Since his work in the mid-1970s,
Florida, Texas, and California have stood out as leaders in the creation and evolution of
the carceral state—from new levels of punitive legislation (California’s “three-strikes” law)
to a 600 percent increase in the incarceration rate in Texas since 1960 to innovations in
private corrections in Florida. At the same time, these three states represent signal exam6
E. Ann Carson and William J. Sabol, Prisoners in 2011 (Washington, 2012), http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/
pdf/p11.pdf, pp. 10, 12, 23. In 2000 there were 125,000 prisoners in federal institutions; by 2011 the number had
reached almost 200,000, nearly half of whom were convicted of drug offenses.
7
Carson and Sabol, Prisoners in 2011, 23. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, 2007). On the impact of California’s three-strikes law, see Simon, Governing through Crime, 155–77. Peter Wagner, “Tracking State Prison Growth in 50 States,” May 28, 2014, Prison
Policy Initiative, http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/overtime.html.
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
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ples of the transformation of the balance of regional political and economic power in the
post–World War II United States. Since 1964 five presidents have hailed from California
or Texas, and Florida has become a perennial swing state in presidential elections, provoking a constitutional crisis in 2000. A “sun belt economy” based on the extraction of fossil
fuels, military investment, service, global trade, and tourism now powers the U.S. economy, replacing an increasingly obsolete “Fordist” model of production and consumption.
Demographic and economic transition—a flow of population, labor, capital, and technical expertise from the rust belt, and the simultaneous remaking of working-class populations through post-1965 mass immigration from Asia and Latin America—have formed
the backbone of the Flocatex revolution. Intensive, rapid urbanization, fading rural areas,
and the politics of fiscal retreat and social disinvestment have underwritten these states’
growth-oriented politics. Finally, after four decades of heedless prison expansion, all three
states now face the growing fiscal limits of mass incarceration under neoliberal forms of
governance that seek to slash state expenditure on “public goods” while expanding the capacity to punish the poor. As such, the systems in those states may represent the natural
limits of the expansion of the carceral state. Or Flocatex may turn to privatization and enhanced exploitation of penal labor, in much the way that the New South did when faced
with similar fiscal restraints on its capacity to punish.8
The articulation of mass incarceration with these characteristics of the sun belt can
be located along several social axes central to mass incarceration more generally: space,
race, and governance. Where new prisons are located, who gets locked up, how states
bear the enormous costs of incarceration, and how prisons mold the nature of relationship between state and citizen in a neoliberal order that substitutes the “market” for the
state as the arbiter for public and social goods are all issues deeply embedded in a model
of regional development most advanced in Flocatex. Along with the rapid growth in the
number of prisoners in these sun belt states after 1980 came an enormous increase in the
number of correctional institutions there. Between 1979 and 2000 the number of prisons
increased 706 percent in Texas to 137, 115 percent in Florida to 84, and 177 percent in
California to 83 (faster than in any other states, even those with comparable increases in
incarceration rates), making theirs the three largest carceral systems in the nation. One
of the most striking aspects of sun belt development has been a radical reorganization
of social space, with urban sprawl abetted by freeways replacing downtown urban cores
arranged around public transport hubs as the primary means of promoting population
growth and regional economic expansion. A recent collection of essays on the sun belt is
thus appropriately organized around the concepts of space and place. Such angles of vision encompass factory relocation, freeway construction, strip malls, dam building, suburban communities, and yes, prison siting and construction. In penal matters, as in so
many other areas, “the Sunbelt . . . acted as a national pacesetter,” the editors point out.
As one of the new historians of the carceral state, Volker Janssen, shows in his contribution to this collection, “a Sunbelt ‘culture of control,’ forged out of Southern and Western
8
Kirkpatrick Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New
York, 1975); Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region
(Philadelphia, 2011). Perkinson, Texas Tough, esp. 8, 7. On California’s antigovernment revolt, see Peter Schrag,
California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment (Berkeley, 2006), 95; and Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, 1994). Sale, Power Shift, 159, 172–73. On the 600% increase in Texas’s
incarceration rate, see Margaret Werner Cahalan, Historical Corrections Statistics in the United States, 1850–1894
(Washington, 1986), http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcsus5084.pdf, p. 32.
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June 2015
penal traditions . . . have made prisons and prison politics a central feature of the modern American state” since 1960, with California, Texas, and Florida as the quintessential
examples.9
Janssen’s essay, “Sunbelt Lock-Up: Where the Suburbs Met the Super-Max,” offers primarily a spatial account of the “carceral landscape” of southern California, where the same
social and economic forces driving suburban sprawl have created a “gulag rim” cheek
by jowl with utopian bedroom communities. Janssen argues that the characteristics of
criminal justice in the postindustrial sun belt—privatized corrections, rapidly expanding
prisons, innovations such as the supermax prison—are deeply connected to the region’s
political economy. He posits a symbiotic relationship between mass incarceration and the
reordering of social and economic space over the last quarter of the twentieth century. As
he puts it, “Sunbelt politics in and outside prison walls played a crucial role in formation
of the late twentieth-century carceral state.” In 2006, for example, eight of the ten states
with the highest incarceration rates were in the sun belt.10
Much like the Soviet Gulag once did, the sun belt’s logic of prison expansion relies on penal dispersal as a form of distant exile and penal concentration as the creator of a new local
social order in regions seeking economic resources, whether Siberia, the Florida panhandle,
California’s central valley, or isolated rural Texas counties. As the Urban Institute reports,
prison facilities spread out geographically during the 1980s and 1990s. An ever-growing
number of counties in Flocatex in particular became incarcerative sites: from 45 to 78 percent of counties in Florida, from 3 to 28 percent in Texas, and from 34 to 59 percent in
California. These figures suggest the degree to which prisons became a far more common
feature on the social landscape of these states. For some rural counties prisons became central
to renewed population growth, and they bet on the idea that prisons would generate local
economic growth. (For the most part, studies show that their hopes have been disappointed.)
Texas and Florida each boast a county with prisoners making up 30 percent of the population; by the year 2000, of the forty-seven U.S. counties that counted prisoners as 10 percent
of their population, twenty-seven were in Flocatex. The same study shows that these hinterland counties, which often lobbied to become the site of new prisons, drew prisoners from
distant urban areas. In Texas, where more than half of convicted state prisoners come from
the racially diverse metroplexes of Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and San Antonio, the prisons are located in rural counties such as Bee (population 32,000), Anderson (58,000), and
Walker (61,000). Coryell County (population 77,000) has been the site of five new prisons
since 1979.11
An examination of the expansion of Florida’s corrections facilities reveals the evolution of this process. Beginning in 1995, when Florida prisons housed 62,000 inmates,
the state began a massive public and private expansion of its incarcerative capacity. That
year, four new prisons opened, adding over 5,000 new prison “beds,” concentrated in ru9
On the prison increases in Texas, Florida, and California, see Sarah Lawrence and Jeremy Travis, The New
Landscape of Imprisonment: Mapping America’s Prison Expansion (Washington, 2004), http://webarchive.urban.org/
UploadedPDF/410994_mapping_prisons.pdf, pp. 2, 10. “Introduction,” in Sunbelt Rising, ed. Nickerson and Dochuk, 14, 23.
10
Volker Janssen, “Sunbelt Lock-Up: Where the Suburbs Met the Super-Max,” in Sunbelt Rising, ed. Nickerson
and Dochuk, 218, 219–20, 236.
11
Lawrence and Travis, New Landscape of Imprisonment, 13–14, 31, 34–36; Janssen, “Sunbelt Lock-Up”; Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time. For the Texas county populations, see Bee County, U.S.
Census Bureau, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48025.html; Anderson County, ibid., http://quickfacts
.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48001.html; Walker County, ibid., http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48471
.html; and Coryell County, ibid., http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/48099.html.
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
119
Major Correctional Facilities in California, 2014
Del Norte
Siskiyou
Modoc
Shasta
Trinity
Lassen
Humboldt
Tehama
Plumas
Butte
Glenn
Sierra
Mendocino
Lake
Colusa
Sutter Yuba
Nevada
Placer
El Dorado
Yolo
Sonoma
Napa
Alpine
Sacramento Amador
Solano
Marin
Contra Costa
San Joaquin
Calaveras
San Francisco
Stanislaus
San Mateo
Tuolumne
Santa Clara
Santa Cruz
Mono
Mariposa
Madera
Merced
Fresno
San Benito
Inyo
Tulare
Montery
Kings
San Luis Obispo
Kern
San Bernardino
Santa Barbara
Ventura
Los Angeles
Orange
Riverside
San Diego
Imperial
The geographical expansion of the prison system over the past three decades in Flocatex has
resulted in the commitment of ever-growing regional carceral economies in once-isolated
corners of California, Florida, and Texas. See this map and those on the following two pages.
ral counties such as Gadsden, Okeechobee, and Bay. (Three of these facilities were private
prisons). The following year a new state prison opened in rural Santa Rosa County, and
in 1997 another pair of private prisons, with a combined capacity of 2,800, opened in
rural corners of the state. More recently, between 2007 and 2010, a new spate of prison
expansion remade a number of Florida’s smaller counties: 5,500 prisoners call the declining rural communities of Live Oak, Graceville, and Milton home, as the state’s total number of inmates surpassed 100,000 and its expenditure on corrections reached $2.3 billion.
Since 1995 Florida has opened eleven major new correctional facilities, six of them run
by private corporations. They are mostly located in isolated rural areas, especially in the
struggling panhandle. Two of these prisons, for example, are in Santa Rosa County, which
has a population of about 140,000 and is 90 percent white. The most recent addition to
Santa Rosa’s carceral landscape and economy, the Blackwater River Correctional Facility,
privately built and operated by the GEO Group, holds two thousand prisoners (half of
them are black), and supporters claimed it would bring 350 new jobs to the area while
reducing the cost of running the prison.12
12
“Florida Department of Corrections, Facility Directory,” Jan. 5, 2015, http://www.dc.state.fl.us/orginfo/
facilitydir.html#4; State of Florida Department of Corrections, Annual Report, Fiscal Year 2011–2012, http://www
The Journal of American History
120
June 2015
Major Correctional Facilities in Florida, 2012
Holmes
Okaloosa
Jackson
Nassau
Gadsen
Liberty
Gulf
Franklin
Wakulla
Madison
Suwannee
Duval
Baker
a
Bay
Hamilton
Leon
bi
Calhoun
lu
m
Washington
Co
Walton
Jeff
ers
on
bia
am
Esc
Santa Rosa
Taylor
Union
Lafayette
Bradford
St Johns
Clay
Alachua
Gilchrist
Putnam
Dixie
Flagler
Levy
Marion
Volusia
Citrus
Lake
Sumter
Hernando
Orange
Pasco
Osceola
Polk
llas
e
Pin
Hillsborough
Brevard
Indian River
Manatee
Okeechobee
Hardee
St Lucie
Highlands
Sarasota
De Soto
Charlotte
Lee
Martin
Glades
Hendry
Palm Beach
Broward
Collier
Monroe
Miami-Dade
As the Florida example indicates, state legislators have sought to mitigate the enormous costs of incarceration through the neoprivatization of corrections. This strategy
resolves for policy makers the conundrum of both taking a tough-on-crime political
stance and demanding a reduction in state spending, much the way their New South
predecessors did. Not only does prison privatization shed state fiscal responsibility
for prisons but it also is compatible with the regnant ideology of market fundamentalism: any state function can supposedly be more efficiently managed by the private
sector. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant points out, in an era of fiscal austerity, “the
American electorate refuses to shoulder the exorbitant cost of the swing from the social state to the penal state” that has characterized the sun belt challenge to New Deal
models of governance. One result is the privatization of corrections, and just as the
.dc.state.fl.us/pub/annual/1112/AnnualReport-1112.pdf, pp. 22–32; “The GEO Group, Inc. and Blackwater River Correctional Facility Bring Approximately 350 New Jobs to Milton, fl. Job Fair June 1st,” PRWeb, May 26,
2010, http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/05/prweb4044204.htm; American Civil Liberties Union, Banking on
Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration (New York, 2011), https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_
document/bankingonbondage_20111102.pdf, p. 6; Steve Bousquet, “New Private Prison in Milton Shows Florida Cost-Savings Challenge,” Tampa Bay Times, April 24, 2011, http://mediakit.tampabay.com/news/publicsafety/
crime/new-private-prison-in-milton-shows-florida-cost-savings-challenge/1165848.
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
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Major Correctional Facilities in Texas, 2014
Dallam
Sherman Hansford Ochiltree Lipscomb
Hartley
Moore
Oldham
Potter
Carson
Dear Smith
Randall
Armstrong
Parmer
Castro
Hutchinson Roberts
Wheeler
Donley Collingsworth
Briscoe
Swisher
Hemphil
Gray
Hall
Childress
Hardeman
Bailey
Lamb
Floyd
Motley
Cottle
Crosby
Dickens
King
Knox
Garza
Kent
Stonewall
Haskell
Hale
Cochran Hockley
Lubbock
Wilbarger
Foard
Wichita
Clay
Baylor
Montague
Archer
Grayson
Cooke
Lamar
Fannin
Red River
Bowie
Delta
Yoakum
Gaines
Lynn
Terry
Throckmorton
Young
Jack
Martin
Borden
Scurry
Howard
Mitchell
Fisher
Nolan
Jones
Shackelford
Taylor
Hood
Eastland
Callahan
Loving
Winkler
Ward
Ector
Crane
Reeves
Midland Glasscock Sterling
Upton
Reagan
Irion
Coke
Tom Green
Runnels
Coleman
Erath
Pecos
Crokett
Schleicher
Brewster
Williamson
Real
Blanco
Lee
Travis
Hays
Kerr
Edwards
Brazos
Bandera
Uvalde
Zavala
Frio
Atascosa
Trinity
Polk
Jasper
Tyler
Newton
San Jacinto
Montgomery
Austin Waller
Hardin
Liberty
Harris
Chambers
Orange
Jefferson
Colrado
Fort Bend
Wharton
Wilson
Maverick
Grimes
Lavaca
Gonzales
Bexar
Medina
Shelby
San Augustine
Angelina
Sabine
Houston
Madison
Waller
Washington
Fayette
Caldwell
Guadalupe
Kinney
Panola
Bastrop
Kendall
Comal
Rusk
Harrison
Nacogdoches
Leon
Robertson
Milam
Burleson
Gillespie
Val Verde
Cherokee
Limestone
Bell
Kimble
Terrell
Anderson
Falls
Lampasas
Burnet
Mason
Sutton
Presidio
McLennan
Llano
Gregg
Freestone
Caryell
Menard
Marion
Upshur
Smith
Henderson
Navarro
Hill
Mills
Wood
Ellis
Bosque
Concho
San Saba
Rains
Kaufman
Van Zandt
Johnson
Hamilton
McCulloch
Jeff Davis
Dallas
Franklin
Titus
Hopkins
Morris Cass
Hunt
Somervell
Comanche
Brown
Tarrant
Parker
Stephens Palo Pinto
El Paso
Culberson
Collin
Rockwall
Dawson
Andrews
Hudspeth
Denton
Wise
De Witt
Karnes
Jackson
Victoria
Galveston
Brazaria
Matagorda
Goliad
Dimmit
La Salle
McMullen
Live Oak
Jim Wells
Duval
Webb
Bee
Calhoun
Refugio
Aransas
San Patricio
Nueces
Kleberg
Zapata
Jim Hogg
Starr
Brooks
Hidalgo
Kenedy
Willacy
Camerson
New South was an innovator in this area in the nineteenth century, the sun belt is in
the vanguard today. As recently as 1984, only 1,000 prisoners were working in private prison industries. Yet, during the 1990s alone, the number of “beds” in private
prisons ballooned to over 70,000. By 2010, that figure reached 128,000. Here too,
Texas and Florida took the lead, as together they housed 30,000 prisoners in private
facilities.13
At least until recently, California was the exception that proved the rule of sun belt
prison privatization. The state’s powerful prison guard’s union, the California Corrections and Peace Officers Association (ccpoa), insisted that “public safety should not
be for profit” and blocked most of the state’s efforts to ease the fiscal burden of incarceration through privatization. However, in 2013 Democratic stalwart Jerry Brown
increased the numbers of California prisoners sent to private facilities—most of them
out of state—to over twelve thousand, which partly explains the state’s “declining”
number of inmates in public correctional institutions. Significantly, one of the most
ardent advocates of prison privatization in the Golden State is the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the progenitors of the state’s fiscal austerity driven by Proposition
13
Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, esp. 168; Criminal Justice Associates, Private Sector Involvement in Prison-Based
Businesses: A National Assessment (Washington, 1985), https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/100437NCJRS
.pdf, p. 1; Cody Mason, Too Good to Be True: Private Prisons in America (Washington, 2012), http://sentencing
project.org/doc/publications/inc_Too_Good_to_be_True.pdf, pp. 1, 4–5.
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June 2015
13 (which cut property taxes) nearly forty years ago. In the pages of the Orange County
Register the organization’s president insisted that the best way to trim the state’s massive budget deficits was to reduce the cost of the carceral state. But the way to do this
was not by reducing incarceration; rather, the group believed, the state should emulate the “public-private partnerships” that had reduced the fiscal strain of corrections
in Texas.14
The potent combination of prison expansion to counties seeking new economic engines and willing to provide cheap local labor, the growing privatization of corrections,
and the dispersal of a racialized urban population of convicts to distant gulags is exemplified by sun belt carceral development. The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore presents
a trenchant analysis in her 2007 book on the recent history of California prisons, The
Golden Gulag. Gilmore emphasizes how the carceral state reshaped the state’s demography, funneling black and Hispanic prisoners from urban enclaves in the Los Angeles
basin beset by poverty, unemployment, and intense policing, to resource-poor rural
counties that clamored for prison growth and prison jobs. At one time California was in
many ways the quintessential example of postwar development: it enjoyed massive federal spending (on military contracts, irrigation, and interstate highways) coupled with
heavy state investments in human capital through the development of a world-class university research base, and high levels of consumption. Gilmore argues that the material
and ideological collapse of the foundations of this system left a vacuum that the carceral
state has filled, resolving the interlinked problems of surplus population, surplus land,
and surplus capital in California’s shifting political economy. Gilmore’s work suggests
that in the first decade of the twenty-first century, “A new kind of state—an antistate
state—[was] built on prison foundations.” This simultaneously revoked the social wages
associated with the New Deal order and substituted a new form of state power. Incarcerating surplus people replaced providing for their welfare; crime control supplanted
labor market interventions; spending on corrections substituted for ordinary countercyclical fiscal stimuli and social investment (in education, for example). Gilmore also
observes that despite their apparent dissimilarities, “the places prisons are built share
many similarities with the places prisoners come from,” especially in terms of social
disinvestment. Thus, the physical geography of the modern carceral state effects a linkage between those regions—rural and urban—left behind by the postindustrial, fully
mechanized, high-tech, information economy, with a declining need for inexpensive,
unskilled laborers.15
The irony, of course, is that in the immediate postwar years, California was the leader in reform penology and “therapeutic rehabilitation.” After the 1960s, however, the
influence of southern punitive penology derived from places such as Texas and Florida
grew, corresponding with the decline of the dream of a Golden State utopia and the
14
Joshua Page, The Toughest Beat: Politics, Punishment, and the Prison Officers Union in California (New York,
2011), 138–39; Schrag, California, 201–2; Carson and Sabol, Prisoners in 2011, 2, 4–5; Don Thompson, “Jerry
Brown Proposes Sending California Inmates to Private Prisons, Jails in Response to Court,” Huffington Post, Aug.
27, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/27/jerry-brown-california-inmates_n_3825401.html; Saki
Knafo and Chris Kirkham, “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California’s Overcrowding Crisis,” ibid., Oct.
25, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html; Jon Coupal and Leonard Gilroy, “Cutting Costs for State’s Prisons,” Orange County Register, April 8, 2010, http://www
.ocregister.com/opinion/state-243090-prisons-california.html.
15
Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 38–39, 245, 247; Mike Davis, “Hell Factories in the Field,” Nation, Feb. 20, 1995,
pp. 229–34; Peter Schrag, Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (New York, 1998); Jonathan Simon,
“Rise of the Carceral State,” Social Research, 74 (Summer 2007), 471–508.
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
123
state’s retreat from modern developmental welfarism. Those trends, closely linked to
the growing conservative hegemony in sun belt politics, also included sharply reduced
tax bases, disinvestment from education, and the growing privatization of social services and basic social goods. When wedded to a law-and-order politics driven by fear,
these forces combined to create a potentially unsustainable result: Proposition 13 gutted California’s tax base, while the “three-strikes” law massively increased the cost of its
prison system.
A number of scholars have demonstrated how the sun belt conservative ascendancy,
built on the ideology of low taxes, an eviscerated public sector, and inviolable property
rights, has dovetailed with racial exclusion and nativist politics— from Barry Goldwater’s
opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act to Reagan’s opposition as California’s governor
to the state’s fair housing act of 1963 and as president to affirmative action, to more recent efforts to criminalize immigrants and their families. When this brand of conservatism joined with a sun belt paradigm of punishment, the result was the deeply racialized
carceral state that has emerged on the country’s southern rim over the past three decades.
As Peter Schrag notes in his account of California’s long decline, the state’s tough-oncrime stance “signaled a southward shift” during the 1990s, making California’s approach
to criminal justice more like that of Texas or Florida than that of the progressive reform
states that once had informed its therapeutic penology. Schrag also observes that much
of the political inclination to downsize public service spending in California—and to,
correspondingly, super-size penal spending—accompanied a massive demographic shift
in the state that transformed whites into one minority among many. Texas and Florida,
of course, have seen similar demographic transitions, especially in their rapidly growing
urban areas. Census data shows that non-Hispanic whites now constitute less than 40
percent of California’s population; the corresponding figure for the white population of
Texas is 44 percent, and in Florida, 57 percent and projected to shrink. These three states
have by far the largest absolute numbers of “minority” residents in the country. But the
proportion of black and Hispanic inmates in their state prisons continues to outstrip their
population at large—68.5 percent in Texas, 69 percent in California, and 53 percent in
Florida. Increasing numbers of noncitizens are also spending time in the state prisons of
Flocatex; a total of 35,500 noncitizens were housed in the three states combined in 2011,
or over one-third of all incarcerated noncitizens in the nation. Here too, subcontracted,
privatized carceral institutions have played a significant role in the lockdown of the undocumented.16
The racial disproportion in sun belt prison populations should come as little surprise.
In the wake of the civil rights victories of the 1960s, “crime quickly opened an important
line of retreat for political defenders of segregation and states’ rights,” who increasingly
16
On sun belt conservative ascendency, see Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American
Right (Princeton, 2001); Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton,
2012); Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York,
2001); and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia, 2013). Schrag, Paradise Lost, 94–95; Amy Sherman, “Florida Will Become Majority-Minority in 2014,
Alan Grayson Says,” Politifact Florida, Oct. 31, 2013, http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2013/oct/31/
alan-grayson/florida-will-become-majority-minority-alan-grayson/; Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Statistical
Report Fiscal Year 2010 (Austin, 2011), http://www.texascjc.org/sites/default/files/jc_files/TDCJ_Statistical_Report_
FY_2010_(Dec_2010).pdf, p. 1; California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, California Prisoners and
Parolees, 2010 (Sacramento, 2011), http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/reports_research/offender_information_services_branch/
Annual/CalPris/CALPRISd2010.pdf, p. 19; Florida Department of Corrections, “2010–2011 Agency Statistics,”
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/pub/annual/1011/stats/ip_general.html; Carson and Sabol, Prisoners in 2011, 13.
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June 2015
found it possible to restate their basic principles in a newly acceptable language, which
was wedded to a broad-based strategy of political realignment (the “southern strategy”).
This political realignment depended heavily on the sun belt resurgence of the Republican party, melding sun belt ideologies and concerns effectively with the civil rights counterrevolution in the formerly segregationist South. The convergence of post–New Deal
forms of governance with post–civil rights fear of crime as a form of racial threat has
proven especially potent in a region that effectively joins the punitive traditions of the
New South with the antistate sentiments of the new West. As Jonathan Simon, Loïc Wacquant, and other sociological theorists of crime and punishment such as David Garland
have shown, the now-obsolete rehabilitative model of penal practice was closely tied to
the welfarist ideals of the New Deal state. Much the way that countercyclical spending
might even out a business cycle, the New Deal state was willing to invest in criminal rehabilitation to reintegrate wayward citizens into a nominally stable social order. With the
repudiation of this appeal to social solidarity and with the rise of a new individualism in
the 1980s, punitive and exclusionary policies came to replace this model of governance.
Simon, in particular, places mass incarceration within a series of historical “penal regimes”
that have articulated modes of governance with forms of punishment. During the New
Deal order, a new therapeutic form of “correctional institution” sought to “transform recalcitrant subjects who had typically ‘failed’ in the softer sectors of the New Deal” welfare state, with California leading the way. In today’s post-Fordist era, the carceral state,
with its much expanded capacity, has, Simon suggests, devolved into a “waste management prison,” designed to isolate what are seen as irredeemable members of the polity.
Absent from Simon’s formulation of the evolving connection between “governmentality”
and punishment, however, is the privatized system of racialized punishment that emerged
in the late nineteenth-century South. Including this trend toward privatization helps explain the hybridized form of the sun belt’s carceral regime, which draws simultaneously
on southern and western ideas of punishment and the state. This approach, in turn, lends
weight to Robert Perkinson’s contention that Texas, which more than any other state
brings these models together, has become the template for the modern correctional system in the United States.17
The consequences—as opposed to the justifications—of a long-term shift in governance centered on the “war on crime” are just now coming into view, as the social and
fiscal costs of mass imprisonment become due. For example, communities—usually already impoverished, urban, and of color—that have borne the brunt of the rush to incarcerate now suffer from an even greater deficit of social capital. Young men who have
spent their prime years in prison have few stable family ties, diminished employability,
a lack of skills, and little education. Yet, returning to the textbooks with which I began,
one would be hard pressed to find in current syntheses an acknowledgment that mass
incarceration in our own era has played much the same role that the deployment of the
criminal justice system played in the wake of Reconstruction in the making of the Jim
Crow South, both in reinstituting a disrupted racial order and in tailoring punishment
to a rapidly transforming political economy. By no means does this require or imply a direct or functional correlation between economic trends, the exploitation of prison labor
17
Jonathan Simon, Ian Haney López, and Mary Louise Frampton, “Introduction,” in After the War on Crime, ed.
Frampton, López, and Simon, 7; Jonathan Simon, “From New Deal to Crime Deal,” ibid., 54; Garland, Culture of
Control; Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; Alexander, New Jim Crow, 56. Simon, Governing through Crime, 150, 153;
Simon, “Rise of the Carceral State,” 476–96; Perkinson, Texas Tough, 1–14.
Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration
125
by the private sector, and/or the new business opportunities provided by the correctional
apparatus. Indeed, one could easily argue that in an era of austerity and slipping levels of
capital accumulation, the balance sheet of mass incarceration is probably marked in red,
as its fiscal costs approach unsustainability, draining states’ general funds. As the National
Association of State Budget Officers recently remarked in a report devoted to corrections
expenditures: “Many states are finding the opportunity cost from directing more resources to corrections year after year too high, resulting in significantly less money for other
priorities like education or infrastructure.”18
Ultimately, the history of mass incarceration does not come down to a question of
costs and benefits, however. Rather, the massive and unprecedented increase in imprisonment over the past forty years is closely and structurally related to shifts in the nature and
geography of U.S. capitalism in this same period. This trend is best exemplified by the explosive growth in the nonindustrial sector of the economy, the privatized ideal of a weak
state, and the determined fiscal austerity in the area of social goods, which together have
come to define the sun belt political economy, as well as the neoliberal ideal writ large.
As with the post-1865 South, the analysis of post-1965 Flocatex offers a view of the “war
on crime” that allows us to see mass incarceration as an integral aspect of current regional
history, rather than as some unfortunate by-product or deeply aberrant social exception
to otherwise healthy dynamics of race, class, and political economy.
18
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Corrections, Year at a Glance, Fall 2010 (Sacramento, 2010), http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/docs/2011_Annual_Report_Final.pdf, p. 2; National Association of State
Budget Officers, State Spending for Corrections: Long-Term Trends and Recent Criminal Justice Policy Reforms (Washington, 2013), https://www.nasbo.org/sites/default/files/pdf/State%20Spending%20for%20Corrections.pdf, p. 4.
For a critique of the “prison-industrial complex” as a model for understanding mass incarceration, see Wacquant,
Punishing the Poor, 29.