A central component of Trump’s campaign was his promise to “bring back jobs.” And to give credit where credit is due, his administration has been fantastic for one particular industry: private prisons.
The administration’s decision to rescind the executive order issued under President Obama to gradually reduce federal use of private prisons should be no surprise. After all, the private prison company GEO Group gave $331,360 to Trump’s presidential campaign.
It’s only natural that a mutualistic relationship would exist between the two, especially since private prisons operate over half of the nation’s immigrant detention centers. Trump’s policies on this front are good for business.
At the same time that the administration embraced the use of private prisons, it also announced that there would be a “greater enforcement” of marijuana laws. This, too, is only logical. Most private prisons have “lock-up quotas” in their contracts with the government, some going so far as to require that they be at least 90 percent full at all times.
The easiest way to fill up prison cells is to go after drug users. After all, 46.4 percent of inmates in the United States were incarcerated for drug-related offenses as of late January.
These decisions, however, are just two strands in the vast web that comprises what we might call the Prison-Industrial Complex, a social institution responsible for the fact that the United States, while making up around 5 percent of the world’s population, is home to almost 25 percent of its prisoners.
In the United States, the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution prohibits involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” This means that it is constitutional to force prisoners to work against their will, which is exactly what happens in many prisons.
Black Americans in the late 19th century had their freedoms harshly restricted by the “Black codes” in the southern United States, which created heavy fines for trivial offenses like “vagrancy” and forced black men into penal labor.
The modern prison-industrial complex truly blossomed, however, with Richard Nixon and the “War on Drugs.” It’s not mere conjecture that black people were specifically targeted by the “War on Drugs." Take it from Nixon’s Assistant for Domestic Affairs, John Ehrlichman, who said: