Punishing for a living: more on the cementing of prisons

In: Social justice: a journal of crime, conflict and world order, Volume 31, Issue 1/2

Abstract

In "a world without prisons", Julia Sudbury ties the fate of the marginalized masses to resistance against intersecting military, penal, and imperial projects of dominant neoliberal regimes. The growing workforce of social control reveals much about how these intersecting roots extend into the fabric of our society. Prison work has come to represent a "good deal" in the new economy of opportunity, perhaps gaining a modicum of glamour through the penal obsession of popular culture, but mainly because of its sheer abundance and relative security. Recall that direct and intergovernmental justice system expenditures in the U.S. totaled around $36 billion in 1982 and almost $147 billion by 1999. This massive expenditure has not gone mainly to construction, but rather to institutional operations, including labor. Exhorts anti-globalization activists to explore a contradiction at home that ideologically and materially supports the growth of the prison-industrial complex. (Original abstract - amended)