Bird’s Eye: Slavery is alive and well in Lockuptown, the city of prisoners in the US, and now the second largest American city. Adam Gopnik’s stunning article from this week’s New Yorker looks at the number and way that millions are imprisoned, and at the CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America, the company that makes money from them. This is an unforgettable article. We follow this with a close examination of how the CCA shapes the law to create more prisoners, and end with Jane Jacobs, who presciently highlighted the precise moral problem with this.

* The Caging of America Adam Gopnik The New Yorker

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

…..No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

* Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law  NPR

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch….What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants. “They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community,” Nichols said, “the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate…They talked like they didn’t have any doubt they could fill it.” That’s because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona’s immigration law….The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

* Jane Jacobs and the Problem of Monstrous Hybrids Forbes

Delegating a coercive government functions like operating a prison to a private company is dangerous because the prison company has divided loyalty. The people in charge of a prison ought to be completely devoted to serving the public and the rule of law. But a private company also has an obligation to generate profits for shareholders, which can lead them to cut corners in ways that damage the rights of others. In this case, the profit motive drove a prison company to lobby for laws that would swell the prison population, harming both immigrants and taxpayers.

Jacobs calls combinations of the two syndromes—and the institutions that operate on such hybrid moral systems—”monstrous hybrids.”