Corporations Go to Prisons: The Expansion of Corporate Power in the Correctional Industry

Over the last two decades, the U.S. prison population has quadrupled, with some 1.9 million people behind bars in federal and state prisons, and local jails by the year 2000. Corporations are seeking profit-making opportunities from this prison population. In this paper, we examine two major areas through which corporations are capitalizing on prison labor: prison privatization and prison industry. We briefly review key explanations of incarceration, report on the current state of prison privatization and prison industrialization, examine the impact they have on organized labor, and propose union strategies in fighting against the expansion of corporate power in the correctional industry.