Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

2. Taking Over: The Private Company in the Public Prison

50 > 51 filed by prisoners assigned to Project Habilitate Women, the new drug treatment program that the Company was running in the prison. Specifically, prisoners contended that they had been forced to watch “pro-Nazi propaganda” by a counselor in the treatment program. After receiving the complaints, the lieutenant contacted Joanne Torrence, the director of the program and a Company employee. She did not respond to any of his initial inquiries. When the prisoners did not receive a timely response from the lieutenant, they had concerned family members notify the American Civil Liberties Union. A lawyer from the organization contacted the warden about the incident. It was only then that an investigation was conducted into the event, one that was run by staff from the Company, not state prison employees. As reported to the warden, the Company’s investigation revealed that one of its counselors had required prisoners in the program to watch Schindler’s List, a movie about the Holocaust.1 She told them the film was about “cultural diversity” before popping the tape into the VCR and returning to her office. When the movie was over, she sent the prisoners to the cafeteria for dinner with no discussion of the movie, the historical context of Nazi Germany, or invitations for the women to talk with her if they had questions, concerns, or reactions to the film. Following the investigation, the counselor was disciplined by the Company for failure to do “direct therapeutic work” following the screening of the film. The incident proved embarrassing for prison administrators because it suggested they were ultimately not in control of what was happening in PHW, a program that housed nearly one quarter of the prison’s inmate population . As the lieutenant commented in his remarks at the accountability meeting, “Look, I want to know who the hell they answer to. The complaint comes to me, I try to investigate and get nowhere because the program director supposedly doesn’t work for us. However, it’s my ass on the line with the DOC [Department of Correction] when the ACLU gets involved.” A chorus of voices rose up in agreement as the lieutenant looked at the warden and asked, “Do they answer to us or are they truly independent contractors?” Before the lieutenant could finish his thought, Warden Richardson was shaking his head saying, “No, no, no. We’re responsible. It doesn’t matter who signs her check, we have the final word. We contracted them” (his emphasis). His response provoked a second, then a third round of questions from the other administrators in attendance, many of whom noted that Ms. Torrence, the director of PHW, did not attend accountability meetings even though she held a supervisory position that was roughly analogous to the supervisory positions held by state employees in charge of educational and vocational programs in the prison.2 As the meeting wore on, the administrators’ 52 > 53 by the popularity of criminal anthropology—a set of theories premised on the belief that criminals were “throwbacks” to a biologically inferior and more primitive race of people.3 In this framework, reform made little sense since “primitives” were incapable of controlling their “savage” impulses.4 Beyond this, the broader southern economy was on the brink of collapse in the absence of slave labor. The solution that emerged was convict leasing. It existed in various guises but at its core, convict leasing involved private businesses (typically plantation owners) paying the state for the use of prisoners ’ labor.5 Prisoners were not compensated for their work. In organizing the penal system in this way, southern states were able to balance their crimecontrol budgets (and in some cases turn a profit) while simultaneously shoring up plantation economies by providing a ready supply of cheap labor. Thus it is not the presence of private interests that distinguishes the current moment from other eras in American prison history. Rather, it is their growing influence and the multifarious extent of their reach. By the end of the 1990s, the spread of private interests in the prison system became so pronounced that scholars and activists observed that the drug war, coupled with the mass incarceration it produced, fueled a historically unprecedented influx of corporate vendors and private interests.6 Scholars like Angela Davis characterize these labyrinthine public–private relationships as a “prison– industrial complex” and suggest that it has rapidly eclipsed the “military– industrial complex” of the...