 A strike by prisoners in the US state of Alabama has entered its third week. They are protesting not only working conditions in prisons, but also the legal structure of mass incarceration. The strike has brought into focus the exploitative prison industry in Alabama, but also the entire legal system in the US, which is the highest number of prisoners in the world. Why does the US have such a huge segment of its population behind bars? How do racial and other socioeconomic factors play into this policy of mass incarceration? Eugene Puriar of Breakthrough News explains. You know, I think the Alabama prison strike is a perfect opportunity to look at really as a microcosm, one state of what we see in the whole country. I mean, the United States, I mean, there's a frequent stab about 5% of the world's population, about 25% of the world's prisoners. There's 2 million people in prisons and jails at any given time in the United States. And if you count people that have some sort of electronic ankle monitor or things like that, prison in another form, it's about 7 million. So overwhelmingly, the United States is the world's largest jailer. It's extraordinarily disproportionate with the vast majority of people being in prison, being folks coming from lower income, working class backgrounds, disproportionately black, disproportionately Latino, disproportionately Native American, disproportionately people who have been homeless, disproportionately people who have mental illness, disproportionately people who have any almost every negative ailment you can think of about capitalist society. So really, when you look at the prison system in the United States of America, what you really have to look at it as is a criminalizing almost basically a military solution to the social problems that have been created by the system of quote, unquote, neoliberalism, the extreme unequal capitalism that's been pushed in the United States since the late 1970s. That those policies which deindustrialized the country, which caused mass structural unemployment to increase, which destroyed whole communities in the so-called inner cities, primarily black working class communities in terms of their economic opportunity, created a whole range of deprivation, destruction, and just abject, you know, absurd living conditions that were terrible and exploitative in every single way. But rather than address that, because why would you address it when you solved it? The system in the United States decided to hold the lid on a boiling pot. And many of these parts of the country where there are all these various different contradictions that emerged, and instead of addressing social problems, they criminalize them, they penalize them, and they create this huge system of mass incarceration in order to contain the social carnage of the policies of neoliberalism, and on the same time as a weapon of social control to send a message to those in the highly criminalized communities about what will happen to you if you attempt to stand up and be counted around the treatment of your community being so poor. So on both ends, it's solving an economic problem, and it's also continuing the untrammeled rule of capital in the United States by sending a message to those who are the most victimized to quote-unquote stay in line, which means to stay in a high poverty, high unemployment, low wage type of reality with very little opportunity for yourself or your family or your loved one. So, you know, in a microcosm, that is what we see in the U.S. prison system is the direct fallout of the so-called free market paradise that is the United States of America. And I think just as we've seen in Alabama, as we've seen consistently since 2008, prisoners are increasingly rising up against terrible health care, terrible working conditions, basically slavery, and really the lack of any basic human rights or dignity. The private prison industry in the U.S. plays a huge role in keeping a lot of people behind bars. A private sector in which a number of asset management companies are also invested in has its tentacles in every aspect of prison life. How have these firms contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration? What kind of lobbying efforts have they undertaken? And what is the influence on politicians? You know, when you really look at the issue of how prisons have become these profit centers, it's twofold. You know, maybe the most notable actually is the billions and billions of dollars it's made every single year on privatizing public prisons services. So the health care will be run by a private company. The food will be, you know, provisioned by a private company. Prisoners will be hired out to work for private companies, everything from call centers to wrapping video games to fish farming in different parts of the country. In fact, most of the mid-Atlantic region of the East Coast, Tilapia, which is a very popular fish, quite a bit of that is actually harvested by prisoners in a private prison in this sense. But certainly in the context of prison contracting, it's become this huge, huge business as prisons have expanded and boomed and as state legislatures have looked to, you know, essentially line the pockets of their friends in the corporate world by allowing them the opportunity to make quite a bit of money running these various concessions. One of the worst, of course, that is well known in America is telephone services where there's extreme price gouging, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40%, sometimes even 120% more per call than an average person making outside of it. So a huge amount of money being made just in that space alone. Then you also have the private prison industry, which is heavily concentrated in immigrant detention. 81% of all immigrants in the United States that are in an immigrant detention center in a private facility, but in some states, Montana, 50% of the prisoners are in a private facility. I think it's 30-some odd percent in Tennessee. So you can see at many state-level prison establishments in the states are where the most people are in prison. There's also a heavy presence of these private prisons. The federal government alone in 2021 spent $3 billion on immigrant detention centers and other private prisons. So it gives you a sense of where it is. CoreCivic, the biggest company of the private prison companies, is going to make probably about $120 million, maybe more than that. That's just what they're saying last quarter. In pure profit, they're also spending $250 million giving money back to rich shareholders. So it's a huge, huge business the way that they're playing and it creates this entire matrix around law and order of politics in America that can in many ways exist without the profit element of it because it arose, like I said, to address the social contradictions of neoliberal policy. But now that you have all these people making billions and billions of dollars, you now have this huge lobby that is going to lobby at the local, state, and federal level and certainly does spending millions of dollars on politicians and on lobbyists every single year to maintain the toughest policies that send the most people to prison for the longest possible time because they know they are going to be able to profit in a huge way off of that and that creates a whole separate new constituency promoting these policies of mass incarceration that obviously becomes a huge issue as people start to question mass incarceration to have this huge material interest pushing back, you know, plays a major role in continuing to keep the United States as the world's largest prison house. Now you look at especially the private prison industry the amount of funding that is going to law and order politicians is very significant, you know, in just the first few months of this year they spent over a million dollars on just a handful of politicians and that's just the legal money that you can track and of course people don't want to look like they're taking money from private prisons so when you think about dark money that's the kind of money you have to think about but it's even double, you know, doubly sinister because you look at a lot of the senators and congressmen who are Marco Rubio for instance who get a lot of their get a lot of money from the private prison industry they also get a lot of money from Wall Street and Wall Street is one of the is really a heavy investor about 60% of course Civic which I already mentioned is owned by big investment funds like Vanguard, Fidelity, BlackRock and others and so you have these big investors who also have an interest in private prisons because they view it as a steady growth industry because racism and the other realities of the sort of hot-button nature of the politics of quote-unquote crime they know is a saleable product and is being pushed aggressively especially by Republicans but also many Democrats and thus the lock them up and throw away the key mentality will continue to create these profit opportunities and there's no doubt about it. I mean certainly we're not in the rooms with the closed doors but you know I think anyone with any basic common sense knows that a lot of these financial industry interests are undoubtedly also when they're presenting their agenda for low taxes and destroying public services to these politicians are also talking to them about politics like immigration detention which many of these people like Marco Rubio again are heavily in favor of expanding and so you can see that both the money itself from the industry itself but also the money from the carry on industries the AT&T's who have the phone contracts the black rocks that own a bunch of the stock that are going to make money off of it creates a virtuous feedback loop where a lot of the biggest industries from telecommunications to manufacturing to financial services are all deeply invested and undoubtedly lobbying politicians around policies that will continue to push this kind of mass incarceration militarized policing in the United States.