Production and Propagation of the Drainage System via the Prison Industrial Complex
In her book, Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky, Pem Buck introduces the fascinating yet pervasive construct of “the drainage system” that she witnessed in rural Kentucky, from the emic positionality of a white, working-class Kentuckian (which she acknowledges as “the view from under the sink”). According to Buck, “the drainage system” refers to the system of consolidation of wealth by the “elites” through the arrangement of labor; the flow of value (profits) from the lower-class and working class to the elites. In essence, it functions like a “plumbing system” wherein the profits are transported from the numerous small pipes to a few large pipes. Buck explicates this “drainage system” as not solely being driven by economic forces, but also by cultural processes. The modification and mobilization of cultural beliefs aids in creating and propagating the belief that the elite upper-class is in a position of power naturally and deservingly.
In the article “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection” (Collins, Patricia H., 1989), Collins espouses the view that thinking around ‘oppression’ needs to be radically reformed and introduces “systems of oppression” to elucidate how our encounters with oppression structure our experiences of the world (alluding to a form of positionality). Here, the aforementioned notion of drainage system aligns strongly with Collin’s description of “systems of oppression,” which interact with and forge social identities (for instance, the class hierarchy and social disparity of “elite” upper-class and working-class as per Buck’s views) thereby, conferring privilege and structuring violence, among other advantages and disadvantages.
Bringing together the ideas of “drainage systems” and “systems of oppression,” one can visualize numerous present-day examples of how the elite (people in positions of power and privilege) exploit the hard-work and toil of the working-class (people with little or no influence over their work/life choices), but one of the most apparent yet overlooked scenarios where this is applicable, is the “prison-industrial complex”. The prison-industrial complex refers to the substantial growth in the number of prison inmates across the U.S. over the past few decades which is ascribed to the rise of private, profit-making corporations involved in the prison industry. With increased privatization and commercialization of various components of the incarceration system (prison and jail construction, telecommunications, surveillance, food industry, and prison labor itself are some prime examples) in the U.S., there has been a major overhaul of prisons and incarceration statistics portray the changes quite clearly. According to the web-comic “Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History” (Dam, Sofie Louise, 8th Sept. 2016), the U.S. accounts for 5% of the global population and yet holds nearly 25% of the world’s incarcerated people (a staggering five-fold disparity!).
However, what makes the prison-industrial complex even more interesting is the array of social disparities prevalent in the U.S. prison system. For example, the above-mentioned source also reports that African-Americans are incarcerated nearly six times the rate of Caucasian-Americans whereas there are no statistical differences in the rates of drug-related crimes between races. Developing further on this statistic, new research from “Criminalizing Race: Racial Disparities in Plea Bargaining.” (Berdejó, Carlos, 15th Sept. 2017) shows that despite pleading guilty to crimes, African-American defendants are offered tangibly harsher pleas by prosecutors than their Caucasian counterparts, in misdemeanor and low-level felonies. Other observations included how white defendants were 25% less likely to be convicted of the principal initial charge than black defendants, and how when the stakes were increased (high-level felonies) there were similar conviction rates for both groups.
Based on this research, the article “We Told Y’all: New Study Reveals How Every Phase of Criminal-Justice System Favors Whites” (Harriot, Michael, 26th Oct. 2017) provides some insight into the viability of racial biases hindering fair judgment, in particular how prosecutorial discretion (prosecutors and judges determine plea bargains and deals), economic impact (convictions and charges affect financial aid, employment, etc.) and African-American criminalization (prolonged or more severe punishment for committing the same crime as their white counterparts) are propagating racial biases in the criminal justice system. These very racial biases are modified and mobilized to produce and propagate the contemporary drainage system of the prison-industrial complex. These biases create the large-scale disparities in incarceration rates and impart a ‘better’ social identity for the privileged group (Caucasian-Americans) while subtly denigrating the less-privileged (African-Americans).
One of the most prominent secondary causes of mass incarceration (and the Prison-Industrial Complex) can be traced back to the concept of “insourcing.” Here, “insourcing” refers to the use of cheap or free prison labor for the production of commodities and sometimes even encompasses services rendered by prison inmates. Socio-historically, it was commonplace in the 1800s for plantation owners (the oppressors in a system of oppression/the benefitting social group in a drainage system) in the U.S. to hire prison inmates (the oppressed in this system of oppression/ the exploited social group in this drainage system) to work on their fields (the flow of value), and when slavery was abolished in 1865, it didn’t extend to abolishing punishments of slavery or involuntary servitude for a crime where the party was duly convicted. This led to mass exploitation (which continues to date) of the prison convicts, who now emphatically searched for options to revolt or go on a strike, as portrayed vividly by Dam in her webcomic.
In the article “Scathing U.N. Report: ‘Structural Racism’ Endures in the U.S., and the Government Has Failed to Protect African-Americans’ Rights” (Norton, Ben, 7th Oct. 2016), Norton discusses the UN’s recommendations for combating “structural racism” in the U.S. and protecting African-American rights. One of the major recommendations is mitigating the school-to-prison pipeline, which depicts the adverse effects of increasing contact with juvenile and adult criminal justice systems via zero-tolerance policies, law enforcement in school, etc. (closely following the institutional aspect of systems of oppression). One finding, for instance, was that black students were more likely to be disciplined for subjective reasons (disrespect, misbehavior, etc.) while the white students were likely to be disciplined for documentable reasons (vandalism, plagiarism, etc.). Such increased criminalization of children, excessive punishment of poor children for minor offenses and racial profiling and harassment of black children suggests that ‘policing in schools’ is almost analogous to the early implementation of the drainage system based on modifying ‘race’ in society, wherein laws were legislated and enforced to force people to conform to the dominant ideology of ‘race.’ This eerie similarity speaks volumes about the adversities that the school-to-prison pipeline might produce, structure and reproduce; thus, the UN recommended the “complete abolishment” of this system. This system of oppression could have indirectly affected the prison-industrial system by creating and mustering the same forms of cultural beliefs in children (who could grow up to be oppressed by the real prison-industrial complex) that other more directly-influenced systems of oppression would to increase the trickle-up of value from the under-privileged to the elite.
The article goes on to mention “mass incarceration” related to the War on Drugs, which is closely related to the talk by Michelle Alexander on Democracy Now! “Roots of Today’s Mass Incarceration Crisis Date to Slavery, Jim Crow.” The phenomenon of “mass incarceration” has had a “disproportionately high impact on people of African descent” especially pronounced by the introduction of “tough-on-crime” laws and drug laws that are racially biased. This is illustrated by the fact that despite being 14% of the population, Black Americans constitute 36% of all federal and state prison population, with a whopping incarceration rate 5.9 times higher than men (confirming the figure of “nearly 6 times” mentioned before). As Alexander wrote in her book, this new “color-blind” age of mass incarceration is marked by “deep collateral damage on the African Americans.” In her talk, she goes over how the construct of “color blindness” (in terms of race/skin color) signifies being blind to racial inequality instead of race itself, thereby, drawing parallels to the construction of “whiteness” in rural Kentucky as experienced by Buck, and verifying the ubiquitousness of drainage systems. Thus, mass incarceration can be visualized as contemporaneous legal legislation and enforcement of ‘color-blindness’ akin to how racial segregation and discrimination were legislated and enforced as a result of ‘whiteness’ and ‘white privilege.’ Alexander expounds the premise of mass incarceration as being rooted in the profit motive of the private prison industry (alluded to in Dam’s webcomic), and to end mass incarceration, other forms of enforcement of ‘color-blindness’ such as mass-deportation and criminalization of immigrant populations also need to be mitigated. The institutional aspect of this system of oppression also extends to law enforcement and the criminal justice system, which propagates racial oppression and disparities as explained by Harriot and Berdejó’s research.
To conclude, all of these socio-cultural and legal processes amalgamate to create a racially-divisive and oppressive drainage system that creates a flow of profit to the private prison industry (the elites) from the labor and toil of the prison convicts (the working-class), and this system is periodically maintained and restructured through mechanisms such as racial disparities in legal processes, insourcing, the school-to-prison pipeline, and mass incarceration. Thus, the prison-industrial complex produces and propagates a drainage system (consolidation of wealth by private prison industry at the expense of prison labor and services) which is maintained by institutional (law enforcement, criminal justice system, and school policing) and symbolic (proliferation of racially coded ideologies surrounding “urban crime” and “super” predators; and social constructs such as “color-blindness”) aspects of systems of oppression.
Works Cited
Buck, Pem D. Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.
Collins, Patricia Hill. “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection.” Memphis, Tennessee : Centre for Research on Women, Dept. of Sociology and Social Work, Memphis State University, 1989.
Dam, Sofie Louise. “Inmates Are Planning The Largest Prison Strike in US History.” The Nib, 8 Sept. 2016, thenib.com/inmates-are-planning-the-largest-prison-strike-in-us-history.
“Michelle Alexander: Roots of Today’s Mass Incarceration Crisis Date to Slavery, Jim Crow.” Democracy Now!, democracynow.org/2015/3/4/michelle_alexander_roots_of_todays_crisis.
Harriot, Michael. “We Told Y’all: New Study Reveals How Every Phase of Criminal-Justice System Favors Whites.” The Root, The Root, 26 Oct. 2017, theroot.com/we-told-yall-new-study-reveals-how-every-phase-of-crim-1819880516.
Berdejó, Carlos. “Criminalizing Race: Racial Disparities in Plea Bargaining.” SSRN, 15 Sept. 2017, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3036726.
Norton, Ben. “Scathing U.N. Report: ‘Structural Racism’ Endures in U.S., and the Government Has Failed to Protect African-Americans’ Rights.” Salon, Salon.com, 7 Oct. 2016, salon.com/2016/10/07/scathing-u-n-report-structural-racism-endures-in-u-s-and-the-government-has-failed-to-protect-african-americans-rights/.
