The GIP as a Neoliberal Intervention: Trafficking in Illegible Concepts

Abstract

The prison industrial complex exemplifies the neoliberal inversion of a fundamental structure of classical liberalism: the state/market relation. With exponential growth that tellingly begins in the late 1970s, prison populations in the United States exploded from 1.8 million in 1980 to 7.3 million in 2008.1 Increasingly serving as a racializing technology that imprisons persons of color, especially African Americans, at disproportionately high rates, the prison industrial complex has become a remarkably productive and expansive economic site. As Michelle Alexander explains in her well-circulated book, The New Jim Crow, “prisons are big business and have become deeply entrenched in America’s economic and political system.”2 Not only has the private prison market boomed since the early 1990s, but many rural (and mostly white) communities have become dependent on prisons for jobs and economic growth. Moreover, as Alexander argues, a whole range of industries profit from the ongoing growth of the prison industry: phone companies that gouge prisoners’ phone rates; gun manufacturers that arm penitentiary security forces and the police forces that incarcerate the prisoners; private health care providers contracted by prisons; the US military and corporations that exploit prison labor; and so on. The market of the prison industry demands that the state continue to feed it.