Prohibitive cost of prisons

Social cost of incarceration

Incidence

The USA has the world's highest rate of incarceration and the prison population is rising by 13% a year. This means building new prisons at the rate of $100 million a week in construction costs alone. It costs over $40,000 a year to keep a convict in a federal high-security prison.

Claim

Prisons are the largest growth industry in the USA. Prisons are literally becoming the concentration camps of the neoliberal regime, places to isolate those redundant to corporate needs. But never wanting to waste an exploitable resource, the elite are also developing an extensive prison-labour system, renting out inmates to fill lower-rung labour needs. This growing network of slave-labour concentration camps has so far escaped public notice. So, too, has its racial and ethnic bias.