thumb|upright=1.25|Correctional populations in the U.S., 1980–2013
thumb|upright=1.25|US timeline graphs of number of people incarcerated in jails and prisons
The prison–industrial complex (PIC) is a term, coined after the "military–industrial complex" of the 1950s, used by scholars and activists to describe the many relationships between institutions of imprisonment (e.g., prisons, jails, detention facilities, and psychiatric hospitals) and the various establishments that profit from them. According to this concept, incarceration not only upholds the justice system, but also subsidizes construction companies, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, surveillance and corrections technology vendors, telecommunications, corporations that contract cheap prison labor, correctional officers unions, private probation companies, These advocacy groups note that incarceration affects people of color at disproportionately high rates.
Many commentators use the term "prison–industrial complex" to refer strictly to private prisons in the United States, an industry that generates approximately $4 billion of revenue a year. Others note that fewer than 10% of U.S. inmates are incarcerated in for-profit facilities, and use the term to diagnose a larger confluence of interests between the U.S. government, at the federal and state levels, and the private businesses that profit from the increasing surveillance, policing, and imprisonment of the American public since approximately 1980.
History
Early American jails were largely privately managed, holding both criminals awaiting trial and debtors awaiting repayment, and charging holding fees to local governments and creditors. After the first publicly-run prison was established in 1790 in Pennsylvania, private business involvement in corrections largely diminished to providing contracted services, such as food preparation, medical care, and transportation. The major 19th-century exception to the relative separation between public punishment and private industry was the convict lease system in the American South, in which private parties paid public prisons for forced prisoner labor.
During the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, business leaders and unions successfully pressured the federal government to prohibit private corporations from contracting cheap prison labor and undercutting competition. In 1930, the federal government established Federal Prison Industries, a prison labor program to produce goods and services for the public sector.
Many scholars and activists argue that the contemporary prison–industrial complex has its origins in the war on drugs, a legislative campaign orchestrated by the U.S. federal government since the early 1970s aimed at criminalizing and punishing drug trafficking and use. Following tougher anti-drug legislation and harsher sentencing standards under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, incarceration increasingly became the standard punishment for non-violent offenses. As the overall incarcerated population dramatically increased, new correctional facilities needed to be built, staffed, and maintained, and private-sector prisons began to emerge as cost-effective solutions. In May 2021 the Federal Bureau of Prisons listed 46.3 percent of federal inmates as incarcerated because of drug convictions.
1970s
thumb|420x420px|US incarceration timelineIn 1973, following the lead of President Nixon, New York State passed the Rockefeller Drug Laws, establishing mandatory minimum prison sentences for small-scale drug possession. Although not as harsh as Governor Nelson Rockefeller had originally called for, these laws inspired other states to enact similarly strict punishments for drug offenses, including mandatory minimum sentences in almost every instance. Also in 1973, conservative businesses and tough-on-crime politicians came together to establish the influential lobbying group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union restricted prisoners’ First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, and prohibited them from organizing labor unions. In 1979, inspired by legislation proposed by ALEC, the U.S. Congress overturned the New Deal–era legislation against for-profit prison labor by establishing the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIE). Intended to allow inmates to contribute to society, offset the cost of their incarceration, reduce idleness, cultivate job skills, and improve the rates of successful transition back into their communities after release, the PIE program created a cheap captive domestic labor market, which set the stage for the adoption and expansion of private-sector labor in public prisons.
1980s
President Ronald Reagan's 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act further accelerated mass incarceration. Very shortly many state prisons were experiencing unprecedented overcrowding.
Meanwhile, in 1983, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was founded by Nashville businessmen who claimed they could build and operate state and federal prisons with the same quality of service provided by government prisons, but at a lower cost. As of 2012, the multibillion-dollar corporation, now known as CoreCivic, manages over 65 correctional facilities and boasts an annual revenue exceeding $1.7 billion.
In 1988, the now-second-largest for-profit private prison corporation, Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) was established as a subsidiary of The Wackenhut Corporation. The WCC is now known as GEO Group, and as of 2017, their U.S. Corrections and Detention division manages 70 correctional and detention facilities.
Between 1980 and 1989, the total U.S. prison population increased by 115%, from 329,821 to 710,054 people. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in U.S. history, which directly allotted a $9.7 billion funding increase to prisons and introduced the three-strikes law, assigning unprecedentedly long sentences (25 year to life minimum) to third-time convicts.
As the prison population continued to grow steeply throughout the 1990s, the profit margins of private prison corporations such as CCA and GeoGroup continued to increase. In 1995, Congress passed another piece of ALEC-influenced legislation, the Prison Industries Act, allowing corporations to pay prison laborers less than the federal minimum wage and divert the difference to constructing facilities for further prison labor. This included 71,206 prisoners held in privately operated facilities, accounting for 5.5% of state and 2.8% of federal prisoners.
2010s
In 2016, President Barack Obama issued an executive policy to reduce the number of private federal prison contracts, and the United States Justice Department began developing a plan to phase out its use of private prisons. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates rationalized this decision: "Private prisons simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department's Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security."
Both GEO Group and CoreCivic donated heavily to the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016 and inaugural committee in 2017, and following his election, their stock prices skyrocketed: CoreCivic by 140% and GEO Group by 98%.
By the end of 2019, the U.S. incarcerated population had dropped to 2,068,800 people, its lowest level since 2003. The incarceration rate had dropped to the same rate as 1995 (810 per 100,000 adult U.S. residents), As Kurti and Brown argue, it even overtook reformist dialogue: imagining a social order without police, jails, and a social order that sought to protect and empower, where people can live. However, despite rising waves in abolitionist and anti-PIC movements, the PIC has continued to expand. By 2021, only just following the largest insurgencies of the movement, David Garland cites that 35 states were considering passing pro-police, anti-dissent bills.
As of 2023, a report found that while the United States accounts for only 5% of the world's population, it is responsible for 25% of the prison population. Only a few years later, the Prison Policy Initiative 2026 report detailed that, through all forms of mass incarceration (meaning through state, federal, and local) almost 2 million people are incarcerated through "1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails,1,277 juvenile correctional facilities, 220 immigration detention facilities, and 77 Indian country jails, as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories." This part of the system alone, excluding other extensions of the PIC such as policing, costs at least $445 billion per year." Furthermore, for a second year in a row (in comparison to almost two decades of decline) there has been an increase trend in youth confinement. Additionally, a study conducted by the Civil Liberties Union in 2022 found that prison labor produces around $11 billion in yearly revenue. Of this $11 billion, $2 billion are profits from commodities, while the rest of $9 billion are produced by the services demanded of inmates. It is important to note too, that while this number is already significant, it is likely an underestimate due to common lack of transparency by involved parties regarding labor practices and supply chains.
AI and surveillance
New implications for the PIC continue to emerge with the rise of AI. For instance, the American Civil Liberties Union recently reported on the rise of Flock and their nation-wide mass surveillance project. Flock currently sells their cloud-connected cameras to police departments and private contractors, reading anywhere form license plates to recording people's daily movements and faces.
More expansive definitions often include as elements of the system tough-on-crime politicians and district attorneys seeking office, conservative political lobbies and legislatures passing punitive laws, and investment banks and rural economic developers leveraging public debt into private profit through prison construction and employment contracts. The widest definitions of the prison–industrial complex include even larger and more abstract institutions and processes, such as the news media sensationalizing crime and influencing public perception, gentrification disrupting urban environments and displacing precarious residents, and public schools increasingly subjecting students to police oversight and legal punishment since the 1980s.
The war on drugs
Marc Mauer, executive director of the criminal justice reform group The Sentencing Project, has argued that the growth and expansion of the prison–industrial complex since the 1970s has its roots in the war on drugs, which, rather than suppressing the illegal drug trade, has produced a perpetual cycle of drug dealing and imprisonment. This he attributes to a structural feature of the drug trade, a market with perpetually high demand and lucrative potential profits. has argued that while some appear to believe that the prison industrial complex is taking the space once filled by the military industrial complex, the aftermath of the war on terror shows how the links between the military, corporations, and government are growing even stronger. The relationship between these complexes, Davis suggests, shows they are symbiotic, because they mutually support and promote each other, even sharing some technologies. Further, they also share important structural features, both generating immense profits from processes of "social destruction"
Statistics show that incarceration and unemployment are correlated, Nevertheless, such a high rate of recidivism can be attributed in part to the difficulty formerly incarcerated people encounter in finding stable employment. The Evidence-Based Professionals Society suggests two reasons for this difficulty: "First, most of the offenders may simply lack the necessary job skills for specific positions, keeping them from those usually higher paid and more stable jobs. Second, many employers are reluctant to hire these people due to the stigma imposed by their previous criminal records."
School-to-prison pipeline
Scholars and critics describe the existence of a "school-to-prison pipeline", a system in which public school policies contribute to funneling urban students of color into the prison–industrial complex. Students at urban schools and other schools with high percentages of minority students are more likely to experience out-of-school suspensions and academic failure, which have been correlated to a higher likelihood of incarceration after leaving school.
Race
The war on drugs has disproportionately impacted African Americans. Although African Americans use drugs at similar rates to Americans from other demographic groups, they are prosecuted at much higher rates.
Economics
In the decades following World War II, the American domestic economy was characterized by growth, but also by deindustrialization, the decline of the labor movement, austerity and the privatization of government services, the transformation of welfare to workfare policies, and suburbanization, including white flight from city centers. These large-scale transformations had particularly damaging effects on the economic activity of large American cities, generally increasing urban unemployment and exacerbating income and racial inequality.
Statistics have shown that the unemployment rate is correlated to the incarceration rate, and American historians such as Heather Ann Thompson and Alex Lichtenstein have argued that mass incarceration has accompanied the public-sector abandonment of former urban industrial cores, and contributed to the rise of the Sun Belt as an important economic region. In this view, the prison–industrial complex is not simply the cumulative effect of decades of increasingly punitive legislation, but is an integral sector in the neoliberal national economy, with the largest and fastest-growing states—like Florida, California, and Texas ("Flocatex")—also leading the country in number of inmates and prison privatization.
- "Correctional industry" jobs in the government-run prison factories launched in the 1930s. These jobs account for nearly 5% of state and federal prisoner employment, with prisoners producing a wide range of goods and services for sale to other government agencies, including library, school, and office furniture; uniforms, linens, and mattresses for prisons; metal grills and wooden benches for public parks; body armor for the military and police; road signs and license plates for transportation departments; doing data entry and staffing call centers. In Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas, state prisoners earn no wages for such labor but, on average, state and federal prisoners earn $0.33–$1.41 an hour for this work, reaching as high as $5.15 in Nevada, where the pay starts at $0.25 an hour.
- Jobs outside of prisons and jails through various inmate labor programs. These work-release programs, outside work crews, and work camps are more common than public and private industry jobs, but less common than facility maintenance. This category of labor is various, with prisoners performing "community services" like cleaning parks, or clearing homeless encampments, or fighting wildfires in California. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) serves as a federal tax credit that grants employers $2,400 for every work-release employed inmate.
Advocates of prison labor argue that rehabilitation is promoted through discipline, a strong work ethic, and providing inmates with valuable skills to be used upon release. Gina Honeycutt, executive director of the National Correctional Industries Association, stated in 2015 that moreover, "in recent years, the focus of many work programs has shifted to concentrate even more on effective rehabilitation of inmates. The transition in the last five years has been away from producing a product to producing a successful offender as our product." Indeed, studies have shown that participants in prison labor programs often have a lower risk of recidivism; these studies may be misleading, however, as it is often only obedient and industrious inmates who are allowed to participate in prison labor in the first place. Activists Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans (writing while incarcerated in California) explain that <blockquote>For private business, prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for Victoria's Secret—all at a fraction of the cost of 'free labor.'" These scholars all cite the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing the institution of slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."thumb|360px|Private prison stock prices from 2002 to 2012
Private prisons
In a Bureau of Prisons (BOP)–funded study, privatized prisons were compared side-to-side with the public prisons on economic performance, and quality of life. The study found that in a trade-off for allowing prisons to be more cheaply run and operated, the degree to which prisoners are reformed goes down. Because the privatized prisons are so much larger than the public-run prisons, they were subject to economies of scale, allowing for a more efficient, lower-cost alternative to government spending on incarceration.
In 2011, The Vera Institute of Justice surveyed 40 state correction departments to gather data on what the true cost of prisons were. Their reports showed that most states had additional costs ranging from one percent to thirty-four percent outside of what their original budget was for that year.
John W. Whitehead, constitutional attorney and founder of the Rutherford Institute asserts that "Prison privatization simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism." Whitehead argues that it characterizes an increasingly inverted justice system dependent upon an advancement in power and wealth of the corporate state.
Immigration–industrial complex
As of 2000, funding of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had been increasing as about a total of $4.27 billion was allotted to the INS in the 2000 fiscal budget. This was 8% more than in the 1999 fiscal budget. This expansion, experts claim, has been too rapid and thus has led to an increased chance on the part of faculty for negligence and abuse. Lucas Guttengag, director of the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project stated that, "immigrants awaiting administrative hearings are being detained in conditions that would be unacceptable at prisons for criminal offenders." They also claim that despite having the incarceration rate grow "10 times what it was prior to 1970,... it has not made this country any safer." Since the September 11 attacks in 2001, the budget for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have nearly doubled from 2003 to 2008, with CBP's budget increasing from $5.8 billion to $10.1 billion and ICE from $3.2 billion to $5 billion and even so there has been no significant decrease in immigrant population. Over half of the prison industry's yearly revenue comes from immigrant detention centers. For some small communities in the Southwestern United States, these facilities serve as an integral part of the economy. According to Chris Kirkham in 2012, this constitutes part of a growing immigration industrial complex: "Companies dependent upon continued growth in the numbers of undocumented immigrants detained have exerted themselves in the nation's capital and in small, rural communities to create incentives that reinforce that growth."
In 2009, University of Kansas professor Tanya Golash-Boza coined the term, "Immigration Industrial Complex", defining it as "the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of 'anti-illegal' rhetoric," in her paper "The Immigration Industrial Complex: Why We Enforce Immigration Policies Destined to Fail".
In 2009, congressional immigration detention policies required that ICE maintain 34,000 immigration detention beds daily. This immigration bed quota has steadily increased with each passing year, and as of 2017 costing ICE around $159 to detain one individual for one day.
In 2010, immigration detention policies implemented by ICE benefited the two major private prison corporations CCA and GeoGroup, increasing their share of immigrant detention beds by 13%. Compared to data from 2009, the percentage of ICE immigrant detention beds in the United States are owned and operated by private for-profit prison corporations has increased by 49%, with CCA and GeoGroup operating 8 out of 10 of the largest facilities.
In May 2025, the WSJ reported how the second Trump administration had already spent 50% more on immigration removals and detention than in 2024.
Impact and response
Women
thumb|350px|A graph of the US incarceration rate under state and federal jurisdiction per 100,000 population 1925–2008 (omits local jail inmates). The male incarceration rate (top line) is 15 times the female rate (bottom line).
In 1994, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women was released which stated that "Among many other abuses women prisoners have identified, are pat searches (male guards pat searching and groping women), illegal strip searches (male guards observing strip searches of women), constant lewd comments and gestures, violations of their right to privacy (male guards watching women in showers and toilets), and in some instances, sexual assault and rape." International human rights standards reinforce this by stating "the rape of a woman in custody is an act of torture." In addition, some prisons fail to meet women's needs with providing basic hygiene and reproductive health products.
In regards to women and the prison–industrial complex, Angela Davis stated that "State-sanctioned punishment is informed by patriarchal structures and ideologies that have tended to produce historical assumptions of female criminality linked to ideas about the violation of social norms defining a 'woman’s place'. Considering the fact that as many as half of all women are assaulted by their husbands or partners combined with dramatically rising numbers of women sentenced to prison, it may be argued that women in general are subjected to a far greater magnitude of punishment than men." She also suggested that the "historical and philosophical connections between domestic violence and imprisonment [comprise] two modes of gendered punishment – one located in the private realm, the other in the public realm."
Davis continues: