Now, let's again ask ourselves, would there have been protests, some of them violent, of the sort we saw in Paris and London, during the running of the Olympic torch if, say, Chicago been awarded the Olympics?

Somehow, I think not, and I find this both striking and odd.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

And of course DeAnander's Law applies:  it is more profitable to keep this lucrative prison-industrial complex running than to shut it down.  Powerful interests -- corps like KBR and Halliburton, who get contracts for building prisons in the US as well as overseas -- make lots and lots of money in this "sector of the economy" as it's blandly known.  This ensures that there's a lobby to keep locking up more and more people, a propaganda machine to frighten the public into supporting more and more draconian punishments and more and more paranoid "get tough" laws.  And -- and this is tragic -- the prison industry "creates jobs" in dead-end, gutted ex-industrial towns, offering work for guards, maintenance personnel, cooks, cleaners, clerks in places that industrial capitalism has chewed up and spat out.  O Benevolent Industry, please come to our dying town and give us Jobs!

BTW, I was reading fast as I have to get on to my own local problems, but I think it went unmentioned here that some prisoners in the US are made available at minimum wage to corporate employers for piecework -- a kind of internal outsourcing, an FTZ within the national borders.  The ultimate non-union captive (literally) labour force!

Prisoners now manufacture everything from blue jeans, to auto parts, to electronics and furniture. Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do. Konica has used prisoners to repair copiers for less than 50 cents an hour. Toys R Us used prisoners to restock shelves, and Microsoft to pack and ship software. Clothing made in California and Oregon prisons competes so successfully with apparel made in Latin America and Asia that it is exported to other countries.

Inmates are also employed in a wide variety of service jobs as well. TWA has used prisoners to handle reservations, while AT&T has used prison labor for telemarketing. In Oregon, prisoners do all the data entry and record keeping in the Secretary of State's corporation division. Other jobs include desktop publishing, digital mapping and computer-aided design work.

US employers have pointed to the tight labor market for their interest in employing prisoners. But the other advantages, though not stated publicly, are obvious. The prison system can provide an “ideal” workforce: employers do not have to pay health or unemployment insurance, vacation time, sick leave or overtime. They can hire, fire or reassign inmates as they so desire, and can pay the workers as little as 21 cents an hour. The inmates cannot respond with a strike, file a grievance, or threaten to leave and get a better job.

Prisoners who refuse to work under these conditions are labeled “uncooperative” and risk losing time off for “good behavior,” as well as privileges such as library access and recreation. In one case, two prisoners at California's Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility were put in solitary confinement after a local television station broadcast their complaints about working for C.M.T., a T-shirt manufacturer that required them to put in 60 days of unpaid “training.”

Now that's what I call "market discipline."

80,000 workers is not a large number in such a big country, but it's still 80,000 jobs that are not held at a decent wage by free people.  The prison gets to collect Federal minimum wage for each hour worked, but the prisoners don't get all of that.

The struggle over prison labor has a long history in the US. In the early 1800s, group workshops in prisons replaced solitary handicrafts, and the increased efficiency allowed prisons to be self-supporting. Entire prisons were leased out to private contractors, who literally worked hundreds of prisoners to death. Manufacturers who lost work to prison contractors opposed the leasing system, but only with the growth of the union movement came effective opposition to prison labor. One of the most famous clashes, the Coal Creek Rebellion of 1891, took place when the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad locked out their workers and replaced them with convicts. The miners stormed the prison and freed 400 prisoners, and when the company filled up work with more prisoners, the miners burned the prison down.

The prison leasing system was disbanded in Tennessee shortly thereafter, but remained in many states until the rise of the CIO and industrial unionism in the 1930s. As a result of this mass movement of workers, Congress passed the 1935 Ashurst-Sumners Act, making it illegal to transport prison-made goods across state lines. However, under the presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, Congress passed the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, which granted exemptions from Ashurst-Sumners for seven “Prison Industry Enhancement” pilot projects. Congress has since granted exemptions to all 50 state prison systems.

Although prison labor is today in its infancy, it could become one of America's most important growth industries. Over the last decade, the prison population has increased by 840,000, many of these prisoners having been convicted of nonviolent crimes. With the use of tough-on-crime mandatory sentencing laws, the prison population continues to grow. Some experts believe that the number of people locked up in the US could double in the next 10 years. The expansion of the number of prisoners will not only increase the pool of slave labor available for commercial profit, but also will help pay for the costs of incarceration.

With 2 million inmates, the US already has the largest prison population in the world. China, which the AFL-CIO consistently condemns as anti-worker and totalitarian, has a half-million fewer prisoners. With only 5 percent of the world's population the United States has a quarter of the world's 8 million prisoners.

The WSWS obviously has its axe to grind, but their figures don't clash with others I have seen from less sectarian sources -- the story is pretty consistent.

How this all gets dismantled, short of armed struggle, I don't know.  I do know that I worry (along with Dmitry Orlov) about the fate of US prisoners in the event of a serious dislocation in energy and/or food supplies, and about the effects of a sudden unplanned release of all these angry, abused incarcerees should the system break down.

Basically, industrial capitalism has substituted fossil fuels for human labour, with great success (ignoring for a moment all the "externalities" that threaten to bring down western civilisation entirely, such as biotic bankruptcy and industrial toxicity).  So there's a huge pool of "unnecessary" humans out there, not needed to produce widgets -- more than are required even to sweep the floors, clean the toilets, kiss the asses and suck the dicks of the affluent.  So those "excess" people pose a problem -- and the answer in the US is "efficient" industrial warehousing of the "surplus population" (thank you Mr Scrooge), plus using some portion of them as slave labour to increase corporate profits.  In other countries, these unwanted humans are warehoused in giant slums, cordoned off, sometimes hunted for sport by local law enforcement and military (effectively private security for the affluent).

Sometimes it could almost make a person nostalgic for feudalism.

It seems pretty clear that we're at a point of dislocation.  The cheap fossil fuel that was substituted for human labour is running out, and the industrial processes that it fuelled are running into their own diminishing returns and risible shortsightedness.  What does A do now?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

However, according to the British Home Office statistics, the US has the highest prison population in the world and also the highest imprisonment rate (686 per 100,000 of population - 10 times the rate of many European countries.)

Thanks for the link. Checking it, next are the Cayman Islands (what's up with that?), Russia and Belarus (though some countries like China have incomparable figures that say exclude people not yet sentenced).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

At first, I thought you meant these border fences were caging us in in the US.  

I think there was a time when we believed in rehabilitation.

For much of the twentieth century, about one American in a thousand was confined to a cell. The proportion of Americans behind bars started rising in the mid-Seventies, and by 2003 had done so for twenty-eight consecutive years. Counting jails, there are now seven Americans in every thousand behind bars. That is nearly five times the historic norm and seven times higher than most of Western Europe.

and perhaps relevant to the controversy about the Clinton years and Obama's remarks about them:

The 1990s were said to be a time when rising tides finally did lift all boats. Western warns that part of the reason, statistically speaking, is that many poor men have been thrown overboard--the government omits prisoners when calculating unemployment and poverty rates. Add them in, as Western does, and joblessness swells. For young black men it grows by more than a third. For young black dropouts, the jobless rate leaps from 41 percent to 65 percent. "Only by counting the penal population do we see that fully two out of three young black male dropouts were not working at the height of the 1990s economic expansion," Western warns. Count inmates and you also erase three quarters of the apparent progress in closing the wage gap between blacks and whites.

And lots more in The American Prison Nightmare by Jason Parle (an NYRB piece from a year ago)