surplus value: the political economy of prisons

This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 22 November 2014, At: 08:18Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gred20

Surplus Value: The Political Economy of PrisonsDavid Theo GoldbergPublished online: 03 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: David Theo Goldberg (1999) Surplus Value: The Political Economy of Prisons, Review of Education,Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 21:3, 247-263, DOI: 10.1080/1071441990210304

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1071441990210304

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gred20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/1071441990210304

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1071441990210304

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

the review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies ©1999 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.Vol. 21. No. 3, pp. 247-263 Published by license underReprints available directly from the publisher the Harwood Academic Publishers imprint.Photocopying permitted by license only part of The Gordon and Breach Publishing Group.

Printed in Malaysia.

David Theo Goldberg

Surplus Value: The PoliticalEconomy of Prisons

INTRODUCTION

The past decade has witnessed massive growth in the UnitedStates in both prison construction and levels of incarceration,especially in racially configured terms. These related increaseshave been coterminous with the manifestation of profoundshifts in the "foundations" of the American political economyand attendant shifts in American education, most notablyhigher education, as well as the attack on public funding ofuniversities. The question is whether these explosions inprison construction and racialized incarceration are in anyway significantly linked with these broader shifts in politicaleconomy.

This question is large, and I cannot pretend to do it full just-ice here. One way in to the issues involved is to address a sub-stantially narrower question, but which is emblematic of thebroader concerns. Thus, how do we account for the discrep-ancy between, on one hand, the raced criminal suspect rateand, on the other, the raced prison rate? In Arizona in 1996,for instance, the criminal suspect rate was something like17.4 percent not white while 53.3 percent of those incarceratedwere people of color; the national figures differ little fromthose in a state like Arizona (roughly 17 and 50 percentrespectively). The considerably lower suspicion rate is consist-ent with the now widespread consensus among researchersthat there is not a great deal of explicit discrimination inarrests for crimes (see Tonry, 1995, pp. 71 ff.). The differencebetween suspicion and incarceration rates then is significant

247

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

248 David Theo Goldberg

not least because it is so counter-intuitive. Why indeed wouldthe rate of incarceration of people of color, particularly black menand women, so outstrip the rate at which people of color aresuspected for crimes? A reasonable explanation of this differ-ence, I suggest, will implicate precisely that relation betweengrowth in prison construction, levels of racially configuredincarceration, shifts in American political economy, and attackson public (especially higher) education, thus revealing the sig-nificance of these connections.

One explanation that might be offered for the differencebetween raced suspicion and incarceration rates is what I callthe "No nigger zone defense." There is a widespread and widelynoted policing sensibility, if not policy, to stop people of coloron sight in certain socio-economically up-scale neighbor-hoods as their presence in those spaces in which "they do notbelong" is deemed "unnatural" and bound to be for no good asthey are up to no good. There are many examples nationwide.Scottsdale, for instance, is the Beverly Hills of Phoenix. Arecent civil suit brought by a former "Hispanic" officer on theScottsdale police force not only revealed the rampant racismfacing officers of color on the force. Equally pressing, it alsobrought to light the informal but blatant policy to stop blackpeople on sight in Scottsdale, whether residents or not, andwhether engaged in suspicious behavior or not. A captain, awhite man, in the Scottsdale department testified at the trialthat "nigger" was widely used as a term of reference amongthe overwhelmingly white officers, rationalizing usage as nodifferent than its widespread use among the predominantlyblack Cook County police officers in Chicago. Again, police inChandler, a lower middle to middle class city-suburb in thegreater Phoenix area, were involved in a two or three dayround up with INS officers of any person looking Chicano, nomatter whether a citizen or residing in the country legally. Thepolicing practice of stopping black people on sight in BeverlyHills and Bel Air has been widely reported. Indeed, if HowardBeach is anything to go by, this police disposition to "suspectpeople of color" is widespread also in white ethnic workingclass neighborhoods.

Now "stopping black/brown" as a form of surveilling cityand suburban space is not at odds with a racialized suspicionrate relatively consistent with demographic percentage. After

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

The Political Economy of Prisons 249

all, the suspect rate represents the best police response toresolving actual crime committed and can be matched critic-ally against victims' profile reports (Tonry, 1995, pp. 70-4). In theface of increasing pressures of professionalization and publicfunding, setting up faked suspects to sustain arrest rates oras a result of prejudice, while no doubt an occasional indi-vidual motivation (Mark Fuhrman has hardly faded frommemory if his late night television appearances are anythingto go by), carries considerable cost as an institutional commit-ment. Racist expression may assume many forms. That thesuspicion or arrest rates seem no longer for the most part tosuggest institutional racist bias, as it not so long ago did, doesnot entail absence of individual or institutional racism in otherpolicing activities—like keeping a neighborhood white, orrestricting advancement within the force on racial grounds.

The "No nigger zone defense" however clearly would imply agreater racially driven suspect rate, and so it fails to accountfor the discrepancy we are facing. Indeed, in a society soripped through with racism, not least in urban police depart-ments, and so marked by the unemployment of black andbrown folk for whom the rate is always at least double that ofwhites (cf. Tonry, 1995, p. 79), it's a wonder that the raciallydriven suspect rate is not considerably higher. What all thissuggests rather is that there is no naturalized notion of crime,either in racial or more broadly social terms. The notion ofcrime and dispositions toward crime are laden both in theirsocial production and in their significance with invested socialmeanings. These meanings reflect and resonate with widersocial, political, economic, and cultural concerns and commit-ments, paranoias and moral panics.

If the "No nigger zone defense" is porous in this play ofexplanations, consider the "Coloreds only wanted offense." Herewe are concerned with explaining why the racialized incar-ceration rate, the well documented and highly commentedpeopling of prisons by black and brown bodies, is so dramat-ically high. Accordingly, the question now becomes how toaccount for the second part of the discrepancy: How is it,given the relatively low raced suspect rate, that the racedincarceration rate is so large?

I have named these strategies and practices in terms of"niggers" and "coloreds," "defense" and "offense" so as to link

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


them to two not unrelated phenomena: on one hand, to thelongstanding tradition of racist culture in America, in the per-petuation and protection of which the police have been deeplyimplicated; on the other hand, to the ways in which sport, war,and their metaphors effect the production and reproduction ofbroad consent to a deeply raced social order, a point I willaddress more fully towards the end of this paper.

The fact that black incarceration is three to four times theirrate in the national population, and that of Hispanics threetimes the national population rate, is a complex phenomenonthat requires a complex response. I want here to address twoconsiderations that factor into the (re)production of this phe-nomenon: First, the emergence of "the new segregation"—res-identially, educationally, criminally; and second, the politicaleconomy of prison building requiring that massive building ofprisons actually house people to sustain its development—aninternal logic of self-perpetuation linked to broader shifts inthe reproduction of capital and the social conditions that sus-tain the promotion and growth of surplus value.

THE NEW SEGREGATION

As institutional design and practice, segregation emerged inthe United States in the wake of post-Civil War abolition andthe demise of Reconstruction, marking especially the expan-sion of urban space first in the South and then, in the wake ofmassive black migration, northern cities. From 1890 to 1930black residence in New York surged nearly tenfold from36,000 to 328,000, in Chicago over twentyfold from 14,000 to234,000. Chicago neighborhoods just 10 percent black in1900 were swept by the cold wind of segregation into neigh-borhoods 70 percent black just 30 years later (Massey andHajnal, 1995, pp. 533-4; Hirsch, 1993, p. 66).

The dominant picture concerning the racial divide in Amer-ica is that the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation iteffected managed to end de jure segregation. Thus any linger-ing divide between the social spaces of white and black/brownAmerica is claimed to be a function of class formation and theexercise of private preference schemes that government iseither helpless or constitutionally limited from doing anything

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


about, and in any case is likely to disappear as people's socio-economic status advances "naturally" over time. Failure toadvance then is rationalized away as a function of the unsuc-cessful's nature or culture. This picture nevertheless fails toaccount for the deep and resilient racial divisions that con-tinue to mark America largely (though not only) in black andwhite.

Thus America remains almost as deeply racially divided res-identially, educationally, occupationally, recreationally, andin some ways attitudinally in 1998 as it was in 1968. Startingimperceptibly in the 1950s and gathering speed, blacks andwhites were becoming more segregated across and not justwithin municipal boundaries, living (to use Massey andHajnal's apt language) not only in different neighborhoods butalso in different municipalities. At the very time there wasgrowing expression of desegregation in the public sphere, onecould say there was publicly subsidized resegregation in theprivate. Desegregation never stood a chance. By 1980, blacksliving in cities found themselves in municipalities on average35 percent black; if black and white residents were to be evenlydistributed across municipalities 50 percent of blacks in citieswould have had to switch places of residence with whites(Massey and Hajnal, 1995, pp. 536-7). The suburban explo-sion that pulled whites out of the cities transformed the coun-tryside into sprawling suburbs. These suburbs eventuallybecome small self-governing cities, the effect as much of thedesire to be politically and fiscally autonomous from deterior-ating old and racially identified cities as of some purelyadministrative rationality.

In 1950 there were no central cities that were overwhelm-ingly or even largely black. No city with a population largerthan 100,000 had a majority black population. Forty yearslater there were 14 such cities. Eleven more cities had blackpopulations between 40 and 50 percent. Among cities largerthan 25,000 in 1950 just two had majority black populations,a number that had exploded to 40 by 1990 (Massey andHajnal, 1995, p. 537). Interestingly, the increase in segregationafter mid-century is characteristic only of larger cities withlarge black populations. There was a noticeable decline insegregation in small cities with small black populations (Hir-sch, 1993, p. 79). In the latter cases African Americans found

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


themselves assimilated into dominant white space with little ifany noticeable effect on prevailing urban arrangements orculture. By the end of the Civil Rights era, in contrast, geo-graphic isolation of blacks in larger urban settings—the over-helming majority of black folk—was nearly complete.

Now resource availability determines educational opportun-ity, hence jobs, and so by extension quality of housing. Whereone lives largely determines where one goes to school, thequality of education one receives, and so the quality of hous-ing one can afford. Segregation accordingly is a totalizing con-dition: For segregation to be sustained in any one dimensionthere has to be segregation in every dimension.

The socio-spatial make-up of the contemporary city rendersinvisible especially the racialized poor. Similarly, policy prior-ities and bureaucratic rationality of federal, state, and localadministrations restrict the possibilities for addressing theproblems faced by the (racially) marginalized. Expandingopportunities and social services for the racially marginalizedin periods of fiscal conservativism, externally imposed struc-tural contraints, and downsizing imperatives become at best azero sum game, if not the city's political and economic suicide.Economic globalization has prompted demographic disloca-tion and massive migrations not only from country to city butfrom south and especially east to the west, geographic sitesthat assume geopolitical significance. A growing share of afixed if not shrinking racial pie means diminishing returns tothose racially defined groups similarly structurally situated.

Segregation within cities concentrates crime—violentcrimes, especially homicide—within the spatial confines of thecity or neighborhood. So those blacks who kill, kill other blackpeople, for the most part, as too those Latinos who kill, and soon. In the wealthiest neighborhood of Washington DC, forinstance, which is 88 percent white, there were no murders inthe first half of 1996; just a couple of miles apart in the poor-est part of the city, which is 91 percent black, there were 30murders. The overwhelming majority of homicides take placewithin ethnic groups. In Texas, for example, 86 percent of Lat-inos were killed by Latinos. In the final analysis, it is not rawpoverty that accounts for the high homicide rates among Lat-inos and blacks but income inequality—the fact of economicdifferentials and the related spatial concentration effects, and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


these have been rising rapidly (Martinez, 1996). The wealthyget protected not only as the poorer do not but at the expense,discomfort, and threat to the safety of the racially impover-ished.

The current delimitation of welfare benefits and especiallythe workfare requirements that are so central to currentreform seem to regulate a reserve army of surplus labor thatkeeps the minimum wage rate in check and thus the wageprofile of the low end service sector. The prison industry like-wise has become a form of color-coded segregation, especiallyof young black and brown men. As prisons are being privatized,prisoners increasingly are being employed at sub-minimumwage on behalf of profit-producing private businesses. Welfareand prisons, then, have become cornerstones of the NewSegregation, locking poor people of color spatially as much aseconomically into lives of severe limitation. I turn now to dis-cuss the emergence of local political economies centered inpart around prisons in light of the recent reification of thisNew Segregation.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRISONS

The 1980s closed and the 1990s opened with considerablerhetorical warring over the downsizing of the US militarybudget. In dollar terms, however, the military budget this pastdecade has declined less than the rhetoric would lead one tobelieve: Climbing steadily during the Reagan years, the milit-ary budget more than doubled from $133m in 1980 to an his-torical high of $303m in Bush's first presidential year, 1989,and then declined modestly through the 1990s to $267m in1997. Yet there has been considerable decrease in relativeterms, as the military budget has shrunk as a percentage ofthe total US economy. Thus the military share of grossdomestic product dropped from a high of 23.6 percent in 1983to 20.8 percent in 1997, the lowest it had been since 1974 (seethe Federal Budget Summary, 1945-97). Economic rational-ization of the military (in the Weberian sense) at the turn ofthe decade was a response to the break-up of the Soviet Unionand the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe together with the con-sequent shift in geopolitical power. This rationalization was

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


really the manifest effect of a deeper and longer shift startedunder Reagan, namely, the shift in military commitment froma primarily manpowered military to one technologicallydriven, from one fighting wars by those bearing "stars" andmainly "stripes" to one of "star wars." It is against the back-ground of these transitions that bases were targeted for clos-ing and the racially configured economy of the militaryindustrial complex was downscaled.

This military downscaling, most notably in personnel andthe supportive infrastructure, especially troubled the econom-ies of California, the Southwest and South, the Southeast andNortheast; in short, these were the local economies alreadybuffeted by the storm of recession sweeping through theregions. It was racially marked in a triple sense. First, a con-temporary demographic map of the United States reveals thatthe racial heterogeneity in the country tends overwhelminglyto be concentrated in cities along the two coasts and in thesouth. These are the regions, of course, that were hardest hitby the twin storms of recession and downsizing. Second, thelower ranks in the military proper tended to be people of colorand such opportunity became scarcer precisely at the mo-ment affirmative action more broadly came under attack andbegan to be scaled back. Third, now out of work military indus-trial executives, engineers and skilled workers in high payingjobs tended largely to be white. They were the epitome of thoseangry white males much noted in the first half of the 1990s,culminating in the howl that became the "Contract on America."California suffered the greatest job loss related to base closuresbetween 1988 and 1993—105,000 military and civilian positionsin all at seventeen facilities.

Thus at the very moment recession struck at the heart ofAmerican political economy, the squeezing of the militaryindustrial complex had a negative multiplier effect both eco-nomically and politically. In a sense the Gulf War marked as itpapered over the material moment of this shift. It distractednational, indeed, global attention from American economicwoes even as it was being used to make out a case for the shiftfrom a manpowered military to a technologically fashionedone. Perhaps even more so, it signalled as it fuelled the emer-gent market for virtual war games while covering over, or up,the dramatic economic shifts to the wealthy that the 1980s

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


produced at the expense of the poor. If the wealthy's futuresseemed tied dramatically to the stock market, prospects forthe poor increasingly lay along a path paved to prison.

As military bases closed prisons remarkably began to prolif-erate in precisely those areas the economies of which weremost affected by militarily motivated slippage. In a stagnatingeconomy, fiscal "realities" reduced politics to a zero sum game.So the rapid rise in prison appeal and construction wasbought at the cost of a long-standing post-1945 commitmentto funding higher education. Between 1989 and 1994, 318new adult prisons opened. In 1994, 41,000 beds were addedat $55,000 a piece for a grand total of $1/2 billion. Another113,000 beds at the time were on the planning table. It hasbeen well documented that more was and is being spent onprisons than on building universities. Between 1987 and1995, state prison expenditure increased by 30 percent whilespending on higher education decreased by 18 percent. By thesame token, between 1980 and 1994 the prison populationnationwide increased by 300 percent while university enroll-ment decreased by 22 percent. (Here I am suggesting a cor-relation, or at least some relation, though obviously not astraightforwardly causal one.) California and Florida both nowspend more on prisons than on higher education. Relatedly,in 1995, expenditures concerning police protection in Califor-nia by far outstripped other states (by 3 times that of NewYork as next largest, for instance). And the incarceration rateof African Americans in prisons nationwide in 1993 was 7times that of whites (1.4 percent in contrast to 0.207 percent).

Prisons became the growth industry of choice not leastbecause they "killed" three, again racially characterized, birdssoaring in the political economy of America. First, they providedan alternative to the plight of unemployment, especially as aresult of industrial downscaling related to the military and theshrinking of educational opportunities most pressingly foryoung people of color. Second, they offered what turned out tobe an electorally appealing response, predominantly amongthe massively spreading middle classes perenially paranoidabout losing their newly acquired class status, concerning themoral panics around crime. This was especially pertinent inwake of the explosion in usage of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s predominantly among black and brown men. Thus 88

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


percent of offenders sentenced for crack offenses in 1995 wereAfrican American, 4.1 percent white (if crack and powderedcocaine were treated alike, the average sentence for the formerwould be 47 rather than its actual 141 months). In 1992nearly 30 percent of state prison admissions were for drugoffenses, up five fold over a ten year period. While the arrestrate of those not white for drug offenses has long been some-what higher than that for whites, the difference in arrest ratesspiraled during the years of the Reagan administration: forwhites between 1980 and 1988 they rose slightly from roughly0.25 percent of the population to 0.3 percent; for those notwhite alarmingly from roughly 0.45 percent of the overallpopulation to a staggering 1.5 percent over the same period(Tonry, 1995, p. 111). The increase in rates thus more thantripled for the latter while rising just 20 percent for whites, dif-ferentiated rates of increase all the more telling in face of thefact that whites constitute roughly 70 percent of the U.S.population. And third, the commitment politically and eco-nomically to prisons consolidated the political conservativismat the center of US politics in the name of keeping Americawhite—which is to say, safe for whites.

What I think these all too brief indications point to is thatthere is a more or less straightforward and conscious linkbetween downsizing the military and upsizing prisons in thepolitical economy of the United States, accompanied by thestreamlining of educational opportunities to the middle classand wealthy at the expense of the poor. Note that I emphatic-ally am not claiming that the prison industrial complex dis-places the military industrial complex as the centerpole of theUS economy. My claim rather is that the self-consciouslydesigned growth in the prison industry picks up—was con-ceived quite self-consciously to pick up—the slack at the timeboth in the racially configured political economy of Americaand in the fabrication of its "moral economy." That growth hasnow become institutionalized, integral to American economicand ideological reproduction.

There does exist some direct evidence of this chainingtogether of the military, prison, and moral economies of Amer-ica. In July 1989 then President George Bush established aCommission to determine if there were any closing or closedbases suitable for prison usage. In August 1989—just a

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


month into its existence, barely on its feet when it receivesthis missive—a senior official of the Federal Bureau of Prisonswrote the Commission laying out the Bureau of Prisons' needfor properties with existing structures and facilities of 100acres or more. The letter went on to argue that "a Federalprison operation can be very beneficial to a local economy, asannual operating expenses run to several million dollars."Prisons, as this astute official was quick to point out, bring tothe local economy exactly those sorts of direct and indirectexpenditures previously mobilized by military bases. Theseinclude not only service industries like catering, laundry, andsupplies. Prisons produce economic effects also less directlyrelated to prison operation. The latter include the local infra-structure supporting the lifestyle of prison and prison-relatedemployees—supermarkets, drug stores, gas stations and autorepair shops, doctors, dentists, schools and community col-leges, and so on. In some cases prisons notoriously havemade available also a supply of cheap labor, whether for agri-culture, road work, street cleaning, or telephone services andcredit card collections. In the moral economy, then, prisonsare supposed ideologically to represent law and order, work inthe face of welfare, discipline rather than delinquency, socialcontrol over anarchy.

Total military base acreage converted to prison use far out-stripped most other acreage usage—like the national guard,parks, hospitals, homeless shelters, the Bureau of IndianAffairs, or at least in one case a satellite campus of my ownuniversity. In all, so far as I can tell, though it is well nighimpossible to get a confident read on these figures, at leastnine bases were converted to prisons. There is thus a directsubstitution effect from the military to the prison industry,from a uniform(ed) economy of one kind to a more or less uni-form(ed) economy of another. In addition, so the argument ismade, robust economies tend to produce safer environments;prisoners behind barbed wired walls in a local community arebetter than criminals on the streets of otherwise faded neigh-borhoods and towns.

So, against the related background of reproduced segrega-tion and rising prison-based economies we return to the ques-tion with which we began: What accounts for the 35 percentdifferential between racially conceived suspicion and racially

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


effected imprisonment rates? It cannot be that people of coloras a matter of "natural" fact commit more crimes, all elseequal, for from a narrowly crime prevention/detection logicone would expect the suspicion rates to be higher, not least inlight of the racially driven disposition of law enforcement "tosuspect black." Such an assumption fails even on the basis ofthe most regressive criminological logic.

It follows that a reasonable explanation for the discrepancybetween raced suspicion and incarceration rates must be acomplex version of the "coloreds only need apply offense."Three considerations at the very least must factor interactivelyinto such an explanation. First, certain crimes committed byblacks are more likely incarcerable in ways other crimes arenot. As noted above, the rate of drug related incarceration forblacks far outstrips that for whites, most evident in the differ-ential sentences for crack and powder cocaine (Tonry, 1995,pp. 81-124). In addition, certain locations not only dispose thoseso confined to committing crimes but to being caught, and tolarger and longer sentences. The construction of "crime infestedareas" renders those spaces so represented as more highlysurveilled and policed. Police helicopters regularly patrolSouth Central Los Angeles but not Santa Monica. South Cent-ral, revealingly, becomes characterized for these and otherreasons as a "war zone." Similarly, crimes against whites areat least a little more likely to draw prison sentences, and longerterms, than those against people of color, even though AfricanAmericans are far more likely to be the victims of violentcrimes than any other ethnoracial group in the US. Thus viol-ent crime victimization rates for African Americans in 1992were 75 percent higher than those for whites.

Second, young impoverished people of color, especiallyblack and Latino men, are regarded silently as a surpluspopulation. For one, those unemployed youth of color are con-sidered to have "nothing better to do." So, while approximately80 percent of all US men of working age are employed fulltime, only 55 percent of prison inmates were working full timeat the time of arrest (at least in "legitimate" formal sector jobs,but isn't that the point in relation to criminalization?). Therate of unemployment for particularly (free) men of color(especially blacks) has always been double that of whites, andin the past two decades the rate of unemployment of young

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


black men across America's inner cities has ranged alarminglybetween 25 and 50 percent. In 1996, more than a third ofblack people between the ages of 16 and 35 were underem-ployed. Consequently, fully one third of African Americans,and very nearly that propoportion of Hispanics, live in pov-erty. In light of this, there has been a longstanding dominantconcern with "warehousing" those the society would havenowhere else to go. Revealingly, 50 to 75 percent of all stateprison inmates are unable to read. Only one-third of prisonersnationwide have completed high school in contrast to 85 per-cent of the general population. Most crimes, especially violentcrimes (or at least convictions), are committed by those withno more, and often less, than a high school education (Gold-berg, 1997, p. 173; in general, see Wilson 1996). In the zero sumgame of current political economy, the funding of prisons, Ihave suggested, is at the cost of funding education, especiallyhigher education. Defunded education promotes crime, espe-cially youth crime; crime calls out for prisons; the politicaleconomy of prisons reproduces a spiralling prison population.The circle of logic is now self-perpetuating.

Third, and relatedly, those without the capital get prison;not only do they have few other earning options than crimebut equally they likely lack the resources for an adequatedefense once arrested. That lack, in a society romanticizingconspicuous consumption, no doubt leads them to considercrime in the first instance. Thus, more than half of all prisonand jail inmates had a reported annual income of less than$10,000 prior to their arrest. The current court challenges tothe funding of legal aid services for the poor is but the logicaloutcome of the relentless post-1970s attack on the rights ofthe impoverished in America to receive any legal representa-tion, let alone an adequate defense (Greenhouse, 1998). Iattended the community meeting in Phoenix of President Clin-ton's travelling road show that goes under the name of theCommission on Race. The forum produced a long litany ofheartbreaking stories by desparately poor people of all racialcharacterizations whose rights had been trampled for lack ofany legal representation at all. Bereft and stripped of all hopethe legal system once had held out for them, they saw thisforum as their last opportunity for divine intervention, in theperson of the President of the United States. Hope springs

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


almost eternal, and dies hard. The nineteenth century poorhouse seems to have metamorphosed into the twenty-firstcentury prison.

Thus the 35 percent differential between raced suspicionand incarceration rates is a co-function of the economicimperatives of capital and politics, a long history of discur-sively reproduced, racially conceived and configured degrada-tion and segregation, the all too easy policy resolve to set thedegraded and socially least popular apart, to hide by whare-housing them in marginal facilities. If prisons are necessary tothe political economy of middle America's well-being, well,they better be filled, and filled they are. The poor, unemployedand uneducated will get prison more readily than the rich,marginally comfortable, employed and educated. And in Amer-ica the poor and uneducated are far more likely black andbrown than white.

There has emerged accordingly a carcerality of contain-ment, as Michael Taussig has suggested in a different context,conjoined with that carcerality of (self-) surveillance Foucaultmade so theoretically influential. The carcerality of surveil-lance marking modern states is about controlling (throughself-disciplining) the circulation of bodies throughout thesocial formation. Those deemed threatening to social control,"savage minds" beyond the dictates of this disciplinary logic,were largely to be locked out—in the colonies or the outhouse.There are social spaces—some heterotopias, some simplyabandoned because seemingly uncontrollable or not worththe cost-benefit balance to bring under control—remainingimpenetrable to the surveillant gaze. These periphractic spaces,home to "the fabricated savage" the late modern state hasmade its own by perpetuating, have been primarily aboutkeeping the projection of "savagery" contained—locked in tothe inner city or locked up in prison houses. (This, of course,is not to deny respective instances of modern raced intern-ment, and an array of late modern racially factored exclu-sions.) And so it follows that if panoptical carcerality largelydefines the logic of modern state control, late modern racedregimes enact a new rationality. The latter is expressedthrough exterior or surrounding containment, an evacuationfor the most part to anarchy of the space of racial others solong as the exteriority of that space is fenced off by a policed

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


cordon (Taussig 1997)—a cordon sanitaire to reference the co-lonial urban condition in Africa—the boundaries (rather thanthe interiority) clearly defined and policed, symbolically as muchas materially (Goldberg, 1998; Goldberg, 1993, pp. 190-2).

This emergent carcerality of containment is probably bestrepresented in relation to the street trade in drugs in aban-doned parts of major U.S. cities. Police largely turn a blind eyeto street corner dealing so long as its effects don't too readilyspill over into middle or main street America. Little concern isshown for inner city youth either killing for or dying fromdrugs so long as the anarchic spirit is limited to the inner city,its effects contained largely out of sight. The war on drugs isthus largely a war of position, to twist a well worn metaphorsome. It is a war over place and space, a war to position thoseblack and brown bodies not able to actualize the AmericanDream through the hyper-exploited public sphere of the sportsindustry. Rather, black and brown bodies are maneuvered inthe ongoing racial nightmare into the hyper-contained spacesof mean streets preparatory to spending the rest of their usuallyshort lives behind bars.

Accordingly, the sport/war metaphor I started with—defense/offense—is meant to reflect the deep discursive order-ing of the psyche of war in the national imagination, displacedinto one of those other foundational poles of US political eco-nomy now, namely, the business of recreational sport andspectatorship. So, the war on crime/drugs takes up thatspace between the rhetorics of war and that of sport as war,furnishing a rationalization—a hiding of—war on youngpeople of color as the surplus value of this society. Impover-ished youth of color, then, are seen as surplus in the sense ofan unusable commodity, the remainder stock, the detritus ofthe economy, an inhuman capital capable of producing profiton capital investment only by being treated as alien(able)objects, products to be traded in the marketplace of that newracially configured economy of the prison industrial complex.The more value socially, materially and symbolically he (andincreasingly she) is at the center of creating the less valued heor she is. Indeed, their value in the former senses is a functionof their devaluation in the latter, their devaluation in the lattera necessary condition for their value in the former. So, themore valuable they are, the more worthless; the more civilized

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


if not civilizing the supposed presumption of their Incarcera-tion, the more barbarous they are rendered because assumedso; the more economically empowering their imprisonment,the more powerless they are required to be (Marx, 1975). The"exterior enemy" that fetishistically grounded the moral eco-nomy of self-proclaimed superpower status has necessarily,magically given way to the "enemy within" in the face of rapidlyshifting alliances and altogether permeable borders.

In closing, I draw a comparison with late apartheid SouthAfrica. The standing joke about the proto-fascist rulingNational Party in the early 1980s went as follows: So why arethe Nationalists spending so much of late on prisons?Because they are investing in their own future. Besides theprophetic nature of the humor (and despite the fact thatalmost no former leaders of the Party are anywhere close tobeing imprisoned), what this reveals is that the building ofprisons and incarceration of large numbers of black SouthAfricans said something very basic about the evisceration offreedom for all in South Africa, indeed, one could say for blackpeople and people generally everywhere. Placing imprison-ment at the center of national consciousness and a corner-stone of the national political economy, rather than and at thedirect expense of (higher) education, is precisely to place lim-its on freedom, to predicate freedom on unfreedom, and so todelimit freedom at its roots. Thus, the political economy offear and loathing that promotes the prison industrial complexin the United States, that presumes as it at once reproducessurplus values, is one that by necessity restricts freedom inthe land of the free and denies courage in the country of thebrave. And in funneling access—to education for some, arevolving life of crime and prison for others—freedom preciselyis (re-) configured and reproductively manifest in racial terms.A society that secures itself internally through force in thisway—forced incarceration and forced labor—is one stricken toits roots by anxiety and Insecurity. In being so (de)based, iterodes the freedom of us all.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014


References

Denton, Nancy (1994). "Residential Segregation: Challenge to White America".Journal of lntergroup Relations XXI(2) (Summer), pp. 19-35.

Glazer, Nathan (1965). "The Renewal of Cities". Scientific American 213(3), pp.192-203.

Goldberg, David Theo (1993). Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics ofMeaning. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

——(1997). Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America. New York: Routsledge.

——(1998). "The New Segregation". Race and Society 1(1), pp. 15-32.Greenhouse, Linda (1998). "High Court Ruling Puts in Doubt $100 Million for

Legal Services". New York Times, Tuesday June 16, 1998, Al, 18.Hirsch, Arnold (1993). "With or Without Jim Crow: Black Residential Segrega-

tion in the United States". In Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl.(eds.) Urban Policy in Twentieth Century America, pp. 65-99. NewBrunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Mann, Coramae Richey (1993). UnequalJustice: A Question of Color. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press.

Martinez Jr., Ramiro (1996). "Latinos and Lethal Policy: The Impact of Povertyand Inequality". Social Problems 43(2) (May), pp. 131-45.

Marx, Karl (1975). "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts". In Early Writ-ings. London: Pelican.

Massey and Denton (1993). American Apartheid: Segregation and the Makingof the Underclass. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Massey and Hajnal (1995). "The Changing Geographic Structure of Black-White Segregation in the United States". Social Science Quarterly76(3) (September), pp. 527-12.

Mohl, Raymond (1993). "Shifting Patterns of American Urban Policy since1900". In Arnold Hirsch and Raymond Mohl. (eds.) Urban Policy inTwentieth Century America, pp. 1-45. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-versity Press.

Seeking Justice (1997). Crime and Punishment in America. Edna McConnellClark Foundation.

Tonry, Michael (1995). Malign Neglect—Race, Crime, and Punishment inAmerica. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, William Julius (1996). When Work Disappears: The World of the NewUrban Poor. New York: Knopf.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

08:

18 2

2 N

ovem

ber

2014

surplus value: the political economy of prisons

Documents