As added incentive for their construction and use, many rural areas struggling with high unemployment rates clamor for prisons, public or private, because they mean jobs; and local legislators are often anxious to gratify these wishes whether or not the facility is needed.

Upon the whole, this research has opened my eyes to injustices that don’t receive nearly enough attention. The United States depends-more than any other government in the world- on caging people as a response to our problems. In recent decades, we have closed mental hospitals, addiction services, and community programs for the retarded and the disabled, not to mention support services for families, children, and the elderly. Prisons and jails have become the one-stop solution for all our problems. The private prison industry is strengthening its grip on the entire correction community. The only way it can continue to grow is if more and more people are sentenced to jail for longer and longer sentences.

It’s common knowledge that the harsh drug-sentencing laws that congress passed in 1986 have greatly increased the prison population. (In 1984 just 30 percent of inmates were drug offenders; today 57 percent are) Less known is the impact of federal immigration policies. Sine 1994, Congress has created enormous pressure to find and deport troublesome immigrants (both legal residents and undocumented immigrants). In the 1996 Immigration Reform Act, Congress widely expanded the list of crimes for which a noncitizen must be deported after serving his or her sentence. These crimes, called “aggravated felonies,” are now defined to include many offenses that are neither aggravated nor even, in many other jurisdictions, felonies. This has fueled an all-out campaign to find crime-committing immigrants even relatively small time offenders and those whose only crime is attempting to re-enter the country and with that comes an explosion in the number of non-U.S. citizens in the prison population. In the past seven years this population has increased by almost 19,000. In addition, several thousand other non citizens are being held in prisons, not as convicts serving sentences but as pretrial or predeportation detainees. These include many people who have completed their criminal sentences in state or federal prison and are now supposed to be deported but who remain incarcerated because no country will take them. In addition to seeking a greater flow of prisoners to the beds of prisons, lobbyists also work to increase the level of inmates’ classification-as, for instance, from minimum to medium security because the higher the level of classification, the greater the level of the state’s payment to the firm.

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