The perpetual prisoner machine : how America profits from crime /

Crime pays. In two words, this is the thesis of Dyer's book. The author, a journalist and former editor, argues that crime pays primarily for politicians who have gained considerable mileage from the winning "tough on crime" rhetoric over the last decade. In particular, it pays for corporate America, which has invested significantly in the nation's prison-industrial complex with an estimated 150 billion dollars now spent annually on criminal justice. Dyer documents his case with an enormous amount of credible material. Crime rates, for example, have been level or have fallen in many communities over the last three decades and yet, during the 1990s, US prison populations have doubled to nearly two million. The US now incarcerates, by far, the largest per capita percentage of its population of any nation in the world (500,000 more than communist China, in fact). And most disturbing, big business now has a vested financial stake in seeing that those numbers remain steady or continue to climb. The book is written in an investigative journalistic style and has a powerful and sobering impact. A modest collection of notes accompanies the text. Recommended for public, college and university libraries. Upper-division undergraduates and above. K. Edgerton; Montana State University at Billings

Dyer examines the conflict of interest inherent in introducing the profit motive into crime and punishment. The U.S. prison population is 20 times greater than it was 29 years ago, though the crime rate has remained relatively flat during that period. Current annual expenditures on prisons top $150 billion, threatening to soon rival defense expenditures. Crime has become a "valuable commodity" in the U.S. At the same time, the growing prison industry threatens social stability as one out of three blacks in the U.S. is under supervision of the criminal justice system. The rise in prison construction has been fueled by excessive media reporting on crime and violence, increased political polling, and rising profits from prisons and related industries. Dyer details how U.S. corporations, from those directly involved in prison construction and administration to those directly or indirectly using prison labor, are benefiting; he cites a company that has moved its database processing operation from Mexico to San Quentin. A revealing look at a troubling social trend. --Vanessa Bush

This is a disturbing treatise on an Orwellian component of contemporary capitalism: the free-market takeover of the American corrections system. In the 1980s, Dyer argues, we were told that prison spending had to go up because the crime rate was going up. In the '90s, we've been told we have to spend more on prisons because the crime rate is going down, i.e., spending money works. Those with vested interests, he says, have further told the public that privatized prisons are tax-efficient boons to deindustrialized areas. Dyer provides a plausible argument that violent crime rates over the last 20 years have not fluctuated as dramatically (either up or down) as FBI statistics indicate, and that the bulk of the growth of the prison system is disproportionate to the change in the crime rate. Disproportionately growing numbers of prisoners have been nonviolent criminals, usually caught up in the war on drugs. One of Dyer's innovative observations is the "prisonization" effect: that the extreme brutality of our prison culture virtually guarantees recidivism. This is exacerbated, he argues, by prison privatization: referring to various incidents in the prisons in Colorado, Texas, New Jersey and elsewhere run by Correction Corporation of America and by Wackenhut, Dyer (Harvest of Rage) documents how the cost-cutting drive to please shareholders quickly results in negligence, danger, violence, escapes and a general air of brutalization (he finds particularly heinous the policy of randomly mixing violent and nonviolent offenders). Thus, prison has "hidden costs" to society, which Dyer illuminates. He notes that, because of the growing reliance of the "prison boom" on corporations with a bottom-line mentality, it will soon be too late to turn back the policies of extreme incarceration. Dyer supplements meticulous research with argumentative anger and verve to make a strong case that what has been called the "prison-industrial complex" is preying on largely minority and underclass segments of our society. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

An indictment of our decision to incarcerate an ever-increasing number of our citizens. According to journalist Dyer (Harvest of Rage, 1997), the 'lock 'em up' mentality loose in the land is attributable to the 'prison industrial complex,' which he identifies as law-enforcement bureaucrats and private enterprises that profit from our recent prison-building boom. And what a boom it's been: The US now imprisons more of its citizens than China or Russia'quite a feat given our smaller population and penchant for thinking of ourselves as more enlightened in matters of criminal justice than either of our Cold War adversaries. In the face of this trend, Dyer asks a simple question: How can the American public possibly believe that locking up so many people makes sense? His answer is equally simple: capitalism. Those profiting from the criminal-justice business have duped the public in the same way that the military-industrial complex led it to accept that vast public outlays were necessary to win the Cold War. While Americans are less at risk of becoming crime victims than they were 20 years ago, public- opinion polls show they're convinced it's just the opposite. Dyer lays much of the blame for this misconception at the feet of the media. Television programs and the nightly news highlight violent acts with alarming regularity, not to inform the public but to boost advertising revenues. Meanwhile, companies that seek a piece of the ever-increasing public money allocated for prisons lobby politicians, who advance their own careers by catering to voters' misplaced fear of crime. In Dyer's judgment, this combo of circumstances virtually guarantees the perpetuation of a massive falsehood: that ever more prisons are needed. While many of Dyer's views are controversial, he provides an ideal place to begin looking at the issue of why most states spend more money building prisons than schools.