Marijuana smokers are filling jails with cheap labour for corporate profit.

The United States has a new form of slavery. SWAT teams are conducting military "cleansings" of poor, minority and marijuana-growing neighbourhoods under the guise of drug raids that particularly target women, black people and members of the cannabis culture. Prisons are being privatized and converted into sweat-shops where, for example, pot puffers might find themselves in an ironic hell on earth… a dark cave were they are forced to answer unending calls for a travel agency, for the rest of their lives. The entire operation is being coordinated by multinational corporate interests that reach deep into the heart and pockets of the White House.

War against pot-people

They weren't growing pot. They didn't have pot in their possession. Not a single one of them even had a bong. But when they refused to let the DEA install cop cameras in their grow store, Southern Lights and Hydroponics, the Tucker family became targets in the US war on drugs, as did many other residents of Norcross, Georgia. The DEA watched the store's customers and sent SWAT teams to terrorize them and clean out their grow operations. Some of those customers traded bogus testimony against the shop's owners for shorter sentences. The Tuckers – Gary, his wife Joanne, and his brother Steve – each received 10 year prison sentences when they reached court in 1994.

The Norcross, Georgia sting was part of a larger DEA plot called "Operation Green Merchant" (OGM), which began as early as 1987, with roots in the heart of the Reagan drug war… a war that still continues today. The operation's goal: to eradicate indoor marijuana grow-ops all across the United States through the surveillance and targeting of hydroponics stores. Literally hundreds of thousands of Americans have been investigated by agents working under the umbrella of OGM. And yet even OGM is only a small part of the larger picture of drug war oppression.

In the excellent book, Lost Rights – The Destruction of American Liberty, James Bovard touches on how, early in the modern drug war, certain towns became DEA targets. Like Jerome, Arizona, where in 1986 a small hamlet of hippies was raided by over a hundred heavily armed police who "…dragg[ed] women and children out of bed, scaring them half to death, to get 9 or 10 pounds of marijuana." Since Bovard's 1994 book, military attacks on towns have become almost commonplace in the US government's campaign to destroy cannabis. A campaign that continues today with the seizure of homes, property and bank accounts… and with the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of innocent plant lovers.

Soaring rates of imprisonment

Prisons aren't being built to keep violent criminals off of the streets, they're being built to create drug-war dungeons. Rapists, murderers and thieves don't crowd US prisons. Rather, thanks in particular to President Ronald Reagan, it is harmless marijuana smokers who swell the cells to overflowing.

Before the Reagan drug war, prisons were becoming empty. From 1965 to 1975, the US prison population actually shrank at the rate of about 1% per year.1 The drug war – especially against cannabis – changed all that, and turned the failing prison industry into a booming business. US Bureau of Justice Statistics show that at the beginning of the Reagan era in 1980, there were 220 inmates for every 100,000 people in the US. But by the end of the Reagan era in 1989, prisons were stuffed to maximum capacity… bursting at a record 434 inmates per 100,000 US citizens. During the Reagan era, the number of inmates per 100,000 US citizens had risen by 214 over a 9 year period… when it had only risen 80 per 100,000 over the previous 52 years!

Drug war against women

The drug war simplifies the disposal of undesirable people in a society were humanity has become a catch-word for "what we can get away with and still look clean." Because a disproportionate number of American women are poor and disadvantaged, a disproportionate number of them – many of them single parents10 – go to prison for drug offences. In the worst US prisons, women are routinely raped and sold as prostitutes, as though they were nothing better than slaves waiting to be captured and used.

SWAT scam

In an exclusive interview with Cannabis Culture, Catherine Austin Fitts gave an example of how HUD/SWAT cooperation works through the HUD's Operation Safe Home.

"In 1998, the HUD's Operation Safe Home dropped a SWAT team into a Washington, DC community with 200 agents, police and 50 to 100 reporters," explained Fitts. "The reason for the operation was to arrest three people that they had been investigating for two years, and that could have been picked up by local police. Their real goal was to create headlines. They swept another 17 people in a housing project that night, and the next morning it was headline news."

Fitts sees the combination of HUD loans and the drug war as an attack on local prosperity for the benefit of Wall Street investors. The 1998 DC drug raid, Fitts points out, came only shortly after the neighbourhood opposed a development project to build a convention centre that wasn't good for anyone except wealthy developers. "The spin on the raid was that people in the community were bad, and that the people building the convention centre were good. After the raid, the convention centre vote passed."

The drug-war victims of HUD raids are destined for corporate assembly lines in private prisons. "Operation Safe-Home was designed and started at the same time [1994] as federal and state governments increasingly turned to private contractors to buy government prisons, or build new ones," said Fitts. "It was a plan."

A look at history confirms Fitts' suspicions. Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, supported and co-developed by Gore, created the nation's federal three-strikes laws, meaning longer prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders, and also established a federal commission to study the "drug problem." The two planned to offset the increased cost of imprisoning drug offenders by widespread prison privatization, which became one of their platforms in the 1995 US election, after private prison lobbyists dolled out $150,000 in campaign funding to both Democrats and Republicans. In 1997, Vice President Al Gore gave the HUD $217.3 million for its anti-drug battles, to step up drug-war oppression against poor communities.

"It is critical that black people, minorities, and even women are considered hopeless in terms of being able to provide productive products and services, let alone manage other people's money," said Fitts. "This is how we have welfare reform, but tremendous opposition to learning centers and business incubation. We need the welfare population to go to jail and the children of farmers to guard them. The welfare population provides a low cost work force and distribution locations for the drug business. Then they are put in prison and produce the necessary headlines to prove that politicians are doing something about drugs."

Indeed, Fitts' own plan to provide data servicing jobs for low-income families was turned down by HUD secretary Cuomo and ridiculed by high-ranking HUD staff who, according to Fitts, called the plan "Computers for Niggers." Soon afterward UNICORP, a Department of Justice-owned business that markets prison labour to private companies, used her plan to create yet more prison jobs.

Private prisons for profit

Even before 1900, there was staunch opposition to private prisons from labour groups, business and reform advocates. The horrific conditions on chain gangs, the negative effects of prison labour competing with industries and jobs outside of prisons, the feast of bribes fed to politicians for prison labour contracts – these were the reasons that private prisons and prison labour were originally made illegal, through a series of acts passed by federal and state governments between 1935 and 1950.16

But in 1979, one year before Reagan's expansion of the drug war, the US government passed the Percy Amendment, legalizing private prisons and prison labour. Since then, a landslide of federal and state amendments have guaranteed increased profits for private prison contractors.

Legislative changes are bought and paid for by large "campaign donations." During the 1997 election alone, private prison contractors like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut provided well over a half-million dollars to political campaigns, according to figures supplied by the Sentencing Project, a prison reform group.

In the early and mid 90's, CCA provided a model to which prison corporations aspired, a kind of business success possible only through a combination of pay-off schemes, nepotism and empty political posturing. CCA, with the largest market share of any private prison contractor, exuded a constant flow of campaign funding to politicians who were happy to lap it up. CCA Chairman Emeritus Thomas Beasley gave $61,250 to politicians between 1993 and '97. During the same period CCA Board Member of Trust Ray Bell contributed $26,050, and CCA Chairman Doctor R Crants donated $27,250.17 In 1997, CCA hired the DC lobbying firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips (MPP). Working with former long-time DC Councilman John Ray (who began with the firm while he was still in office), MPP lobbied the state legislature and secured Washington DC's first private prison contract for CCA in 1997.3

Often, politicians and high-level bureaucrats are hired by private prison contractors to become full-time lobbyists. Just a few examples from CCA include David Myers, CCA president, who was employed with the Texas Department of Corrections from 1968 to 1985; Charles Blanchette, vice president of operations, who worked with the Texas Department of Corrections for 16 years; and Michael Quinlan, trustee and chief executive officer of the CCA Prison Realty Trust, who was acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons for five years. Dozens and dozens more examples abound.

The profits to be made from the private prison industry are so enormous it isn't difficult to see why corrupt politicians salivate at the thought of licking some of it up. While CCA profit is down for the year 2000 due to poor management, they still generate tens of millions of dollars in annual income. Wackenhut, another of the largest private prison contractors in the US, recently surpassing even CCA in its financial growth, generated a record $2.1 billion in revenue in 1999, an increase of 22.6% over the year before, resulting in $37.9 million in operating profit for that year alone.18 More than enough to buy off politicians for the next few decades of drug war oppression and feed prisons with cheap labour.

Prison labour camps

While in a private slammer, drug war prisoners should expect to work long and exhausting days making circuit boards, valves and fittings, eyeglasses, water beds and blue jeans. In Ohio, prisoners do data processing, and in Southern California they answer phones to book vacation flights for TWA.19 Typically, prisoners are paid for their work, but most of the money they make is taken from them by the prison for rent, food, taxes, and a host of other exagerrated costs. Most inmates actually earn only pennies an hour.20

The drug war equals profits as marijuana smokers fill private prisons with cheap labour. Between 1980 and 1994 the number of inmates working for big businesses climbed 358%, generating profits of $1.31 billion.21

As in the early 1900's, businesses in regular society are hit hard by prison labour. When LTI, a circuit board manufacturer, relocated to a Wackenhut prison in the early 90's, they closed their plant in Austin Texas, and layed off 150 employees. Although, by law, corporations that contract prison labour are supposed to consult with local unions and businesses, in reality there were no such meetings when LTI moved shop. Similarly, Honda hired prisoners to assemble car parts for $2.05/hour (of which inmates got to keep 35 cents) without soliciting outside opinion.19

Private prison supporters claim that the revenue generated by inmate labour converts to lower operating costs. But a 1996 GAO investigation found that the government pays about the same in subsidies to the private prison industry as it does to run its own institutions. Private clinks are no less expensive than public ones, and provide worse services as they cut corners in a race to increase profits.

The private prison labour system feeds on itself like a snake eating its own tail. Less jobs in the public sector means more unemployment, which equals more poverty, more replacement of local economies with marijuana and drug economies, swelling ghettos, increased drug war enforcement, more drug-war prisoners, and eventually more private prisons to hold them all.

Dark ironies abound in the emerging corporate feudalism. The CIA imports cocaine… but small-scale dealers are the ones put behind bars. A private prison is proposed to hold Washington DC's predominantly black inmates on a former slave plantation in North Carolina… where they will toil in corporate sweat shops as their ancestors toiled in the fields.22 America is being converted into a two-class society, with the labouring masses enslaved in work camps, and business owners and managers ensconced in newly redeveloped and cleansed ghetto areas, fortified "gated communities" similar to medieval castles with walled villages.

Appalling prison conditions

While slaving for the police-state, many US drug war prisoners face the harshest of living conditions. Patrick Swiney is an inmate of Holman Prison in Alabama, a state infamous for having the worst prisons in the US. He describes the conditions there as "the perfect environment for breeding deadly diseases." According to Swiney, the toilets and showers are unvented, filling the tiny cells with noxious vapours and humidity. Slime and mildew cover the walls, outbreaks of TB are common, and medical care is nearly nonexistent.

That's because, says Swiney, the deputy warden's wife works with Correctional Medical Services, which is supposed to provide medical care to the inmates. "Every dollar she does not spend on our medical care," wrote Swiney, "is profit in her company's pocket."

Kick-backs are big in both the private and public prison business, and they can affect prison living conditions. Telephone companies, for example, will bid big bucks for prison contracts, kick-back up to 35% to the prison for the privilege of doing business, and pass the costs on to the inmate.19 In private prisons it's even worse, as employees are given stock options in the company as a part of their benefits, meaning that they are motivated to cut corners on costs by using, for example, less cleaning products.21

Conflicts of interest are rife as everyone scrambles for their piece of prison pie. The American Correction Association, an organization which is responsible for checking prison conditions and giving them a "stamp of approval," also facilitates what prison-reform groups call "Prisonfest," a yearly meeting attended by drug-war politicians like Janet Reno, at which private companies hock their wares and services to both public and private prisons.

Global prison

The drug-war fueled corporate feudalism of the US is a reflection of the drug war now being waged in Colombia. In Colombia, death squads destroy villages that lie on oil and mineral-rich lands, call the local minority populations "narcoguerillas," and drive them into cities where they toil in corporate sweat shops for pennies an hour. In the US, SWAT teams destroy ghettos and convert the land into a resource by selling it to redevelopers, call the local minority populations "drug abusers," and jail them in factories where they slave in corporate sweat shops for pennies an hour.

In both cases drug-war tyranny wipes out local economies, replaces it with global ones, and produces massive profits for multinational corporations, like Wackenhut and CCA, who have a combined presence in over fifty-six countries. Around the world, the drug war is the rotten core of a profit-driven agenda to enslave every nation's peoples.

You can do something. Buy locally instead of from multinational corporations. Write letters to the media and speak out against drug war oppression when you have the opportunity. Attend demonstrations against the prison/industrial complex, and shout a message of freedom from drug-prison oppression!


Contact:

• The Sentencing Project: 514 - 10th St NW, Suite 1000, WA DC, 20004; tel (202) 628-0871; fax (202) 628-1091; email staff@sentencingproject.org; website www.sentencingproject.org

• Families Against Mandatory Minimums:1612 K St NW, Suite 1400, WA DC, 20006; tel (202) 822-6700; email famm@famm.org; website www.famm.org

• Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE National): PO Box2310, WA DC, 20013-2310; tel (202) 789-2126; website www.curenational.org

• US Department of Housing and Urban Development: 451 7th St SW, WA DC, 20410; tel (202) 708-1112; website www.hud.gov

• The General Accounting Office: 441 G St NW, WA DC, 20548; tel (202) 512-4800; email webmaster@gao.gov; website www.gao.gov

• Amnesty International: 322 8th Ave, New York, NY, 10001; tel (212) 807-8400; email admin-us@aiusa.org; website www.amnesty.org



1. Wacquant, Loic. From Welfare State to Prison State, Imprisoning the American Poor, in Le Monde Diplomatique.
2. Statistics from the US Bureau of Justice.
3. Figures and information provided by the Sentencing Project, a prison reform group. www.sentencingproject.org
4. Penological Information Bulletin No 19-20. Council of Europe. December, 1995.
5. Statistics from Families against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a sentencing reform group. www.famm.org
6. Women in Prison: Issues and Challenges Confronting US Correctional Systems. US General Accounting Office.
7. Mauer, Marc. Americans Behind Bars: US and International Use of Incarceration. The Sentencing Project. 1995.
8. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports for the United States 1980, 1990, 1995, 1998 & 1999.
9. Campbell, Duncan. Anger Grows as US Jails its Two Millionth Inmate. The UK Guardian. February 15, 2000.
10. Buckley, Frank. CNN. January 29, 2000.
11. Wideman, John E. Doing Time, Marking Race. The Nation 261:14. 1995.
12. Amnesty International 1999 Report on the USA.
13. Gott, Natalie. Drug Sweep Called 'Ethnic Cleansing' Of Texas Town's. Arizona Daily Star. October 14, 2000.
14. ACLU of Texas Charges Racial Discrimination in Notorious Small-Town Drug Bust Scandal. American Civil Liberties Union web site. September 29, 2000. www.aclu.org
15. Currie, E. Crime and Punishment in America. p 15. 1998. And Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. p 510. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1996.
16. Phil Smith. Private Prisons: Profits of Crime. Covert Action Quarterly. And Predergast, Alan. Prisons-R-Us.
17. From a research memorandum supplied by the Florida Police Benevolent Association.
18. 1999 Wackenhut Annual Report
19. Erlich, Reese. Prison Labor: Workin' For The Man.
20. Prison Labour in Privatizing the Prison System. National Center for Policy Analysis.
21. Kicenski, Karl K. The Production Of Crime and The Sale of Discipline. George Mason University.
22. Information provided by Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE). Translator: Julie Stoker. July, 1998. Dayton Voice. September 20, 1995.