Did you know that the United States has the most people imprisoned per capita in the world? I mean the whole world, including Russia, China, Albania, wherever. According to the US Department of Justice annual report, on this very day about 2.3 million Americans are in prison. Add in people on probation, and the number is over 3% of our total population. The current rate is four times higher than in 1980. What? How can that be? Even more striking, 1 out of 10 young Black males are in prison. In fact, if you are a young Black male, you have a much better chance of going to prison than going to college. 10.4% of all black males between 25 and 29 years old are in prison, 1.3% of white males the same age. 75% of women imprisoned are single mothers. What’s going on?

The board of a college I served with visited a cramped State prison in Newark on a damp fall day. It was an unusual place (even for a prison), housing the largest gang population in the NJ State system. The Prisoners were kept in their cells for 23 hours a day. The exercise area looked very much like the dog kennel near our home. Two tight rows of small chain-link fenced areas, each with their own steel wire door. One of the board members wept. I kept wondering how it had come to this. This is normal. Acceptable. I wasn’t crying.

                We are continuing our conversation on consumerism, using Veblen’s definition that he wrote back in 1899 in his ground breaking work, “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” “Consumerism is the equation of personal happiness with the purchase of material possessions and consumption.” I wonder if there is a connection between consumerism and the American prison system. Obviously, some people need to be in jail. This is an incredibly complex issue, but there is truth to be found here. Cornell West notes that “The incessant media bombardment of images (of salacious bodies and mindless violence) on TV and in the movies and music convinces many young people that the culture of gratification – a quest for insatiable pleasure, endless titillation, and sexual stimulation – is the only way of being human.” What if that’s the message you receive every waking moment, but you are essentially cut off from legitimate ways of achieving society’s definition of “success?” How else can we explain our astonishing rates of incarceration and the racial disparity that is evident? Our culture of consumerism has a sinister side.

Strangely enough, prison itself has become a business in the United States. The American Prison system costs over $40 billion a year to operate. One private company, the Correctional Corporation of America, operates 60 prisons in 11 states and actually owns 42 prisons. On the company’s website, It calls itself the “corrections management provider of choice” noting that it “focuses on building careers with unlimited growth and development opportunities.” CCA currently employs over 17,000 people.  According to Business Wire, the prison telephone business is a billion dollar enterprise. MCI runs one of the largest phone services in American prisons, which they call “Maximum Security.” They typically charge six times the normal rates, including an automatic $3 surcharge per call made by prisoners. To land the California prison system contract, MCI pays the state of California a 32% cut of what they make on prisoner calls. Win-win, right?

Question: does our legal system create and enforce law only in response to behavior that is detrimental to society, or does it also need to maintain an inventory large enough to sustain, or even grow, the $40 billion prison industry? I’m not sure.

If you live in a world that defines success by the stuff you have, you have to find a way to get the stuff. I take teams of students into the south Bronx. One of the highest concentrations of Aids in the country. The highest rate of adolescent asthma in the United States. Used needles on the littered streets in the morning. Dead rats on the broken concrete sidewalks. Really. What options have we given people in the south Bronx? What are the choices they can make? I’m sorry, but their educational system has failed. Jobs are entry level and scarce. When I walk through the area, everyone assumes I want to buy drugs. Why else would a white guy be wandering around the south Bronx? But when they turn on their TV, listen to their radio, or step on the bus, they see and hear the same thing we see and hear. The messages come at them:   buy       drink       eat           wear              consume.