Post Read Week 13

The Prison-Industrial Complex is a way to describe the rapid increase in inmates and the process of how it became so populated. People, particularly minorities are being imprisoned at increased rate and private prisons are profiting at the amount of inmates that they accumulate. They can pay them at ridiculously low rates and treat them with little respect.

If the motivation for incarcerating people isn’t to stop crime than other possible reasons for their incarceration might have to do with the prisons ability to profit for their incarceration rate or that people are being arrested at an increased rate because police are looking for crimes. This isn’t to say that police offers aren’t doing their jobs, but that maybe the areas that are having higher crime rates are the areas where cops look for crime. These areas happen to be the more poor areas, which are more likely to have suspicious activity because when your poor the things that you’ll do to survive or provide for you family, or the effects that the economy can have on you make you actions cross that legal line. It’s harder to prosecute people who have money and can afford better lawyers or provide bail money.

The incarceration system creates a “racial caste system” in ways like isolating certain areas of crime. Like I said before, the areas that police find them selves in is where they are going to find crime and if they are only in the poor neighborhoods where more minorities are likely to live, because of the way the economic or educational system has affected them, they are likely to find it. The wealthier neighborhoods are assumed to have less crime the police aren’t going to look for it in those neighborhoods. There’s also the fact that once a person is convicted or arrested for a crime that follows them and makes it difficult for them obtain a job, so they stay are stuck in this vicious cycle of being stuck in an environment where circumstances have left them fighting to survive and sometimes these fights get them in trouble.

The industrial part of PIC is the exchange and profit of money that prisons, particularly private prisons make off of the inmates. The prisoners are put to work where they are provided little compensation.

I think PIC is related to colorblind racism because of the fact that people are unaware of the patterns that surround the incarcerations. Even Michelle Alexander admits to not being aware of them for a while until it was brought to her attention. People can be naïve to their own prejudices until someone points them out or they are put into a situation where they have to face their prejudices.

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