Noam Chomsky: Prisons in America (transcript)

Prisons in America
by Noam Chomsky (editor\'s note: transcribed from this realvideo; see below for mp3 audio link.)

Question from audience: I heard you mention before that prisons and the growth of prisons are a shot in the arm for the economy. I\'m curious about the growth of prisons, and various people on the Left and the Right saying \'well, there\'s more crime, and we need more prisons.\' So, is there a role for prisons in the economy? [unitelligible]

Noam Chomsky: Yeah, absolutely.

Questioner: What is that role?

Yeah, in fact, it\'s very clearly a role, as you move towards the third -- I mean, remember what a third-world society looks like, a third-world society has a lot of superfluous people. People are just useless. They have no human rights and no human value because they don\'t contribute to making profit and enriching the rich. You know, they don\'t even clean their floors, they\'re not even needed for anything.

Well, in one of our third-world domains, that\'s why we fund the security forces. Like, half of our military aid, more than half for Latin America, goes to Colombia. And the reason is because it has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. It\'s slaughtered -- the security forces have killed maybe 20,000 people or so in the last few years, political organizers, union leaders, peasants, and so on. And that\'s the way you make sure you keep the superfluous people under control, you slaughter them.

Well, we haven\'t quite reached that level here, though we\'re getting to be a third-world society. So, what we do with the superfluous people, the ones who don\'t contribute to wealth production for the rich -- and therefore aren\'t human really -- what you do with them is first of all try to coop them up in slums, which are sort of like concentration camps, and if that doesn\'t work you put them in jail. Which is the equivalent -- sort of a counterpart in a wealthy society to death squads in a poor society. So, they\'re [prisons] naturally zooming. And they are a shot in the arm.

Icidentally, crime is not going up. Least as far as any evidence is concerned. I mean, if you can believe the government -- you know, they have statistics and all this other stuff -- crime is fairly level. I mean it sort of went up in the 70\'s, since then, accordingly to them, it\'s even declined. But the perception of crime has increased. But that\'s because it\'s [incomplete] -- it\'s not that it\'s not a serious problem, especially if you\'re a poor person, it\'s an extremely serious problem, because crime is mostly poor people praying on eachother.

So, you\'re a poor person living down in Roxbury, yeah, crime\'s a problem -- but they\'re not the ones who are calling for more prisons. You know, their own son\'s in jail. In fact, there are now more black males in the prison system than in the education system, in the relevant ages. In fact, the criminal system is simply being used as a war against -- literally -- a war against an unwanted part of the population.

A part of the population that used to be industrial workers, or at least had the opportunity to, and maybe work themselves up, but now just have no rights. Because you don\'t need that anymore. You can get them cheaper somewhere else. So, you got to get rid of them. That\'s a large part of what the drug war\'s about. The drug war has no effect on drugs. In fact, as I mentioned a large part -- and it\'s well known outside the United States, as in the bishop state -- that a large part of the drug policies are fomenting the production of drugs. In fact, if anybody wanted to do something about the drugs they\'d go to wherever there\'s $260 billion of annual profits being laundered -- namely, U.S. banks. You don\'t see many bankers in jail.

Well, the drug program is designed and implemented to criminalize an unwanted population. Black males, Hispanic males and so on. So, you take a look at the chain gangs in Alabama and it\'ll be somebody who had a joint in his pocket, you know, that sort of thing. So, that\'s what you do with them.

The system has a size limit, it\'s state spending. So, it has a stimulative effect on the economy. Firms like, say, Merrill Lynch and Prudential, and so on, they are putting out bonds, tax-free bonds, for the building of prisons, and making a lot of money on it. It\'s part of the growth system, it\'s not the scale of the pentagon, but it\'s sort of got the same function. In fact, the military corporations, like Lockheed and so on, they\'re already realizing it. So, they\'re now exploring the possibility of climbing on that gravy train, and selling, developing, hi-tech methods of survellience and control, which the public will pay for, and will be dual-use technology, and you will be able to use for something else. Actually, there was a big story in the Wall Street Journal a couple months ago. So, you can figure out a way to implant an electrode in somebody\'s -- and then some super computer somewhere will have them under survellience, and if they go to the wrong place, you send out a shock, or drugs, chemicals, or something or other. And that way, you could have very efficient monitoring and control of large parts of the population which would be quite cost-effective, except of course with the technology, which the public is paying for anyway.

Prison contruction alone is a booming industry. And security personell has been, maybe still is, the fastest growing white-collar profession for some years.

So, all of this stuff goes on, pouring money into the hands of the wealthier sectors, Merrill Lynch, construction -- also, the prisons are being privatized. I don\'t remember the figures, but the growth of the privately-run prisons is far higher than the state-run prisons -- and that\'s just another scam. Privatized prisons are like privatized health. It means the public pays the cost, in one or another techniques, but there\'s private profit. And you have a lot of techniques -- you can cut-down costs by putting more prisoners into a cell, and you don\'t have to give them any care, no rehabilitation, none of that stuff.

So, I think the whole thing is a very natural consequence of the policies designed to create a third-world-type society. Now, when I say third-world, I don\'t mean the United States is going to look like Mexico. It\'s much too rich for that. But it\'s going to that structure, that kind of structure -- at a richer level. And, prisons are a part of that just as death squads and the terror of security forces are a part of Mexico and Colombia.