The subject of the privatization of formerly public enterprises can be interpreted
to mean a wide variety of things. The particular aspect which I intend to address is the privatization of the industrial complexes associated with prisons and the military. The concept of privatization is nothing new; the practice of contracting government tasks to private businesses was widely used by the governments of both the Grecian and Roman republics. It should also be said here that in itself privatization is not inherently bad, rather the uses to which it may be put can be misguided. The contracting out of jobs and labor needs by the government enables the government to function more smoothly and focus on tasks which it is better suited to deal with. That said, some tasks have large and far reaching moral implications and I do not believe that it is appropriate for these fields to operate on a for-profit basis. This is not a new discussion, but it is one that I believe has ever-increasing importance and relevance now. The privatizing of certain aspects of government make sense and should be private, but 1 of the aspects of the Bush Presidency that we would be wise to learn from is the result of privatization without limits or oversight. In retrospect, the War in Iraq served to do little for America save empty the treasury paying Halliburton for all the military contracts of a nearly 10 year long struggle. While for the citizens of Iraq, the war is a deadly reality of daily life, for American Defense Contractors its all just dollars and cents, and that is monumentally unethical. The widespread privatization of the American prison system created a need for more prisoners and helped to create the drug policy which, after the Civil Rights movement, gives the state a brand new, constitutional way to control minorities and keep them from voting, when selectively enforced as it is today.
The privatization of everything possible has succeeded in kicking off the global financial crisis, and now that America really needs money it has none due to all of the outsourcing of jobs. Additionally, if a particular aspect of the government is privatized, it should not be able to maintain its tax exempt status. Supplying military hardware and constructing prisons/caretaking for criminal offenders are two enormous jobs that require a large labor force. There are many differences between the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex. I will begin, though with some of the similarities: The need for a large workforce has been already stated, but the need for large facilities for them to work in and machines to produce building materials with goes right along with it. Both the prison complex and the military complex have to address providing food to large amounts of people on a regular basis. They both have security as a primary concern. Both must supply weapons and gear for their personnel. And finally both complexes share certain aspects of the industrial component which provides some of the raw materials for operation, for example the same industrial complex produces armored military personnel carriers and armored prisoner transfer buses. The relationship between the prison complex and the military complex is much closer and older than one may think. The American military heritage was born through waging war on the Native populations that inhabited these lands before we did, and in many ways parts of the prison industrial complex were born in addition to and alongside the American Indian Residential School System. The Indian schools sought to destroy the rich Native American heritage through the reeducation of Indian children. The American Indian Schools, often military schools, sometimes operated on a for-profit
basis. Through the forced labor of children, they produced goods to be sold for the benefit of the school. Girls were taught to sew and produce clothing items while the boys would cut wood or mine coal. The American Indian schools are a chilling example of how a for-profit enterprise can be used to exploit those it imprisoned, particularly when no one of any significance(able to vote) cares about what happens to them. The beginning of the prison industrial complex as we know it today began in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan and the war on drugs. Before the federal drug ban, prisons in America were not numerous enough to represent a complex, but with the advent of the war on drugs, more and more low-level criminals began getting longer and longer sentences. Now after decades of anti-drug propaganda and the constant inflammatory media reporting regarding the criminalblackman, we can more easily see the toll that the Republican policies have taken. The focus on street crime by Republican Presidential candidates enabled them to win election after election, and build the new Republican majority out of disenfranchised southern White Democrats by appealing to them with law and order rhetoric. After winning the elections Presidents would keep their promises by writing new stricter laws regarding drugs and street crime, and gradually being tough on crime became the winning position in most elections. All that toughness gave us the prison industrial complex. The prison industrial complex in America as we know it today has operated on a partially for-profit basis for its entire history. Criminal prisoners in the United States would make license plates for the state, build roads, and cut wood or clear fields for planting. On its face, such a thing seems like a good idea, giving prisoners something to do and allowing them to be of service to the community and the state and it can be a good
thing as long as nobody is there to make personal gains. But if the prison warden were corrupt, they could easily exploit the inmates for their own benefit and no one is going to stand up for them. Few people in America experience the type of stigmatization that ex-cons have to go though, as if all the hoops and runaround of parole and probation werent enough. The problem is that having a for-profit orientation can encourage corruption by putting pressure on the prison administrators to generate revenue rather than simply letting them focus on prisoner rehabilitation. Prisons are not and should not be businesses; they should be operated by non-profits who are concerned only with prisoner health and rehabilitation. The central issue here is that there are some tasks which are both highly sensitive as well as labor intensive, which I believe can easily become corrupted if they operate within the economic market. The prison complex and the military complex are the two largest examples of where having the wrong priorities can take us when we allow them to. The presence of the Military industrial complex in our society has grown so much and the lobbying power of defense contractors has become so great that when there are no wars going on, we have to go and start one somewhere. The needs of an American missile company for profits outweigh the value of human life on the other side of our world, and I believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with that. How many people will have to die before we can all decide that we just dont need a military at all anymore? In conclusion, although many Americans prefer to believe that they are powerless over their government and they can do nothing to change it, the truth is that the way our government operates reflects on us and if the governments priorities are wrong then the
citizens priorities are too. Our government represents us and if people choose to remain ignorant to its actions, it amounts to a silent agreement between the government and the people where the government gets out of control and the people simply look the other way. If we can not learn from our mistakes then history is doomed to repeat itself.