Prisons: Reduce, Reuse, or Recycle?

It's official. The Obama administration is going to take over the largely vacant Thomson Correctional Center in the countryside west of Chicago and convert it into a federal maximum security prison that will house Guantanamo detainees. Predictably, Obama critics have decried the move, arguing that transferring Gitmo detainees stateside will court terrorist attacks on our home soil.

More surprisingly, many local residents of Thomson have applauded the decision on the grounds that it will bring badly needed jobs to their economically depressed town. Though liberals might well support Obama's efforts to close down Guantanamo, I think they should unequivocally reject this prison-providing-employment justification. It unwisely categorizes incarceration as an economic good.

Of course, there is no denying that prisons provide jobs and that too many Americans need jobs. But a far better idea for reducing unemployment was Obama's campaign-trail promise to create millions of Green Jobs. Promoting green employment means creating economic incentives to improve the environment. Promoting prison employment, on the other hand, creates an economic incentive to put more people in cages. Putting even more people in prison pollutes our social environment.

It's almost possible to see Obama's Thomson Correctional Center takeover as a sort of green "prison recycling" effort. Under this view, the administration is merely reusing an nearly empty prison rather than building a new one as it closes Gitmo. Local jobs can be seen as a happy but incidental benefit. All of this recycling and reusing seems creative enough so long as we seek also to reduce our prisons. Simply put, our goal should be fewer people behind bars, not more. That simple goal will remain elusive, however, if we regard incarceration as a viable long-term source for employment.

Breaking down the logic of mass incarceration requires confronting what some activists have called the "prison-industrial complex." This term derives from President Eisenhower's famous reference to the "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. In that speech, Eisenhower warned about the threat to liberty created by an economy dependent on war rather than peace. (One only need recall Halliburton's role in the Iraq war to see the prescience of Eisenhower's prediction that corporations that profit from war will naturally push us towards it.) Similarly, we face a great threat to liberty by legitimizing an economy dependent on incarceration.

In the longer run, the better strategy for promoting an environment of freedom is to consider what economic incentives might exist to close down prisons. Let's make decarceration green.

Photo: iQoncept