The Normalization of Public-Private Equity Partnerships
The companion article, “Throwing Away the Key,” records how tough-on-crime laws caused vast numbers of incarcerated men and women to age into senescence behind bars (Baumgartner et al. Reference Baumgartner, Daniely, Huang, Johnson, Love, May, Mcgloin, Swagert, Vattikonda and Washington2021). In this reflection, “Turning Over the Keys,” we analyze a related but different process: the growing hegemony of private equity within the broader domain of prison privatization. In our view, the normalization accompanying private equity’s entrance into and dominance of the prison and jail economy has occurred due to three mechanisms that have routinized private equity-owned companies’ relationships with public carceral institutions, namely, bureaucracy, the law, and gender.
Over the last decades, both prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. Two private equity-run phone corporations control the $1.2 billion phone industry in prison (Smith Reference Smith2019). Two recently merged (2016) private equity-run commissary sales corporations monopolize the $1.6 billion industry (Raher Reference Raher2016). In 2017, two of the largest private-equity health care corporations were estimated to bring in a combined $2.5 billion profit annually (McLeod Reference McLeod2019).Footnote 1 If the aging population behind bars could have been anticipated, so too could the consequential blending of the state’s quest to fight crime through incarceration with the profit-driven demands of the market. Indeed, as many scholars and activists have demonstrated, the entwinement of prisons, punishment, and policing with profit-making has been an invariable product of the American combination of racial capitalism and liberal ideology (Smith Reference Smith1993; Davis Reference Davis2003; Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007, Reference Gilmore2020; Kelley Reference Kelley2017; Chaudhary, Weaver, and Prowse Reference Chaudhary, Weaver and Prowse2020; Weaver and Prowse Reference Weaver and Prowse2020).
In tracing the mechanisms of normalization that have worked to establish private equity’s primacy as a partner of public carceral institutions, our reflection builds on the work of scholars, journalists, and activists who have sought to theorize or uncover the neoliberal turn to privatization in the United States’ racialized criminal justice system at large.Footnote 2 Specifically, academic scholarship has directed attention to the purposes of privatization in the carceral sector. The punishment approach frames carceral profit-making and privatization as “another layer of punishment” directed towards people and populations associated, often through a racialized or class-based lens, with criminality (Harris Reference Harris2016; Harris, Smith and Obara Reference Harris, Smith and Obara2019, 352). Recently, others have argued that prison privatization is best understood as a feature of predatory governance, which seeks to bolster state power through the extraction of resources from poor communities and communities of color (Page and Soss Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017; Page, Piehowski, and Soss Reference Page, Piehowski and Soss2019). What both approaches share is a recognition of the recent proliferation of different forms of carceral privatization (Aviram Reference Aviram2014; Lara-Millan Reference Lara-Millán2021).
Taking this recognition as our point of departure, we turn our attention to a tripartite process of the normalization of profit-making within prisons that made it possible for private equity-owned firms to forge the deeply rooted partnerships with public carceral institutions that exist today. Normalization, as Michel Foucault elaborates in Discipline and Punish, concerns the regularization of patterns of behavior, the naturalization of specific relationships between individuals and institutions, the making—“as if” natural—of certain activities and our expectations about those activities (Foucault Reference Foucault1995,135-141, 184, 306-308). What we call markets behind bars—the for-profit provision of goods and services within jails and prisons—have become a naturalized/normalized feature of the carceral sector. After a brief consideration of private equity firms’ imbrication with public jails and prisons, we turn to the three mechanisms that make it possible: the role of bureaucracy in regularizing public-private partnerships; the shifts in legal language that solidified jails and prisons’ ability to also profit from these partnerships; and the production and dependence on (unequal) gender roles to constitute individuals from which these partnerships can profit.
From Private Prisons to Private Equity
What we describe as “markets behind bars”—variously termed “prison retailing” (Raher Reference Raher2020), or “commercialized injustice” (Highsmith Reference Highsmith2019)—denote the all-encompassing monetization of services that shifts the “costs of mass incarceration onto users” (Ibid. 2019, 40). This escalation of privatization marks a fundamental shift in the type of predation. Private equity has worked to extend the systemic reach of capitalism beyond its earlier incarnation of prison privatization and the private use of prison labor, and, in so doing, has mobilized the resources of prisoner-families into a funding cache for the carceral state.
Before private equity’s carceral ascendance, privatization referred mostly to three forms of privatization: 1) privately-run prisons, 2) the use of prison labor for private profit, and 3) the marketing of private goods for prison use. In growth terms, none of these three areas have expanded at the rate that private equity’s infusion into the realm of prison and jail services has ballooned.
Prison privatization has remained level, dipping only slightly from a peak in 2012 when 8% of the state and federal prison population was confined to privately-run facilities (Gotsch and Basti Reference Gotsch and Basti2018). In fact, the private prison population in the United States is lower than its counterparts in the UK, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand where the comparable numbers range between 10% and 20% (Kuang Keng Reference Keng and Ser2016). Only the immigrant detention sector in the United States has seen a vast spike of over 400% in privately-owned and managed facilities (Gotsch and Basti Reference Gotsch and Basti2018). Nonetheless, the profitability of private prisons generates, by one estimate, $5.1 billion in revenue and $421 million in profits for its two corporate giants (CoreCivic and the GEO Group). Because of public controversies over private prisons and opposition from correctional unions, however, any prospect of rapid proliferation is unlikely (Kennedy Reference Kennedy2020).
The private for-profit use of prison labor is harder to quantify.Footnote 3 By far the largest use of prison labor is state-controlled and in-house (doing cafeteria, laundry, cleaning work, etc.) (Worth Rises Reference Rises2020, 30). The next largest category of production is public-use goods (furniture, license plates, military equipment and uniforms) sold, that is, to public institutions. Overall, the part of prison labor employed by corporations is dispersed, not well regulated, often organized through third-party contractors, and, therefore, hard to estimate.Footnote 4 The best-documented assessments—best because of legal reporting requirements—are enumerated under the federal Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). In an analysis by the Corporate Accountability Project, those states that PIECP listed as having corporate partners employed a surprisingly small number of prison workers: 1,785 individuals across fourteen states, averaging 128 employees per state (Ryserson, Wu, and Brady Reference Ryerson, Cindy and Prue2020). None of this is to discount the many pockets of business-prison contracts that employ prison labor at significant profit, some widely publicized (if short-lived) such as Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, and others (Goodridge et al. Reference Goodridge, Schwartzer, Jantz and Christian2018), and others more local and brought to light by assiduous local reporting.Footnote 5 Nor is it to undervalue the extraordinarily low wages received by incarcerated laborers, which in some cases, such as in Massachusetts in 2018, amount to sums as small as fourteen cents an hour (Raher Reference Raher2018).
Private businesses have long found a lucrative market in the selling of private goods to public prisons. In their work on the “prison industrial complex,” Eric Schlosser, earlier, and Eric Markowitz, more recently, describe the practice of trade shows and catalogues plying prisons and jails with sales of everything from modular padded prison cells, steel-frame beds, toilets, sprinkler systems, razor wire, spit-bud masks, suicide blankets, to half-million dollar high tech-surveillance vehicles—all items for purchase in the estimated $80 billion incarceration industry (Schlosser Reference Schlosser1998; Markowitz Reference Markowitz2016; Neate Reference Neate2016).
In recent decades, the systemic infusion of private equity into the service/operational sector of the entire carceral complex has marked a massive expansion in privatization (Requarth Reference Requarth2019; Worth Rises Reference Rises2020). Private equity firms are a non-stockholder, non-publicly traded asset class. In short, they are privately funded firms that buy, restructure, merge, or sell other companies on a short-term horizon, often relying on debt financing. As such, they have a two-fold advantage. First, their practice of “add on and roll up”’ bundles fragments of competing local or regional players into consolidated entities. Thus, through both vertical and horizontal consolidation, a private equity-owned corporation can forge near-monopolistic conditions. Second, with limited reporting requirements, whether to the Securities Exchange Commission or to a formalized stockholder entity, private equity operations are far from transparent (Drucker and Hakim Reference Drucker and Hakim2021).
Private equity firms are uniquely suited to operate in the dispersed prison/jail sector. They are more flexible and more nimble than most companies, with deep and panoramic knowledge of profit opportunities and the capacity to take advantage of them quickly with large amounts of ready cash (Applebaum and Batt Reference Applebaum and Batt2014). This gives them important advantages over other kinds of companies, which can lack the adaptability, easy liquidity, non-visibility, and cross-sector specialized knowledge of private equity firms (Barber and Goold Reference Barber and Goold2007; Stulz Reference Stultz2020). In short, private equity firms can leap into underexplored sectors to speedily buy and bundle key players, thereby quickly dominating the market for goods and services there and securing a consistent revenue stream (Ulrich and Allen Reference Ulrich and Allen2016).
Today, private equity’s profitable partnerships with public carceral institutions are normalized throughout the entire crime and punishment system, from arrest to incarceration to probation and parole, from the local county level to the state and federal prison systems across the country. In the sections that follow, we detail three mechanisms through which, we argue, processes of normalization are constitutively tied to private equity’s rise as the dominant form of privatization in the carceral sphere.
Mechanisms of Normalization
Bureaucracy
How did this transformation in privatization occur? The growth of private prisons faced legislative hurdles absent in the case of private equity. In 2012, the state senate in Florida rejected a bill to privatize state prisons by a hairline margin (Alvarez Reference Alvarez2012). In 2017, the state legislature in Louisiana recommended against privatization after a ten-month study (O’Donoghue Reference O’Donoghue2017). By contrast, private equity-owned corporations’ inroads into the carceral system have required no such legislative involvement. The process is, by contrast, fully bureaucratized—accomplished through local sheriff or county or state agency contracts, the terms set by a routinization of rules that occurs outside the public spotlight.
One way of viewing the bureaucratic process by which private equity has entered the carceral state is through a microcosm—the story of the county commissary system in Texas. Commissaries, by way of background, provide incarcerated individuals the chance to bring some sense of normality into the daily existence of jail or prison living. Money to purchase commissary items is generally placed on a loved one’s commissary account by a family member. Commissaries provide for purchase of food items, stationery, some clothing, non-prescription medicine, and other goods. Although commissary prices may or may not compare favorably to market retail, an incarcerated individual’s ability to earn may require (according to one example from Massachusetts) four days wages to pay for a $4 tube of anti-fungal cream.Footnote 6
But how a commissary should be run raises many questions. Which businesses should get the contract? Should prices maximize profits or take account of the interests of incarcerated populations and their families? And which private and public entities should receive which portion of the profits? When the jail or prison reaps profits, to what purposes should they be put? All of these are questions, as the Texas story reveals, that are answered in the interstices of the bureaucracy.
In the 1960s, Texas jails operated individual commissaries with no intent of profit-making. A now-archived letter, sent in 1963 from the desk of attorney general Waggoner Carr, contains a reply to an inquiry from a county sheriff asking for legal authorization of a jail commissary. Although no law explicitly authorizes a commissary, Carr responds, “the sheriff may supply at cost the necessary supplies for prisoners.”Footnote 7 Profit-making was not the business of a jail commissary.
Seventeen years later in 1980, attorney general Mark White addressed the same inquiry from another county sheriff asking whether the county jail might maintain a jail store. White’s reply, this time, affirms the jail’s right to operate a commissary “at a profit, provided all profits are spent for the benefit, education, and welfare of the jail inmates.”Footnote 8 This proviso packed a large punch. In the course of the next two decades, and with jail commissaries becoming big businesses, the meaning of “the benefit, education, and welfare of the jail inmates” was transmuted in such a way as to ease the path to allow for family/women’s deposits to their loved one’s commissary accounts to pay for running the jail or, as we detail later, to include the bricks and mortar of jail operations.
Enter private equity: A key corporate player nationally as well as in this Texas commissary story is the once family-run business turned private equity-owned corporation: Keefe. Founded in 1963 in St. Louis, Keefe began as a small firm selling coffee to hotels. By 2016 the private equity firm HIG Capital had acquired both the Keefe Group and its main competitor, Trinity Services, reducing market competition and thereby controlling over half of the $1.6 billion national commissary market (Baker Reference Baker2019).
County jails stood to gain monumentally from collaboration with private equity-owned businesses. As was typical of such collaboration, the contract with Keefe came with a significant so-called signing bonus. In Williamson County, Texas, in 2016, for instance, through an arrangement between Keefe and the county jail, the jail stood to gain a 43% commission on all commissary sales.Footnote 9 Phone companies promised even higher kickbacks: In Williamson County, in 2006, the bid for the phone call contract by the soon to be private-equity owned Securus offered a 59% commission—a bid that was accepted not because Securus offered the lowest rates for families but because it proffered the highest commission to the jail—a mere bureaucratic sleight of hand. Step by step, bureaucratic processes constructed the partnership between profit-making and punishment.
In Texas, as elsewhere, it was largely families, not incarcerated individuals, that paid for commissary and phone expenses and for the kickbacks that commissary and phone companies remitted to the jail. Texas is one of five states that does not pay incarcerated persons anything for their labor. Imprisoned men and women in Texas make “license plates, grow crops, tend to cattle, make soap and clothing, refurbish buses and computers, build furniture,” none of which is remunerated (Camarillo Reference Camarillo2019; Sawyer Reference Sawyer2017; Worth Rises Reference Rises2020, 27).
Had this been more than a decade earlier, there might have been some dissension about whether commissary and phone profits taken in by the county jail could be spent on actual jail operations rather than on the needs of jail occupants. But simple bureaucratic rule-making—well outside the sunlight of any broad public debate—determined otherwise. By 2006, an amendment to the Texas Local Government Code 351.0415 specified that “inmate welfare” could be interpreted to include “physical plant improvements, technology, equipment” as well as “programs, services, and activities that provide for the well-being, health, safety, and security of the inmates and the facility”—in other words, jailhouse operations. In either case – whether the profits were spent on “inmate well-being” (educational materials, classes, teacher salaries, athletic equipment) or on building, technology, or security infrastructure—the financial burden rested not with those charged with crimes, but on a sector of the population innocent of the crime: the incarcerated person’s mother, wife, partner, and family.
This chronology, the takeover of small businesses by private equity-controlled corporations and the marketization of jails and prisons via corporate collaboration, all of which is of a piece with the predation of family assets to support jailhouse operations, has been repeated and expanded across the country and across prison and jail service sectors—from commissaries to telecommunications to health services, indeed, throughout the entire prison industry. Worth Rises, an advocacy organization, calculates that there are close to 4,000 companies entering the prison market including 800 in 2019 (Worth Rises Reference Rises2019). The Texas story, writ large, discloses how—through the bureaucratization of rule-making—the massive corporate entity governed by private equity became entrenched within the carceral state.
Law
Just as bureaucratic regulation constitutes a mechanism through which private equity’s alliance with the state is normalized, so too does the reliance on the law’s sometimes-façade of fairness operate as a normalizing mechanism. It is vital to recognize that the economic burden that many private equity-owned corporations impose on incarcerated individuals and their families stems not only from inflated, near-monopoly-driven prices, but specifically from the contractual practice of sharing profits (via commissions or kickbacks) between companies and the jails or prisons from which they seek exclusive vendor access. Indeed, in many cases the prices are inflated precisely because the companies need to recoup profits that were diminished by the very kickbacks necessary to win the initial contract. As noted earlier, jails and prisons tend to select the phone or commissary provider that promises the highest return commission rather than the lowest phone rates (Kubrowski, Wagner, and Sakala Reference Kubrowski, Wagner and Sakala2013).
In rare instances, the law explicitly bans the acceptance of commissions: the Department of Corrections in eight states, for example, disallows telephone kickbacks (Ibid. 2013). But often the law is deployed to insulate the prison or jail from any supposition that funds are being illegitimately collected or misspent. Signing/site commissions or kickbacks are deposited in an entity known by some language approximating the California expression of “inmate welfare fund.” Because it is largely money from families, as discussed before, that accumulates in these funds, directives overseeing expenditures from these funds require that all spending must aid the welfare of the incarcerated population. Yet financial cross pressures (specifically, scarce and declining revenue) regularly cause jails and prisons to direct inmate welfare funds towards institutional maintenance and expansion costs, for which the facility might otherwise need to seek alternative budgetary sources. When this occurs, the correctional facility clashes with the law.
The predatory character of this arrangement is inbuilt. Indeed, however the jail or prison might seek to spend the inmate welfare funds, it is always money from families, not taxpayer funds, that is being utilized. To recall our language earlier, the money made from markets behind bars by public actors operating in public-private partnerships is often meant to go towards the welfare of those on the inside. Frequently it is used instead to cover costs that are, properly speaking, taxpayer-funded liabilities. Thus, even where the money is directed for much needed work benefitting incarcerated populations, as Armando Lara-Millán (Reference Lara-Millán2021) describes in his account of the Los Angeles jail fund’s use towards a much-needed mental health facility, the funds are still levied from prisoner families rather than from the taxpayer.
Often, the meaning of “inmate welfare” is stretched and obfuscated by legal gymnastics. In San Diego, for instance, “millions of dollars a year from the sheriff’s inmate welfare fund is being spent on employee salaries, office supplies and other seeming routine expenses” (McDonald Reference McDonald2019). In Orange County, in 1998–1999, the total spent for inmate welfare was 12% of the fund (Katzenstein, Bennett and Swanson Reference Katzenstein, Bennett and Swanson2020, 265). In Los Angeles, in 1998, barely $16 million of the $70 million inmate welfare fund was spent on inmate services (Ibid., 264).
None of this, strictly speaking, is illegal. Through “adverbial calisthenics” (Ibid., 267), the detailed wordings of laws were changed in order to legitimate (re)directing these vendor profits to correctional infrastructure. In state after state, a word or two was added (“including but not limited to”; “overall”; “otherwise not needed for”) to legalize existing, or make possible new, practices of routing profits towards jail or prison maintenance (Ibid., 267).
This ascendance of legalized vendor commercialization should have been predictable. Jails and prisons faced the dual challenge of a growing prison population (a 700% growth between the early 1970s and 2010) and a declining county tax or revenue base (Ghandnoosh Reference Ghandnoosh2019). Property tax collection fell between the 1930s and 1950s from .5% to 14% of all tax revenue (Newcomer Reference Newcomer1953), a fall that was again accelerated by the 1970s tax revolt led by Proposition 13 in California (Katzenstein, Bennett, and Swanson Reference Katzenstein, Bennett and Swanson2020, 262n10). Inevitably, the bill for mass incarceration has to be paid by someone. The slow, subtle, incremental legal changes that we highlight here indicate the way in which this bill has been methodically passed on to the families of those behind bars.
Gender
In this section, we trace the social mechanism through which private equity and their prison/jail partners rely on the production of a dual gender relationship in which women occupy, simultaneously, the traditional role of the “female caretaker” and the non-traditional role of the (traditionally) “male breadwinner.” Building on the insight from Page and Soss (Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017, 142) that predation in the criminal justice system “is also a productive force that constructs power relationships, subject positions, and terms of civic standing,” we bring to light a two-part process in which a) private equity-driven markets behind bars normalize forms of monetized personal communication and connection while also b) producing and relying upon inverted gender roles for women.
One of the greatest challenges for the loved ones of those behind bars is staying in touch. Recent technological developments, like increased phone access and online video chats, have ameliorated some of the burden. In fact, in terms of technological capacity, it has perhaps never been easier to communicate with a daughter, son, or partner on the inside. However, these innovations have come with cost—and in many cases, an exorbitant one. Nearly all the services and means of communication and connection available to families are monetized, that is, they must be purchased (Harris, Smith, and Obara Reference Harris, Smith and Obara2019, 346; 349-351). Thus, the challenge of staying in touch today is, for most, financial. To do so, one must participate in markets behind bars, paying whatever price is placed on a given service.
In a survey conducted by the Marshall Project of 162 family members of incarcerated persons from over thirty different states, 140 (86%) reported using video call services to stay in touch.Footnote 10 They also reported spending an average of $62 a month on video calls alone, with the cost ranging from $0 to $500, depending on the state, jail or prison, and telecommunications provider in question.Footnote 11 Another survey by the Marshall Project offers a more detailed picture of the communication costs that families face. The partner of one incarcerated individual said that they spend $200 per month on phone calls, plus an additional $100 for care items (usually sent via care package or purchased from the prison or jail commissary).Footnote 12 Another said she budgets $500 a month for her incarcerated husband, which partially breaks down to monthly costs of $75 for phone calls and emails, $80 for visiting room food, $150 for commissary purchases and packages, $50 for extra clothing and toiletries, $120 for longer personal visits and groceries, and $25 for gas.Footnote 13 The list goes on and on. Common to all of them (who can afford helping in the first place) is that a significant portion of their budget goes towards maintaining contact with, and caring for, their loved one.
Communication is not the only thing for sale in markets behind bars. In addition to telephone and video calls and email, other items include basic provisions like food, clothing, and toiletries; educational materials like books and educational technologies like tablets and internet access; quality-of-life items like music downloads and videos; and different ways of electronically transferring money, including but not limited to transfers to commissary trust funds for incarcerated persons (Raher Reference Raher2020). We group this assortment of market transactions under the category of care items, for nearly all of them involve supporting the material and emotional well-being of those who are incarcerated.
This market in caretaking also functions as productive work, that is, to normalize the monetization, in jails and prisons, of care-based experiences. All are for sale, and as though it were natural that they are. Put another way, because these markets facilitate regular patterns of human interaction—which studies have shown is vital for incarcerated persons, their families, and any dependent children involved (De Claire and Dixon Reference De Claire and Dixon2017; Hopkins and Farley Reference Hopkins and Farley2015; Beckmeyer and Arditti Reference Beckmeyer and Arditti2014)—they become an institutionalized, functional part of carceral life for all parties. After monetizing them, markets behind bars normalize forms of interaction and daily living.
By and large, the friends and family members who pay for these items and participate in these normalizing practices are women, and disproportionately low-income women of color (deVuono-powell et al. Reference deVuono-powell, Schweidler, Walters and Zohrabi2015, 54-55; Page, Piehowski, and Soss Reference Page, Piehowski and Soss2019). Indeed, a core feature of the criminal justice system is the procurement of financial resources from the (mostly poor and mostly women) family members of incarcerated persons by private firms and carceral institutions (Katzenstein and Waller Reference Katzenstein and Waller2015; Page and Soss Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017). While it is men who are the primary “targets of policing and incarceration,” it is women “who shoulder the primary burden of financial extraction through the criminal justice system” (Page and Soss Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017, 155). On this point, Megan Comfort writes that between 2.5 and 6.4 million women have loved ones behind bars (Comfort Reference Comfort2008, 8). In a national study, the Ella Baker Center found that, of family members responsible for taking care of the costs associated with an incarcerated loved one, 83% were women: mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, wives, and partners (deVuono-powell et al. Reference deVuono-powell, Schweidler, Walters and Zohrabi2015, 9). The same study also found that 38% of those surveyed had a household income of less than $15,000, 50% between $15,000–$50,000, and 12% over $50,000 (Ibid., 53-55).Footnote 14 Moreover, a significant majority of these family members were women of color. In a longitudinal survey of 122 men and women leaving Massachusetts state prisons, Bruce Western found that a key determinant of success for those seeking to reenter society was an existing family support network. Yet family support, Western noted, did not involve just any family member, but specifically “a mother or sister who was economically more secure,” such that nearly all supportive family members were women (Reference Western2018, 22).
Women’s participation in markets behind bars is central for the long-term financial viability and success of the main market players: private (equity) firms and public jails and prisons. If these public-private partnerships are, jointly, the sellers, it’s mainly women who are the buyers. A closer look at the advertising strategies of private firms involved in the carceral sphere shows their recognition of their dependence on women and their efforts to make the services they provide a regularized aspect of women’s (and their loved ones’) lives. Page, Piehowski, and Soss have analyzed the predatory use of emotionalized tactics in the bail industry, in which bond agents utilize emotional appeals to pressure (usually women) partners of incarcerated persons to cosign for bail (Reference Page, Piehowski and Soss2019, 156-59). In a report on the marketing strategies of private firms operating within jails and prisons, Raher notes that “prison retailers are apt to steer vulnerable consumers into unneeded or inefficient transactions by leveraging the emotional impulses of concerned family members” (2020, 38). Perhaps his most powerful example is of an automated email sent out by JPay, a money transfer service, which is “identified as coming from a specific incarcerated correspondent” and asks for a money transfer to be made to help this correspondent (JPay makes money off such transfers) (Ibid. 2020, 38-39; Page and Soss Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017, 149; Harris, Smith, and Obara Reference Harris, Smith and Obara2019, 349-351). In effect, the families of inmates are targeted and primed to care and participate in markets for (the provision of forms of) care, by the for-profit firms operating within prisons.
Like any market product, the context in which it is offered matters greatly. Thus, it is important to add that these marketing strategies occur against the backdrop of the difficulties, discomforts, and frequent inhumanity of carceral confinement. The often-appalling living conditions in jails and prisons make commissary items into what Raher calls necessities for “everyday life” (2020, 5). Even a prison manager-employee, a twenty-four-year veteran running the Texas food commissary program, notes that purchasing items from a commissary “is one of the only times in an offender’s day that he gets to make his own decisions … It’s paramount. It’s a privilege that is necessary at this point and could not be done away with” (Stiles Reference Stiles2010). As public-private partnerships create and exploit access to these “privileges,” families’ attempts to rectify or ameliorate prison conditions become a routine, almost natural part of the carceral complex.
Both of these insights—marketing strategy and context—cement the larger point that women, as the primary participants in markets behind bars, make it possible for the whole arrangement of private equity-driven service provision in prisons to operate profitably. Put another way, the financial resources that (mostly) women intend to use for the support of their incarcerated loved ones also do the work of supporting jails and prisons as public-private carceral institutions.
Yet there is another and perhaps more important point to made here about the ways in which women’s participation in economic practices, which are normalized by markets behind bars, works to (re)constitute them in an alternative gender role. Existing research has shown that women—and, disproportionately, women of color—are one of the primary populations targeted by “government seizure” (Katzenstein and Waller Reference Katzenstein and Waller2015) and resource “extraction” (Page and Soss Reference Page, Soss, Schram and Pavlovskaya2017; Page, Piehowski, and Soss Reference Page, Piehowski and Soss2019). We wish to draw attention to the simultaneous construction of women as providers or “breadwinners” and their regulation as participants in oligopolistic, financially exploitative markets. In addition to furthering the predatory aims of extraction and seizure, markets behind bars also produce inverted gender roles—which are precisely the ones required for these markets to remain profitable.
There are a few things to unpack in this claim. For one, women disproportionately bear the burden of carework in capitalist societies (Federici Reference Federici2020). Nancy Fraser and Sarah Leonard have recently contended that concurrent with neoliberalism’s retraction of social services has come a “crisis of care,” in which the increasing demand for working hours, coupled with the rollback of public services, has led to a situation in which “our capacities for sustaining social bonds” is nearly depleted (Leonard and Fraser Reference Leonard and Fraser2016). Historically carried out mostly by women, the capacities for the care and reproduction of the bonds that interlink families and communities are, they claim, currently strained to the breaking point. Their work continues a long line of important feminist critical thought about gender inequality and the kinds of unpaid labor and care, both material and affective, that women undertake and that is essential to the functioning of contemporary market economies (Federici Reference Federici2020; Fineman Reference Fineman2001, Reference Fineman2004; Fraser and Leonard Reference Fraser2013; Glenn Reference Glenn2002; Tronto Reference Tronto1993, Reference Tronto2013).
Carework carries over to the carceral world as well. For example, in the carceral context Megan Comfort shows how many of the economic costs of carework are closely intertwined with emotional work and interpersonal dynamics. The “incarceration of a partner,” she writes, “infiltrates and distorts women’s personal, domestic and social worlds” (Comfort Reference Comfort2008, 7). The sociologist Arlie Hochschild has coined the term “emotional labor” to capture the ways in which women are asked to manage their feelings in the fulfillment of a social role (Hochschild Reference Hochschild1983). Maintaining relationships, caring for family, navigating prison systems, and reordering one’s life to adjust for having a loved one behind bars all involve the regular exercise of this kind of labor.
At the same time, however, we contend that the carceral economy adds another demand on women by way of an inversion of some historically rooted gender hierarchies. Having financial control while their husbands were behind bars made a number of women in Fishman’s study feel more secure. This “control made a great deal of difference to them,” she writes, “since they had little say in these matters before their husbands were imprisoned” (Fishman Reference Fishman1990, 200). Comfort encountered a similar phenomenon. Many of the women in her study, she wrote, “acknowledged some benefits to their current situations, primarily the control [the incarceration of a loved one] gave them over their households,” adding that “the relational dynamics around economic issues changed in ways that gave a context of ‘respectability’ to the partnership and valorized the women’s support of their men” (Comfort Reference Comfort2008, 171; 161).
This inversion from male to female breadwinner is important because it helps us grasp, first, the reliance of private equity and their carceral partners on producing gender roles that lead, for them, to profitability. In effect, markets behind bars produce the female providers they need, doing so through the normalization of monetized forms of communication and care. In this way, gender operates as a social mechanism by which public-private partnerships maintain and increase their mutually beneficial relationship.
Conclusion
Each year Suzanne McMillan, who lives in Arizona and her son, incarcerated some six hours away, dedicate themselves to a Mother’s Day project. Together they compile a list of names of his friends and acquaintances on the inside and their mothers’ telephone numbers as best they know them. Then Suzanne spends the day, though sometimes the effort extends into weeks, contacting those on the list with Mother’s Day messages. “Sometimes,” she says,
it is the first communication the mothers have had in years. On Mother's Day it is very difficult for all of us with incarcerated children but especially those Moms that have lost all contact with their children and wonder/worry daily what has happened to them. What my son set up has helped quite a few Moms find their children and quite a few women also reconnect with the incarcerated fathers of their children.”Footnote 15
Suzanne and her son’s project would seem to stand in stark contrast to the profit-making network that we have just outlined. Their work is an example of how care transcends monetization, and of how the dedicated labor of caring people can transcend human loss and disconnection. One of our aims here, however, is to bring to light the processes that generate the need for Suzanne and her son’s project in the first place. Most, if not all, of the calls from mothers to sons will cost; the price tags placed on care and connection ensure that these calls can happen, but only insofar as private firms and their public partners can profit. Our aim has been to trace, in part, how such a now-normalized state of affairs could come about.
Markets behind bars, in this vein, have become normalized parts of the racialized prison complex, as have the public-private (equity) partnerships that operate them. Suzanne and her son must, themselves, do the work of collecting numbers, contacting others, putting into place a means of communication that, nonetheless, is ultimately bound to a profit-making apparatus—the provision of call services within jails and prisons—that shapes and monetizes the contours of connection and care between families and their loved ones on the inside.
In unpacking the process of normalization so essential to private equity’s success, we have sought to identify specific political and social mechanisms that underwrite public-private partnerships in the carceral sphere, despite the fact that privatization in this domain is so often discussed in strictly economic terms. This normalization, we have argued, has depended in particular on bureaucratic rulemaking and on the validation function that the law performs underwriting continued processes of predation. In addition, and just as crucially, markets behind bars have depended on, and produced, the very inverted gender roles that private/public partnerships require. This, too, is of a piece with Foucault’s understanding of normalization and its connection to disciplinary power. Foucauldian power relations are always productive even as they also constrain, delimit, (re)order, regularize, or normalize (Foucault Reference Foucault1980, 92-108; 1995, 170, 182-83). As the primary participants in markets behind bars, women are simultaneously (re)produced as providers, in addition to caretakers, while also acting within the confines of an exploitative, oligopolistic prison-profit complex. In this way, the institutionalization of profit-seeking behind bars is inexorably linked to under-scrutinized bureaucratic processes and legal maneuvers, as well as the production of and reliance upon gender roles. By identifying the mechanisms that support the spread of private equity within public carceral spaces, we hope to encourage the kinds of critical illumination that might interrupt a further perpetuation of such processes of normalization by reclaiming keys turned over long ago.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Peter Joachim Katzenstein, Pauliina Patana, Nicole Lewis, Jennifer Erschabek, Keri Blakinger, and Rosemary Batt, as well as to Michael Bernhard for his editorial guidance and to the internal and external reviewers for their excellent feedback.
