ABSTRACT
Despite the rising crime rates and all the tough talk about fighting crime, during the years from 1962 to 1968 the American prison population had actually declined, by 14.3 percent, underscoring a fact generally understood more by criminologists than the general public: that rates of incarceration are not necessarily related to, or a product of, official crime rates. In the 1990s, most American prison inmates were serving time for drug crimes or were known to have histories of serious drug abuse. Starting in the 1980s, prison expansion has proved to be a bonanza for architects, builders, hardware companies, electronics firms, and other vendors who, like defense contractors, managed to pull down astronomical profits under the banner of public security. Prison benefits one group and one place at the expense of another, somewhat like the convict transportation system in the eighteenth century. Privatization was one of the stimuli affecting the changes in prison labor.
