ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the penal system as highly influenced by market conditions. Pain delivery is an activity of great economic importance for the providers. The chapter describes the pain-market in the way that market expresses itself in its specialized business journals – the publications for staff and entrepreneurs in the prison industry. It aims to develop three major themes which explain some of the growth in the system: the private push, the technological push, and lastly, the importance of the prison industry in the national economy. The many famous early prisons built in the USA were also dependent on money from the private contractors who used convict labour. Several large prisons were leased to private contractors. The size of the prison population was determined not by the amount of crime or the need for social control or the efficiency of the police, but by the desire to make crime pay – for government and private employees.
