Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime [Paperback]

Joel Dyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 8, 2000

In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, author Joel Dyer takes a critical look at the United States’ criminal justice system as we enter the new millennium. America has more than tripled its prison population since 1980 even though crime rates have been either flat or declining. The U.S. now incarcerates nearly two million people in its prisons and jails on any given day and over five million of its citizens are currently under some form of justice department supervision. These facts raise an obvious question: If crime rates aren’t going up, why is the prison population? The Perpetual Prisoner Machine provides the answer to this question and, shockingly, it has little to do with crime or justice. The answer is “profit.”In the 1990s, through their mutual and pension funds, millions of American investors are now unwittingly profiting from crime. As a result of America’s controversial push towards the privatization of its justice system, a growing number of well-known and politically influential U.S. Corporations—and subsequently their shareholders—are now cashing in on a prison trade whose profit potential is tied directly to the growth of the prison population. A disturbing realization, when you consider the influence that these same multi-national companies now have over our government’s policy-making process by way of their lobbyists and their ability to fill campaign coffers.The Perpetual Prisoner Machine explains how the new prison-industrial complex has capitalized upon the public’s fear of crime—which has its origins in violent media content—to help bring about the “hard on crime” policies that have led to our prison-filling, and therefore profitable, “war on crime.” In addition to a quest for profits, Dyer describes an astounding chain of events including media consolidation and globalization, advances in communication technology, and the increasing political dependence upon public opinion polls and campaign funding that have led to the creation of what the author calls “the perpetual prisoner machine,” a mechanism designed to suck the funds from social programs that diminish the crime-enhancing power of poverty and spit them into the bank accounts of those who own stock in the prison-industrial complex.Dyer concludes that powerful, market-driven forces have manipulated America into fighting a very real war against an imaginary foe. “Unfortunately,” says Dyer, “real wars have real casualties. And in this case, the victims are America’s poor, particularly those segments of our black and Hispanic population who live in poverty and who now comprise the vast majority of the new human commodity.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is a disturbing treatise on an Orwellian component of contemporary capitalism: the free-market takeover of the American corrections system. In the 1980s, Dyer argues, we were told that prison spending had to go up because the crime rate was going up. In the '90s, we've been told we have to spend more on prisons because the crime rate is going down, i.e., spending money works. Those with vested interests, he says, have further told the public that privatized prisons are tax-efficient boons to deindustrialized areas. Dyer provides a plausible argument that violent crime rates over the last 20 years have not fluctuated as dramatically (either up or down) as FBI statistics indicate, and that the bulk of the growth of the prison system is disproportionate to the change in the crime rate. Disproportionately growing numbers of prisoners have been nonviolent criminals, usually caught up in the war on drugs. One of Dyer's innovative observations is the "prisonization" effect: that the extreme brutality of our prison culture virtually guarantees recidivism. This is exacerbated, he argues, by prison privatization: referring to various incidents in the prisons in Colorado, Texas, New Jersey and elsewhere run by Correction Corporation of America and by Wackenhut, Dyer (Harvest of Rage) documents how the cost-cutting drive to please shareholders quickly results in negligence, danger, violence, escapes and a general air of brutalization (he finds particularly heinous the policy of randomly mixing violent and nonviolent offenders). Thus, prison has "hidden costs" to society, which Dyer illuminates. He notes that, because of the growing reliance of the "prison boom" on corporations with a bottom-line mentality, it will soon be too late to turn back the policies of extreme incarceration. Dyer supplements meticulous research with argumentative anger and verve to make a strong case that what has been called the "prison-industrial complex" is preying on largely minority and underclass segments of our society. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

An indictment of our decision to incarcerate an ever-increasing number of our citizens. According to journalist Dyer (Harvest of Rage, 1997), the lock em up mentality loose in the land is attributable to the prison industrial complex, which he identifies as law-enforcement bureaucrats and private enterprises that profit from our recent prison-building boom. And what a boom its been: The US now imprisons more of its citizens than China or Russiaquite a feat given our smaller population and penchant for thinking of ourselves as more enlightened in matters of criminal justice than either of our Cold War adversaries. In the face of this trend, Dyer asks a simple question: How can the American public possibly believe that locking up so many people makes sense? His answer is equally simple: capitalism. Those profiting from the criminal-justice business have duped the public in the same way that the military-industrial complex led it to accept that vast public outlays were necessary to win the Cold War. While Americans are less at risk of becoming crime victims than they were 20 years ago, public- opinion polls show theyre convinced its just the opposite. Dyer lays much of the blame for this misconception at the feet of the media. Television programs and the nightly news highlight violent acts with alarming regularity, not to inform the public but to boost advertising revenues. Meanwhile, companies that seek a piece of the ever-increasing public money allocated for prisons lobby politicians, who advance their own careers by catering to voters misplaced fear of crime. In Dyers judgment, this combo of circumstances virtually guarantees the perpetuation of a massive falsehood: that ever more prisons are needed. While many of Dyers views are controversial, he provides an ideal place to begin looking at the issue of why most states spend more money building prisons than schools. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (December 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813338700
• ISBN-13: 978-0765309587
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #251,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent and insightful book, July 17, 2000

By 

Glenn H. Reynolds "Instapundit" (Knoxville, TN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime (Hardcover)

Dyer is rather a leftist, and I'm more of a libertarian, but on this subject we see eye to eye. The politicians, corrections industry, and opinion pollsters have formed an "Iron Triangle" in support of ever more incarceration. In particular, large numbers of nonviolent offenders are being locked up for no good reason at all. (The resulting clog tends to make it harder to put away those who really belong behind bars, too.) The really bad consequences of this (millions of people with grudges against society, learning a lot about violence) have yet to really be visited upon our society. But they probably will be, and it won't be the politicians and lobbyists who pay the price.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nailing The Issue, January 30, 2006

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D. Horne (Mesa, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime (Paperback)

Joel Dyer has done an excellent job of nailing how Congress has abused the issue of crime in America and why we allow it. He's also provided an excellent argument for abandoning the private prison industrial complex and ceasing the attack on urban America and the mentally ill. As someone who works in business and in finance, it bugged my eyeballs when I realized what government is doing, allowing prisoners for profit. I've worked 32 years in a profit driven capacity and doing this with human beings, given what I know about shareholder driven environments, is unconscionable in my mind. To intentionally profit from another's pain and misfortune is heinous. America has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the worlds prisoners. We have over 1,000 prisons and 7 million people under penal control (2004). Over half of them non-violent offenders whose crime involves consenting adults (ie: life in prison for introducing a buyer to a seller of home grown pot in Indiana) or petty thievery (ie: stealing vitamins in California).

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For students of the American criminal justice system, August 11, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime (Paperback)

Journalist Joel Dyer creates an informative, critical, and iconoclastic survey of the United States' criminal justice system in The Perpetual Prisoner Machine: How America Profits From Crime. Dyer persuasively argues that contemporary criminal "justice" is disastrously impacted by violent media content, a push for privatization; an increasing dependence of politicians upon public opinion polling and campaign finance. This has all resulted in an explosion in the American prison population. The rapidly increasing numbers of prisoners, parolees and probationers is not the result of increasing crime rates, but because sectors of the American economy and political power structure find mass incarcerations to be profitable. The Perpetual Prisoner Machine is very strongly recommended reading for students of the American criminal justice system, prisoner reform movement supporters, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and political science students.