Beeville, Texas: 4.30 a.m.
One by one the bosses clip-clop over to one of the guard towers that surround the prison. They chat for a while among them- selves, waiting amiably on horseback. Above them, the picket guard attaches a rope to a plastic milk crate, then lowers the crate over the side. Inside the crate are the bosses' guns. They are .357 Magnums, and the bosses are authorised to shoot to kill. When the crate reaches saddle height, each boss dips in and grabs one. There is one more guard on horseback, and he stays aloof from the others. He is known as the Highrider and he is armed not with a pistol, but with a rifle: a .30-30 capable of picking off a running inmate at several hundred yards. The inmates line up two by two for their work detail. They have been awake since 3.30 a.m., the start of their morning feeding . . . For hours, the men will pound the ground . . . clearing acres of land in a process known as flatweeding . . . To pass the time, the inmates, nearly half of whom are black, sing work songs. This is old music, handed down from generation to generation of convicts. Some of it dates back to the days of the plantation.
Pelican Bay, California, midmorning
The SHU (Secure Housing Unit) is de- signed to deaden the senses. The cells are windowless; the walls are white. From in- side the cell, all one can see through the perforated metal door is another white wall. . . . It is surreally quiet . . . very much like an intensive care ward. The lighting is subdued and even the guards speak in whispers. In the control room, computer screens glow with luminous, pulsing cursors and video monitors flicker with grainy black- and-white images from surveillance cameras . . . Charles Manson lives here.
These are the twin faces of American incarceration. Chain-gangs break rocks in Texas, swinging their hammers to the rhythm of songs first chanted by slaves. Prisoners in futuristic isolation cells hear only the buzz of fluorescent light, the hum of computerised ventilation. Today approximately 1.8 million Americans are behind bars; no other nation imprisons more of its citizens. At the current growth rate, by the year 2050 half of the US population will be incarcerated. The prospect is, of course, absurd: society would cease to function.
What drives this headlong rush towards the unimaginable? Prison is no longer just a crime and punishment business, it is a money business. From the chain-gang to the isolation unit, incarceration has become one of America's fastest growing industries, a sure thing in a softening economy. Generating over $30 billion a year in the US - more than baseball, more than pornography - the thriving prison industry has created millionaires with a vested interest in filling cells and employees with a fatalistic attitude to their long-term guests. "Let's face it," one warden recently remarked, "they're here to die."
Joe Hallinan is haunted by prison sounds. "They say you never forget the clang of the doors slamming behind you, and they're right," he says. "The shrieks of the inmates in the segregation units, the rhythmic pounding of feet on doors; it never leaves you."
Hallinan, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, never wanted to go inside - until he met Jack Kyle. A tough Texas warden, Kyle always believed in locking people up, still does. But, he confided in Hallinan, things are getting out of hand. "Everybody wants 'em," Kyle observed of the new "supermax" prisons that squat like sinister shopping malls on the outskirts of small towns across the US. The sign outside one Illinois hamlet says: "Welcome to Tamms/ The Home of Supermax". And guess what its Burger Shack special is called? Intrigued, Hallinan spent four years visiting prisons across the country, from California to the rural south. "I just kept writing," he recalls. "In hotel rooms, in airports, on the hood of my car. Writing and saying to myself: `Oh my God, people are never going to believe this.' ".
The result is Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, Hallinan's devastating examination of the 21st-century prison industry. He first glimpsed that industry's power in a Texas courtroom at the trial of Joe Boy Lambright, the first prison guard in Texas history convicted of killing an inmate. "I saw how the merger of punishment and profit was reshaping this country," Hallinan writes. "How young men like Joe Boy, who might, in another generation, have joined the army or gone to work in a factory, were now turning to prison for their livelihood. I saw job hungry towns, desperate for something to keep their young people from leaving, compete for prisons the way they once had for industries . . ."
Abandoned by heavy industry and bypassed by the electronic revolution, many failing towns in the US's mid-section and south now have a final shot at prosperity. They can become "prison hubs". Just as the Cold War bestowed military bases on grateful backwaters, so the prison boom holds out cash incentives and employment prospects to decaying towns. "The sales pitch to our town was development," explains Doug Richards, an attorney in Springfield, Vermont. Richards recently opposed the imminent construction of a 350-bed state prison outside Springfield, but concedes that the inducements were too attractive for the struggling factory town to refuse. "The state of Vermont offered a package of some $7.5 million and land for a community centre. That sold it to the voters."
Federal and state prisons have been features of the US landscape since the 19th century; many have become part of the collective imagination: Sing Sing, Folsom, Angola, San Quentin. This is a sealed, self referential world with its own Johnny Cash soundtrack, its own movie legends.
But new players have arrived on the US prison stage: private corporations who now compete with state governments for lucrative prison contracts. "So keen is the competition between public and private that the bottom line drives nearly all decisions behind bars in this country," Hallinan explains, "from the food the inmates eat to the type of work they do - even to the TV shows they get to watch . . . Television acts like `electric Thorazine'. It keeps inmates tranquil, and a tranquil inmate is a cheap inmate."
Before 1983, there were no private prisons in the US; today there are over 150. They are owned by a variety of firms, the oldest and largest being the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In 1997, CCA's stock doubled on Wall Street, fetching over 50 times its earnings on the previous year, a performance rivalled only by the fastest-growing technology stocks. That same year, Wackenhut, CCA's closest rival, reported $8.3 million in profits on $137.8 million in revenues. That, says Joe Hallinan, "is the genius of American prison expansion. Having failed to make prisons effective, we have learned to make them profitable".
They call it "selling the walls". Corporations such as CCA assemble pre-fabricated modular units, minimising construction costs. Small "pods" of cells surround a control booth, enabling one guard to do the work that five traditionally did. (Payroll is 75 per cent of a typical prison's operating costs.) Like a hotel - charging the client state, say, $50 per day per inmate - the private prison sub-contracts all services from food to medical care, then takes its cut. Telephone companies such as AT&T and MCI, for example, compete for prisoners, who make $1 billion worth of calls every year. In 1997, New York made $21.2 million from prison telephone-call commissions.
The numbers make sense. According to the industry's own figures, when a private firm takes over an existing state prison, there is a 10 per cent saving. When it operates a prison of its own design, the saving is 15 per cent. Convict labour is also transformed. "At the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution . . . inmates don't make licence plates any more," Hallinan writes. "They make money . . . $6.25 an hour, on average, manufacturing casual clothing. The prison here, like prisons across America, is turning itself into a for-profit factory, cashing in on a tight labour market." Roughly half an inmate's hourly wage goes to the prison corporation.
Companies like Lee Jeans, Boeing, Victoria's Secret and Eddie Bauer all farm work out to prison labour, and one California correctional agency uses prisoners to make TWA's airline reservations. This, according to its critics, is the new "prisonindustrial complex". State-run prisons draw similar criticism. "So this is going to breathe new life into our town," scoffs Kurt Staudter, another opponent of the Springfield, Vermont prison. "They'll have inmates working there for 25 or 50 cents an hour. How is a local cabinet shop or tool-maker supposed to compete with that kind of slave labour?" Many in Springfield also fear the eventual takeover of the state prison by a private company, a growing trend all over the US.
Corporations such as CCA, citing prison overcrowding, say that they are filling a need. Oklahoma's inmates, for example, are still housed in that state's 1908 prison, despite the fact that their numbers have tripled in the last 15 years.
A source within the New England prison system, who requested anonymity, rejects the argument. "There are plenty of empty cells in our prisons," he insists, speaking from 15 years experience. "But saying that is not good for business. This industry depends on feeding itself. It has to say there's a crisis."
According to the Bureau of Prisons, 58 per cent of the nation's inmates are jailed for drug offences, thanks chiefly to anti-drug legislation enacted during the 1980's. "By 1995, under the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the average federal prison term served for selling crack cocaine was nearly 11 years," explains Hallinan. "For homicide, by comparison, the national average was barely six."
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder about the connection between an exploding prison population and an industry that profits from incarceration. Morgan Reynolds, who directs criminal justice programmes at the National Centre for Policy Analysis, described his vision of the future for Hallinan. Wardens become "marketers of prison labour . . . that's the best way to grow our prison population".