This week’s Justice Notes features a guest essay by Gina Pendergraph, who draws upon her own experience with incarceration to examine the racial and economic forces behind America’s prison system.
The Prison Industrial Complex
By Gina Pendergraph
The United States did not arrive at mass incarceration organically. We did not simply build jails and lock up “bad people.”
Western films from the late 1890s through the 1960s show men shooting each other in the street, the local sheriff making an arrest, and someone getting locked up before the story moves on. By 1960, that image softened even further with the town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, where the town drunk, Otis, locked himself in the jail cell after a bender and slept it off.
Over the eight years that show ran, audiences grew accustomed to the idea that a jail cell could be a safe, almost neighborly place—somewhere a person went to sober up rather than somewhere a person disappeared into.
The War on Crime, which emerged under the Johnson administration, expanded the federal government’s role in policing. But the major expansion of harsh sentencing came later, with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which established binding guidelines and mandatory minimums.
The War on Drugs, waged through the 1970s and 1980s, framed drug use as “public enemy number one,” a push that began under Nixon and expanded under Reagan, whose administration introduced a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine that overwhelmingly targeted Black drug users.
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? both argue that this shift was not an accident, but a deliberately built structure that reproduces racial hierarchy while generating profit for private industry. Alexander traces how the drug war used the language of colorblindness to construct a new racial caste system, while Davis shows how that system has been sustained by corporate interests that depend on prisons for revenue.
Meaningful change requires confronting the racial and economic incentives that keep the system running—and seriously exploring abolition, not just reform.
The Prison Label
In “The Lockdown,” Alexander argues that mass incarceration functions as a new system of racial and social control, one she compares directly to Jim Crow segregation. She points out that convictions for drug offenses are “the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States” (Alexander 2010:360), even though most people arrested on drug charges have no history of violence and are not the “kingpins” the drug war claims to target.
The Jim Crow metaphor is deliberate. Once a person is labeled a felon, discrimination in employment, housing, voting, and jury service becomes perfectly legal again, just as it was under the old Jim Crow laws, though the specifics of felon voting restrictions vary by state (Alexander 2010:380).
A colorblind society is supposed to have moved past legalized discrimination, yet the felony label lets the same exclusions operate under a new premise. Nobody has to say the word race for the outcome to fall overwhelmingly on Black and Latino communities.
Pretext stops and consent searches swept up young men of color on the street, on buses, and in cars. Many don’t understand that they can refuse questions like “May I speak with you?” or “Do you mind if I search your vehicle?” (Alexander 2010:364).
My bunkmate, whom I call Amy in my writings, drove ten pounds of methamphetamine from California to Oklahoma and was sentenced to 156 months. I crossed the border with fifty pounds of methamphetamine and twenty-five kilos of other drugs. Yet through a twelve-page narrative, a strong presentence report describing my life and the trauma behind my choices, and a good lawyer arguing for—and winning—downward departures, I was sentenced to 18 months, plus 6 months of home confinement.
Thirteen years compared with two, for a larger quantity of drugs, is explained less by the crime than by who had the resources to shape how a judge saw her (Alexander 2010:377).
Alexander’s point is that race, not economic status alone, determines who becomes a target of the drug war, but class still decides how survivable that targeting turns out to be. What ties both together is the “prison label.” Even after a sentence ends, the felony record follows a person permanently, closing off housing, employment, and public benefits, regardless of how much time was actually served (Alexander 2010:380).
Incarceration for Profit
Davis explains how the prison system has become a profit-generating industry. In “The Prison Industrial Complex,” she argues that prisons are no longer justified only by public safety, but also by their usefulness to private capital. She describes how corporations, government agencies, and media outlets now share a mutual interest in expanding incarceration (Davis 2003:84).
Private companies build and staff prisons for profit. Phone and commissary companies charge inflated rates to incarcerated people and their families (Davis 2003:99).
What stands out to me in Davis’s account is how this profit motive shapes decisions that appear to be about safety or justice. Companies like Corrections Corporation of America and Wackenhut have built enormous markets around incarceration (Davis 2003:95–98). If a corporation’s revenue depends on prison beds staying full, it has no interest in reducing the number of people locked up.
I saw this daily during my own incarceration, where both the camp and the halfway house I was at sat near full capacity on a one-out, one-in basis. No one received a release-to-community date until another person was scheduled to take her bunk—and there was always someone waiting on a transfer.
Correctional staff hung on to us like their paychecks depended on it, all while complaining about the overtime they worked.
The GEO Group, publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and a major operator of ICE detention facilities and electronic monitoring, reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $705.2 million—a 17 percent increase over the year before—while the number of people wearing a GPS ankle monitor rose from about 17,000 in early 2025 to more than 48,000 in 2026. (The GEO Group)
This is what Davis means when she says the prison population is the bottom line: the industry needs it to grow (Davis 2003:16).
Reform or Abolition?
In the chapter “Prison Reform or Abolition?” Davis acknowledges that reform can sound like the only realistic option, since abolishing prisons entirely can seem “unthinkable and implausible,” even to people otherwise critical of the system (Davis 2003:9).
Abolition raises the harder question of what crimes deserve incarceration and who gets to decide. I had an hour-long debate with my husband about this very question.
My attorney told me that carceral sentences exist to deter the next person from committing the crime. Davis would push back on that logic, asking whether deterrence actually requires a cage at all.
She does not suggest a like-prison replacement. Instead, she proposes multiple alternatives working together, including the demilitarization of schools, investment in education and mental health care, and reparative and restorative justice models that address harm without caging people (Davis 2003:107).
Reforms that improve prison conditions or shorten sentences are worth pursuing, but they leave the underlying structure—and the profit motive that sustains it—fully intact.
The campaign to close Rikers took a decade, and the agreement was to replace it with four smaller, borough-based jails. (CBS News)
Dismantling the system will not happen overnight.
The Machine Keeps Running
Alexander and Davis approach mass incarceration from different angles, but their arguments reinforce each other.
Alexander shows how the drug war rebuilt racial caste under the cover of colorblind law, sweeping millions of people—disproportionately people of color—into a system that permanently brands them.
Davis shows that the same system has become profitable for private industry, giving corporations and government agencies a financial stake in keeping the machine running.
As someone who lived inside that machine and now works with people navigating the federal system—before, during, and after—I find both authors’ insistence on looking past individual guilt or innocence toward the structure itself to be the more honest starting point.
Until the racial and economic incentives driving mass incarceration are addressed directly, the system will keep reproducing itself, one arrest, one label, and one profit margin at a time.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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Great job Gina!! 🙏🙏🙏