Following the Money

We examine the strategic importance of interrogating the flows of funds that make criminalization, incarceration, and policing possible, through all the different forms they take—from source to transfer to officer’s wage or prison gate. Instead of spectacularizing incidents of corruption or the negligible profits of private prison corporations, actually following the money means identifying all the places organized action could interrupt those streams and divert those dollars in other directions. Growing agencies for punishment often use the budgets they accrue to exert more pressure and hoard legitimacy in the next budget battles, even as they trumpet their alleged cost-effectiveness. We make the point that the fight over legitimacy matters, and that attempts by pro-prison actors to shield their funding mechanisms from potential interference by the public are proof that people continue to struggle for other futures.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: As you know, I obsess about where the money for prisons comes from and where it goes. Obviously, in general, we know that the money comes from taxes, fees, and debt, and that it goes to wages, salaries, utilities, and debt service. But it’s also true that when money from taxes, fees, and debt is concentrated into criminalization, prisons, jails, policing, police buildings, police equipment, courts, and so on, that concentration enables the political aggrandizement of its direct and indirect beneficiaries, who then are in a better position than anybody else to get the next round of resources—including the capacity to decide who gets what and how.

Craig Gilmore: So often, discussions about money in incarceration are about “excessive profits” or corruption, and there’s plenty of both in the carceral system. But, as Ruthie just said, so much of the importance of the money that flows through it is that, whether it’s increasing prison budgets or sheriff’s budgets or police budgets, it grows their already substantial political power.

Judah Schept: That’s right. It’s so important for organizers to think about specificity and scale. Because everything we’ve just said is 100 percent correct, and at the same time, potential points of leverage and intervention shift. So if you’re trying to intervene at a state or local level, you want to look at bonds, draw attention to borrowing, examine intergovernmental service agreements, etc. And if you’re talking about a federal prison or detention center, the money flows from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security and then to the Bureau of Prisons or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As this occurs following congressional appropriations, it is very hard to disrupt. As I understand it, you need a member of Congress to introduce a bill, basically, for that money to be rescinded once it’s been appropriated (although the Trump administration’s disruptions of funding streams for federal agencies has meaningfully and chaotically upended this status quo). The point being that the origins and circulations of the money have, at least historically, had predictable tendencies, and that varies at particular scales, so understanding its path is crucial for planning interventions. It can be a question of who’s getting paid, but it often is also or instead a question of how that money is then being utilized to pay wages, plug budgetary holes, recuperate revenue losses, or pay for infrastructure.

As I mentioned in an earlier conversation in this series, Laurel County used the money coming from the state department of corrections and ICE to purchase new fire trucks as well as to fund cost-of-living adjustments for county employees. That’s important in terms of knowing what’s happening in and through the jail, but it also suggests a bigger point, which is that the work of abolition is about community-level and household-level social reproduction, all the way down to the level of people’s cost of living.

Craig Gilmore: And those county-level fiscal strategies are marketed around. We met a guy probably twenty years ago now named Sean Chadwell who lived in La Salle County in South Texas, and his county judge was approached by, as he put it, “a car full of dudes in the best suits I’ve ever seen,” who were a construction firm, a private prison company, and a banker. They were traveling together county to county pitching the idea of jail expansion for beds leasable to ICE or the U.S. Marshals. And what of course they didn’t tell any county is, “We’re going to every county in the state of Texas doing this.” Each county thought, “Well, of course, if we build a few hundred beds, it’ll be full.” And he, unlike the county judge and whoever else was involved in those decisions, called around to a few neighboring counties and revealed that the developers were willing to build everywhere. They weren’t concerned about overcapacity; they were going to lend the money and get contracts to build the facilities, and potentially contracts to manage those facilities as well—getting paid either way, with the county holding the bag.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: On this question of being attentive to the differences of money sources, it’s also important to think about how our opposition has provoked different arrangements. There are now public–private partnerships, for example, that make it harder to interrupt money flows because the decisions are not being laid at the feet of taxpayers. One example that makes this abundantly clear is the repeated tactic by prison boosters to change the legal form public borrowing takes: in so many places, the plan moves away from borrowing through general obligation bonds, which often require voter approval (because they are paid down out of tax revenues) and thus can be blocked by organized campaigns, to lease revenue bonds, which are shielded from interference and voter oversight by ostensibly being paid back by a projected income stream (like bridge tolls or dorm fees). The ruse is that the guaranteed payments are from the state’s tax revenue, disguised as “lease payments” between two state agencies.

A point I want to underline, as well, is that often the benefits offered to communities who agree to take a prison, like new roads or cost-of-living adjustments or wastewater treatment facilities, are in fact not fully funded for the duration of the debt, or even funded beyond the establishment of the prison. Years ago I was contacted by a person who worked for the rural public housing agency in Fresno County, California. The agency had been asked to support a proposed prison in the town of Mendota, which is in western Fresno County, where we had already been organizing a bit. She said, “I got this call and they say, oh, there are going to be all these jobs, so if we commit to putting public housing in Mendota, then this will enhance the likelihood that they’ll get this prison, which will then help the housing pay for itself.” So I faxed her—which gives some sense of how long ago this was—everything I knew about prisons and rural housing. And she faxed me back and said, “Oh, OK, so we’re against it because people who will live in public housing will not have any chance of jobs at the prison.” (There’s an entire conversation we could have had about credit scores and employability—yet another way people are documented not to work.) Our correspondence happened pretty quickly, over the course of a couple of days and miles of fax paper. It’s another of hundreds of examples where it appears that the size of a prison budget and related infrastructural improvements is so enormous that it’s completely counterintuitive to think that the people who live in that locality are not going to benefit, directly or indirectly. But experience shows otherwise, example after example.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: The mechanisms through which money flows to carceral projects are not natural and it can be helpful just to make these mechanisms more visible to the public. For example, to be able to use lease revenue bonds to build prisons or jails requires the creation of a nonprofit corporation (that’s still a state entity) to flow the money through, which requires, at least in the case of Louisiana, the legislature to pass an enabling law. In other words, elites have to organize to make this mechanism exist in the first place, and bond underwriters derive huge profits from offering this as a mechanism that allows elites to sidestep public opposition. In Louisiana, brokers literally contacted the governor by saying, in effect: “We see that all these people are voting down your proposals for more funding for prisons through property taxes. Here’s something you could use to get around them.”

The creation of these kinds of workarounds tells us a story that something wasn’t working. The elites thought something was going to be a slam dunk, but it wasn’t: that workaround implies that some opposition emerged that boosters had to work around. It was not inevitable. There was a political struggle for that formation to happen.

On a more local level, when people fight to reup or create a new property tax millage for the police department or the sheriff’s office, we should also remember that those very taxing districts had to be created in the first place. If you look at the history, against the narrative that people are always happy to give more tax dollars to police and jails, it becomes evident these proposals are regularly voted down. Then carceral proponents seek new kinds of workarounds. In the case of New Orleans at one point, they tacked on a fee for jailing to people’s electric bills. You can read this move as simultaneously an example of local officials’ commitment to locking people up, and also, again, a story about how they had to come up with a sneaky plan because people were being successful in their opposition, too. How these structures get built to allow the money to flow is a story of the dialectical relationship to resistance that is happening over and over again.

Craig Gilmore: There are people on the left who criticize those of us who engage in budget fights around prison or jail expansion, saying that we are reinforcing the notion of austerity and that there’s only so much public money. They say that instead we should get behind taxing the rich so we have more money for social services and more cops and bigger jails. In reality, the growth of the carceral state and the growth of neoliberalism track pretty closely with each other, and in fact more cops are there because we’re continuing to enforce austerity. Cops are needed to turn the screws even harder on it. But that seems a tough thing for some socialists to get.

Judah Schept: I want to go back to an earlier point you made, Craig, framing this around the tension between austerity and the expansion of the carceral state. I have two examples of how this tension is expressed in Kentucky. First, one of the reasons that the Bureau of Prisons ultimately withdrew its decision to build the prison the first time was because the first Trump administration framed USP Letcher as being both outside the bounds of an austerity budget package and as distracting from its prioritization of building additional immigration detention camps at the southern border. There was an entertaining and instructive moment of political theater during a House Appropriations Committee meeting where Congressman Hal Rogers, the prison’s most vociferous proponent, chastised Rod Rosenstein, who was Jeff Sessions’s deputy attorney general, for the DOJ’s withdrawal of its Record of Decision authorizing the prison. Rosenstein made the argument that the more fiscally responsible move would be to spend a fraction of the half-billion dollars appropriated for a new prison in Letcher County on the expansion of existing facilities here and there. This offers a lesson, I think, for evolving abolitionist strategy around money and site fights. Yes, the work in the moment might be to oppose a new prison in a particular place, and also to pay attention to how the capacity that would have gone into building out that new prison may be reallocated to less dramatically building out capacity elsewhere. But the money is key to making those political and geographic connections.

The second point about austerity and expansion concerns the actual plan for what we now call FCI Letcher, but which is in fact two separate facilities: the main one and an adjacent federal prison camp, a minimum-security prison, designed to hold 256 additional people in captivity next door. If you look at the BOP’s own language, the entire justification for building this auxiliary facility is to have people incarcerated in the minimum-security prison serve as a “work cadre” at the larger prison next door, performing what Craig has called “the social reproductive labor of the prison itself.” There’s a lot of ways to think about the absurdity of minimum-security prisons in general, but clearly it’s function here would be to house an unfree labor force to perform the custodial work of maintaining custody. The BOP of course would be relieved of having to pay federal minimum wages to Letcher Countians to serve food or clean or whatever. This is about the money, including the ways the state spends money and attempts to save it.

Craig Gilmore: Or at least appears to be trying to save money. The state may or may not be trying to save money, but it wants to appear to be trying to save money in order to justify its budget.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The dominant discourse is about “saving” (as contrasted with “wasting”) money. When I was on the road doing fieldwork in the mid-1990s, I spent a hair-raising evening in a Sacramento motel watching a bunch of departments of correction heads from various states chatting about their growing agencies on C-SPAN. They all agreed they would be required to devise programs to make their departments self-supporting. Although that was not and would never become a requirement, they all accepted it as future-determining truth, and their declarations made viewers think the same. Indeed, they incited one another’s belief. It was around the time that Oregon started a Prison Blues clothing line, which never made a dent in budgets. This is what I mean by “dominant discourse.”

To me the surface “requirement” of producing revenue hid the real one—that whatever their size, prison budgets should seem as small as they could possibly be, even if staggeringly enormous. That’s entirely different from saving, much less making, a penny. A gargantuan budget slips behind the veil. It’s the strange effect of the state in capitalism trying to behave as the capitalist state. Making that clear is important, at the same time that we see the various ways that prison and jail bosses figure out how to grow and consolidate their power—including by renting space to other jurisdictions. At the same time, because of captive budgets and captive communities, parasites frequently figure out how to turn the cash spigot in their direction—whether for outrageous phone fees, or overpriced commissary, or other goods. We’ve spoken about various jurisdictions and sectors overlapping and interlocking. One of the many ways we can trace those dynamics, and figure out what to do, is by following money—including how people talk about it.

_{Image: Vic / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)}

Contributors

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an assistant professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy.

Judah Schept Judah Schept is professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University and the author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia.

Craig Gilmore Craig Gilmore is a cofounder of California Prison Moratorium Project and was an editor at Prison Focus. Among his publications is the comic book Prison Town: Paying the Price, cowritten with Kevin Pyle.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore Ruth Wilson Gilmore, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, is author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation.

Topics

• Futures

Tags

• abolition
• carceral economy
• Carceral Geographies
• community organizing
• organizing
• prison economy