prisons perpetuating poverty (say that one five times fast!)

I want this book.

I also want to type up my most recent sociology essay and put it online so that I will have access to it in the future. This is one of the most difficult non-hard science classes I've ever taken, and it's not even really an upper level class. However, I absolutely love it and it only furthers my conviction the being a sociology major is right for me.

Explain in a comprehensive fashion how the current prison industrial complex perpetuates poverty in the United States

The ideological enforcement of the link between crime and punishment and the institutional enforcement of the link between crime and poverty inevitably create a societal connection between poverty and punishment. Because the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) eliminates the prospect of dealing with rime through the betterment of institutions which currently allow for poverty due to their ideological standpoints, the PIC is the government's only way to "deal" with poverty, thus maintaining and even perpetuating more of it.

The societal ideology of individual meritocracity allows and encourages the idea that if somebody is living in poverty it is because that person has not worked hard enough to escape it and thus deserves to be poor. This idea also makes it easy to believe that all prisoners deserve to be prisoners, which maintains the belief that if a crime is committed, punishment must follow. Because of this, the prison is both present in its inevitable connection to crime in our minds, but also absent in that believing that someone deserves to be in prison means believing that she or he deserves whatever happens in prison. Thus it is not worth thinking about prison conditions unless you are a criminal. With this absense of consideration comes an ideological duty to ignore the institutions which perpetuate the link between poverty and punishment.

Due to the failure of institutions to rise up and integrate newly freed slaves into society as human beings with rights equal to those of white Americans, racism has been inherited through the generations so that non-white Americans have not had the same access to wealth and opportunity as white Americans, which in consequence has linked non-white Americans to poverty. This in turn links non-white Americans to crime and, more importantly, to punishment. It is no accident that the stereotypical shadowy convict laced within American ideology is black or, at least, non-white. With the PIC in place, there is no need to address the larger issue of institutionalized racism in society because, as inheritants of poverty, non-whites join the population of people the PIC is responsible for "dealing" with.

If it weren't for capitalism, the PIC would be completely obsolete, as it is only with capitalism that the idea of the individual, and thus the idea of individual punishment, arises. Because social stratification is built into capitalism - the best must rise, the others must fall - poverty itself is built into the system. So poverty has to be dealt with, and since dealing with poverty in a constructive way would involve overhauling the very foundations of our capitalist society, the PIC serves the necessary function of "dealing" with poverty without actually offering a solution. On top of this, the corporations within the capitalist society profit off of the PIC by selling products and, in some cases, exploiting prison labor.

The Prison Industrial Complex perpetuates poverty by being itself a solution that is not a solution. It feeds off of the institutions which benefit from giving "acceptable" ideology to excuse poverty, racism, classism, sexism, and exploitation. The PIC takes the place of any helpful institutions that might reduce or eliminate poverty, thus allowing poverty to spread and grow across the United States.