On November 17, 2014 The American Friends Service Committee issued the brief “Treatment Industrial Complex: How For-Profit Prisons are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain.” The brief explains how the “treatment industrial complex” has gotten its hooks into an area of health care that can keep those with a criminal history under supervision and surveillance much longer than necessary.
The introduction to the brief states:
“Private prison corporations have profited from, and at times corporations have profited from, and at times contributed to, the expansion of tough-on-crime and anti-immigrant policies that have driven prison expansion. This confluence of special interests and profit-driven policy making has been referred to as the “prison industrial complex.”
This brief describes the expansion of the incarceration industry away from warehousing and into areas that traditionally were focused on treatment and care of individuals involved in the criminal justice system—prison medical care, forensic mental hospitals, civil commitment centers, and ‘community corrections’ programs such as halfway houses and home arrest.
While the prison industrial complex was dependent on incarceration or detention in prisons, jails, and other correctional institutions, this emerging “treatment industrial complex” allows the same corporations (and many new ones) to profit from providing treatment-oriented programs
and services. This includes moving to capitalize on efforts at the state and federal levels to look at alternatives to prison, a softening of criminal sentencing laws, and a new interest in evidence-based practices in parole, probation, and sentencing.
As a result, this emerging Treatment Industrial Complex has the potential to ensnare more individuals, under increased levels of supervision and surveillance, for increasing lengths of time—in some cases, for the rest of a person’s life.”
Read Treatment Industrial Complex: How For-Profit Prisons are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain.
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