prison industrial complex

noun

variants or less commonly prison-industrial complex

: the profit-driven relationship between the government, the private companies that build, manage, supply, and service prisons, and related groups (such as prison industry unions and lobbyists) regarded as the cause of increased incarceration rates especially of poor people and minorities and often for nonviolent crimes

The exploitation of prison labor by private corporations is one aspect among an array of relationships linking corporations, government, correctional communities, and media. These relationships constitute what we now call a prison industrial complex. The term "prison industrial complex" was introduced by activists and scholars to contest prevailing beliefs that increased levels of crime were the root cause of mounting prison populations. Instead, they argue, prison construction and the attendant drive to fill these new structures with human bodies have been driven by ideologies of racism and the pursuit of profit.

—Angela Y. Davis

The prison-industrial complex involves U.S. for-profit prisons and their influence in American politics, she [Christia Mercer] said.

—Will DeMarco

[Eric] Schlosser's crucial findings are that the prison-industrial complex is a set of bureaucratic, political and economic interests that encourage increased spending on prisons, regardless of actual need.

—Molly Ivins

As many have argued, the prison industrial complex is an engine of inequality through the disproportionate incarceration of both poor people and people of colour …

—Corinne Mason and Shoshana Magnet

Examples of prison industrial complex in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

And wrongful conviction happens for a lot of things — racial bias, all sorts of problems in the prison industrial complex — but the thing that contributes to many wrongful convictions is a crime that happens that overwhelms a local police department. —Brande Victorian, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 Nov. 2024

Ian Shelton started Regional Justice Center in 2016, shortly after Max was incarcerated, as a way to process his worries for his brother, the prison industrial complex, and its institutional degradation. —Nina Corcoran, Pitchfork, 7 Aug. 2024

But if audiences have become numb to stories about the flaws in the prison industrial complex? —Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Mar. 2024

Even just talking about the wellness industrial complex, which obviously parallels the prison industrial complex. —Hazlitt, 25 May 2023

The show’s theme is that what happens in the prison industrial complex affects those of us on the outside as well as the people inside. —Karen Kaplanscience and Medicine Editor, Los Angeles Times, 21 Feb. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1977, in the meaning defined above