BY ZANNY BEGG
As part of this year's May 1 protest events, protesters will blockade the Sydney offices of Australasian Correctional Management (ACM). Here are some reasons why we will be doing this.
ACM, and its US parent company Wackenhut, are in the business of making money out of keeping people behind bars or razor wire — the more people held in detention, the more money Wackenhut makes. Companies like ACM illustrate the nature of the world we live in, a world where the thirst for money allows someone to profit from taking away another's freedom.
Wackenhut Corporation was established by George Wackenhut after he left the FBI in the 1950s. The company has long been accused of being a CIA front — something George Wackenhut vociferously denies. True or false, his company has been closely involved in sensitive security issues for the US government, including guarding overseas embassies and nuclear weapons.
Over the years Wackenhut's list of directors has read like a Who's Who of US government security services: former CIA directors, Marine Corps leaders and FBI directors have all sat on the board.
During the 1950s the Wackenhut Corporation assembled the largest private file on "subversives" in US history. By 1966 the company had files on 4 million people (after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslagg, a researcher for Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-left investigative committee).
In the 1960s Wackenhut Corporations diversified into strike-breaking activities and "anti-terrorism" operations. In 1986, it landed its first contract for a private prison.
By 1999 Wackenhut was profiting from the incarceration of more then 38,000 people in the US. That year, Wackenhut Corporation had a turnover of more than US$1 billion and had offices in more than 50 countries and interests in a diverse range of private prisons, including in Australia.
The Australian holdings of ACM and Wackenhut are as follows:
- ACM runs the Fulham private prison and, on behalf of the Victoria Police, ACM manages the Melbourne Custody Centre.
- Wackenhut provides primary medical, dental and psychiatric nursing at nine state prisons in Victoria.
- ACM has run the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, Queensland, since it opened in 1992.
- ACM has run the Junee Correctional Centre, NSW, since 1993.
- ACM manages the refugee detention centres, although it will face competition for the renewal of its contract sometime this year.
The growth of the "prison-industrial complex" in the US is a frightening example of what could happen here. The US now imprisons more people than any other country: up to two million of its citizens are behind bars. Those incarcerated are usually already discriminated against or disadvantaged — black people, women or those from migrant communities.
One out of every four black men in the US will be jailed for some period in their lives. The number of women being sent to prison in the US has risen twelvefold since 1970. The Californian state government now spends more on prisons than it does on hospitals or schools.
In "The Prison-Industrial Complex and the Global Economy" (< http://www.prisonactivist.org/crisis/evans-A HREF="mailto:goldberg.html"><goldberg.html>), US prisoner rights activists Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans explain how the growth in incarceration is creating a criminalised "under-class" in the US, where prisons are the only "social services" available to the poor. In this scenario, prisons are no longer about "rehabilitation" (there are no jobs to send people back out to) but are places to warehouse "undesirable" persons who are caught in a continual trap of criminality.
"Law and order" has become the staple diet of mainstream politics in the United States. What is particularly concerning is how this links into the private-profit motive of private security companies like Wackenhut. These corporations have become a powerful lobby group for tougher penalties and have both fuelled and benefited from the expansion in prisons.
Described as "recession proof" (hard times result in more people being imprisoned), the US private prison business has expanded its prison population from 77,000 in 1996 to 270,000 in 2001.
Steven Donziger, an attorney who headed the US National Criminal Justice Commission, described the "logic" of this expansion as follows: "If crime is going up we need to build more prisons, if it is going down then it is because we built more prisons".
Similar trends are emerging in Australia. The number of prison inmates in NSW has increased by 20.9% between 1995 and 2001. The number of women in prison increased by 67.6% over the same period.
Although the growth in private prisons has been much slower in Australia than in the US, companies like ACM are pushing to ensure they have their foot in the door.
One activity in which ACM has been allowed to profit from imprisoning people is the incarceration of refugees in detention centres across Australia.
Under ACM's management of the immigration detention centres, asylum seekers have been beaten, abused, held in solitary confinement, threatened and intimidated and charged $150 a day for the privilege. Conditions are so bad, the centres have been described by some former ACM staff as "hell on Earth".
There have been numerous attempts by refugees to break out of the detention centres or organise hunger strikes and other forms of civil disobedience to protest their treatment by ACM.
Sydney M1 protesters will be blockading the offices of ACM to demonstrate their opposition to the corporation's involvement in running prisons and the detention centres for refugees. They will be protesting against ACM, but also a whole system of corporate control which allows companies like ACM to profit from the misery and impoverishment of others.
The ACM blockade will be followed by a unity march with other May Day protesters through the city demanding "a different world is possible" (see notice below for details).
[Zanny Begg is a member of the Sydney M1 Alliance and the Democratic Socialist Party.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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