Theorizing financial extraction: The curious case of telephone profits in the Los Angeles county jails

Lara‐Millán, Armando

doi:10.1177/1462474520941929

Cited by 16 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 26 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…Seventy percent of the contracts require video visitation replace in-person visitation, and families are made to pay about a dollar per minute to talk to their loved ones (Katzenstein and Waller, 2015: 639). Recently, Page and Soss, along with Lara-Millan, have written persuasively about fines, fees, forfeitures, and premiums as part of a vast network of revenue generation—the rise of a predatory form of capitalism that strips resources from the least well-off (Lara-Millan, 2021; Page and Soss, 2021).…”

Section: The Submerged Prison Statementioning

confidence: 99%

The submerged prison state: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability

Berk

2023

Punishment & Society

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Much of penal policy is “submerged,” in the sense that Suzanne Mettler uses the term. There are networks of rules and regulations that link public funds, services, and institutions to various private interests with far reaching consequences. These networks are largely a stealth presence in the lives of citizens and their subterranean status, I argue, warps the wider politics of punishment. Resources are circulated along this network in such a way revenue is generated for some, costs cut for others, all in the shadow of public law. To the extent that this kind of redistribution lacks citizens’ consent and approval, it also represents a potentially undemocratic development. Here, I show how the obscured visibility of these public–private connections distorts public attitudes about, and public support for, the US prison state. The final pages draw out the normative implications of that distortion.

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Section: The Submerged Prison Statementioning

confidence: 99%

The submerged prison state: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability

Berk

2023

Punishment & Society

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“…Recently, others have argued that prison privatization is best understood as a feature of predatory governance , which seeks to bolster state power through the extraction of resources from poor communities and communities of color (Page and Soss 2017; Page, Piehowski, and Soss 2019). What both approaches share is a recognition of the recent proliferation of different forms of carceral privatization (Aviram 2014; Lara-Millan 2021).…”

Section: The Normalization Of Public-private Equity Partnershipsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Frequently it is used instead to cover costs that are, properly speaking, taxpayer-funded liabilities. Thus, even where the money is directed for much needed work benefitting incarcerated populations, as Armando Lara-Millán (2021) describes in his account of the Los Angeles jail fund’s use towards a much-needed mental health facility, the funds are still levied from prisoner families rather than from the taxpayer.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Normalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars

Swanson¹,

Katzenstein²

2021

Perspect. polit.

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In recent decades, public prisons and jails have increasingly outsourced operational functions by “turning over the keys” to private business and, more recently and specifically, to private equity. By the early 2000s, private equity-owned corporations had entered the core sectors of prison and jail operations, creating “markets behind bars” in telecommunications, commissary sales, health provision, and a range of other services. Two decades later, they have become a quasi-oligopolistic market force across the carceral economy. Reacting to these developments, scholars and activists have explored how private firms generate profits by extracting resources from families of the incarcerated. Less explored is the fact that it is often and particularly private equity firms that partner with public carceral institutions in these extractive practices. In this reflection, we propose a three-part schematic for understanding how such partnerships, with their attendant predation on the poor and people of color, have become normalized. We focus, first, on the mechanism of bureaucracy through which mutual profit-making by public and private entities becomes regularized; second, we explore the legal mechanisms—the apparently small but potent and politically unexamined legal maneuvers—that enable the redirection of family resources beyond the support of a loved one to the operational needs of jails and prisons; finally, we trace the role of gender as a social mechanism through which private equity and its prison/jail partners rely simultaneously on women’s traditional role as caretaker and non-traditional role as primary breadwinner. We show that all three mechanisms are crucial to the economic functioning of the carceral state.

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“…Previous research illustrates the extraction of financial resources that incarceration imposes on family and friends. When a loved one is incarcerated, family members are often charged with providing overpriced personal items from the commissary, paying for collect phone calls, and/or covering expensive monetary sanctions and subsequent legal debt (Braman 2004;Hairston and Oliver 2006;Harris, et al 2010;Harris 2016;Lara-Millan 2021;Miller 2021). On top of these costs directly associated with incarceration, the absence of the loved one's income is often strongly felt, with nearly half of incarcerated individuals contributing at least 50 percent to the total household income of their family prior to incarceration (deVuono-Powell, et al 2015).…”

Section: Legal Bystanders and Extractionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punishment by Association: The Burden of Attending Court for Legal Bystanders

Eife¹,

Richie²

2021

Law Soc. Inq.

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Scholars have shown how legal bystanders experience punishment at the hands of the state in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as jails and prisons. Other scholars have shown how bureaucratic processes, such as attending court, are punitive toward people charged with crimes. There is less information about how legal bystanders also experience punishment in courtrooms. In this article, we bridge the literatures between secondary prisonization and procedural punishment to illustrate how legal bystanders, such as family and friends of bond court defendants, experience punishment when attending bond court. We utilize courtroom ethnography of Central Bond Court in Chicago’s Cook County and interviews with family and friends of people charged with a crime to illustrate this form of punishment in three themes: extraction, destabilization, and degradation. With these findings, we argue that secondary prisonization begins not at the point of incarceration, but at the moment a loved one’s contact with the criminal legal system begins.

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Theorizing financial extraction: The curious case of telephone profits in the Los Angeles county jails

Cited by 16 publications

References 26 publications

The submerged prison state: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability

The submerged prison state: Punishment, private interests, and the politics of public accountability

Turning Over the Keys: Public Prisons, Private Equity, and the Normalization of Markets Behind Bars

Punishment by Association: The Burden of Attending Court for Legal Bystanders

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