The racist origins of the us prison privatization process

Abstract

This paper proposes to analyze the participation of private actors in the administration of criminal penalties that took place in the United States of America, from the formation of the Thirteen Colonies to the present day, from a racial perspective. It is intended to demonstrate that the privatizing experience of the United States has been intertwined with the racial question since the end of the Civil War in 1865, whose great consequence was the end of slavery. However, as it is exposed throughout the text, this end was purely symbolic, as the privatization mechanisms helped to perpetuate the segregation and exploitation of the black population's work, no longer as property of the white masters, but as criminally convicted. In sequence, it is exposed how the current scenario of prison privatization in the country still favors the accentuation of racial segregation through the criminal justice system. Methodologically, this research compares the specialized bibliography on the subject with empirical data that profiles the current racial composition of the US prison population in order to demonstrate that the North American privatization process continues to direct incarceration to the same formerly enslaved population, in addition to other marginalized minorities.