Noam Chomsky - The Prison System

I heard you mentioned before that that prisons and growth of prisons shot me off the economy and we are seeing a growth in prisons and everybody from the left and right saying oh yo there's more crime you do need more prisons so do hours in any prison yeah absolutely me what is that yeah in fact very clear new girl as you move towards the third remember what a third-world society looks like a third-world society has a lot of superfluous people people are just useless they have no human rights and the human value because they don't contribute to making profit and enriching the rich you know they don't even clean their floors they're not even needed for anything but well in in one of our third-world domains that's why we fund security forces like we half of our military aid more than half for Latin America goes to Colombia and the reason is it has the worst human rights record on in the hemisphere it's slaughter the security forces have killed maybe 20,000 people or so in the last few years you know political organizers and union leaders and peasants and so on and that's the way you make sure you keep the superfluous people under control you slaughter them well we haven't quite reached that level here though we're getting to be a third world Society so what we do with the superfluous people the ones who don't contribute the wealth production for the rich and therefore have no don't aren't human really what you do with them is first of all try to come up in slums which are sort of like concentration camps and if that doesn't work you put them in jail which is the equivalent sort of the counterpart in a wealthy society to death squads and a poor society and so they're naturally zooming and they are a shot in the arm it's only crime is not going up at least as far as any evidence is concerned I mean if you can believe the government you know FBI statistics and all this other stuff crime is fairly level you know I mean sort went up in the 70s since then it's probably the ends even declined but the perception of crime has increased but that's because it's it's not that it's not a serious problem especially if you're a poor person it's an extremely serious problem because crime is mostly poor people preying on each other so you're a poor person you know down in Roxbury yeah crimes a problem but they're not the ones are calling from our prisons no the to put you know their own sons in jail the in fact there are now more black males in the prison system and in the education system in the you know relevant ages in fact what the criminal system is simply being used as a war against literally a war against an unwanted part of the population a part of the population that used to be industrial workers or at least have the opportunity to and maybe work themselves up but now just have no rights because you don't need that anymore you can get them cheaper somewhere else so you got to get rid of that's a large part of what the drug worse about drug war has no effect on drugs in fact as I mentioned a large part of and it's well known outside the United States is in the bishop statement that a large part of the drug policies are fomenting the production of drugs and in fact if anybody wanted to do something but the drugs they go to wherever those two hundred sixty billion dollars of annual profits are being laundered namely US banks you know you don't see many bankers in jail the drug program is designed and implemented to criminalize and unwanted population black males Hispanic males and so on so you know you take a look at that chain gangs in Alabama and it'll be somebody who had a jointness pocket you know that's sort of thing so that's what you do it as for the the system has a side benefit it's state spending so it has a stimulative effect on the economy firms like say merrill lynch you know and prudential and so on they are putting out bonds tax-free bonds for the building of prisons and making a lot of money on it it's a growth it's part of its it's part of the growth system you know it's come it's not the scale of the pentagon but it's sort of you know it got the same function in fact the military corporations are all like Lockheed and so on they're already realizing it so they are now exploring the possibility of entering on you know climbing on that gravy train and sewing developing high-tech high-tech high-tech methods of surveillance and control which the public will pay for and it will be dual use technology and you will use it for something else actually is a big story in The Wall Street Journal about it a couple months ago so you know you can you good engineer you can figure out a way to implant an electrode and somebody so then some supercomputer somewhere I'll have them under surveillance and if they go the wrong place you stand at a shock or you know in drug you know chemicals or something or other and that way you could have very efficient monitoring of and control of large parts of the population which would be quite cost-effective except of course for the technology which the public is paying for anyway prison construction alone is a booming industry and the security personnel has been maybe still is the fastest growing white-collar operation for some you know profession for some years so all of this stuff goes on with pouring money into the hands of the wealthier sectors Merrill Lynch construction also the prisons are being privatized I don't remember the figures but the growth of the privately run prisons is far higher than the state-run prisons and that's just another scam privatized prisons is like privatized health means public pays the costs and one or another technique but there's private profit and you have a lot of techniques of you know you can cut down costs by pouring putting more prisoners into a cell and you don't have to give them any care and no rehabilitation none of that stuff so I think the whole thing is is a very natural consequence of the policies designed to create a third world type society now when I say third world I don't mean the United States going to look like Mexico you know much too rich for that but it's going to that structure you know that kind of structure at a richer level and yeah that's prisons are a part of that just as death squads and the terror of the security forces is part of Mexico and Colombia

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 44,510

Rating: 4.9526792 out of 5

Keywords: Prison, United States, Poverty, Crime, Racism, Drugs, Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Politics, Prison system

Id: YGeFEl83ljw

Length: 6min 19sec (379 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/mw19078]

Scary how accurate the things he worried about decades ago have turned out to be. The private prison comment really stands out in this clip.