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In his farewell speech in 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower
famously described the rapidly expanding influence of something
he identified as a powerful “military industrial complex,”
warning that such a complex was then beginning to be built
around a growing standing military, the burgeoning armaments
industry and the new federally funded scientific research
community. “In the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of undue influence by the miltary industrial
complex,” he cautioned.
50 years later, critics of the nation’s drug policies, borrowing from
Eisenhower’s coined phrase, have begun to warn of a growing
“prison industrial complex,” pointing out that powerful groups who
have a vested interest in continuing the failed War on Drugs are
blocking crucial efforts to reform the nation’s misguided and highly
punitive approach to drug addiction.
The absurd War on Drugs - I mean, why don’t we just go ahead and
declare war on diabetics or, even better, the disabled? - was begun
by the Nixon Administration in the 1970s with legislation that
created the DEA, among other things. Since then, mandatory
sentencing guidelines at the federal and state levels have led to a
vast imprisonment of America’s addicted population, resulting in a
huge prison building boom and a large increase in the nation’s law
enforcement and criminal courts infrastructure.
The United States, with over 2 million prisoners, has the
highest imprisonment rate by far of any nation in the world, with
some estimates putting drug related incarcerations as high as
70 percent of the total. The last time our country had such a big
increase in prisoners - a 500 percent jump at the federal level - was
during Prohibition, a massively failed effort to control drinking
whose only lasting contribution to society was the creation of
organized crime as an American institution.
And now, efforts to move the handling of the drug addiction
problem away from the criminal justice system into the healthcare
system, where it belongs, are being virgorously oppossed by the
associations and organizations that represent interests that are at the
core of the prison industrial complex, groups like prison guards,
police and district attorneys, among others. The main opponents
of reform efforts like California’s Proposition 36, which mandates
treatment instead of jail for drug offenders, these groups argue
that sending drug addicts to treatment won’t work and is a threat
to public safety. But the real threat from Proposition 36 and other
similar efforts accross the nation, as these groups know and fear, is
to their jobs, power and influence. A massive transfer of resources
into treatment vs jail will necessarily result in a shrinking of the
institutions of the War on Drugs, upon which many in these groups
depend for their livelihood.
Certainly, we can expect the vested interests of the prison industrial
complex to continue to block efforts for reform of our punitive
approach to drug addiction, but we should, like Eisenhower warned
with the miltary industrial complex, vigorously guard against their
undue influence in our councils of government.
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Publisher's Note 
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