Understanding Intersectionality Through Classism (2017 PDF)

# Chapter 10: Understanding Intersectionality Through Classism "Nowadays, it's White men who are the victims." This chapter examines class oppression. We explain current economic relations of power, address concepts such as capitalism and socialism, wealth and income, as well as provide common cla...

# Chapter 10: Understanding Intersectionality Through Classism "Nowadays, it's White men who are the victims." This chapter examines class oppression. We explain current economic relations of power, address concepts such as capitalism and socialism, wealth and income, as well as provide common class vernacular. The chapter also addresses the concept of intersectionality as an important theoretical development for understanding the multidimensional nature of oppression. We identify elements of class privilege, name common misconceptions about class mobility, and speak back to dominant classist narratives. ## Vocabulary to Practice Using: - classism - class vernacular - capitalism - social capital - net worth - intersectionality - meritocracy ## Mr. Rich White and Mr. Poor White Strike a Bargain Once upon a time there was Mr. Rich White, whose forefathers had become rich by exploiting the land and labor of others. Mr. Rich White realized that in order to stay rich, he had to maintain control over his workers. But how? He looked around and his eyes fell upon the Black man. He snapped his fingers, "I've got it!" he whispered. He called Mr. Poor White to his office and said, "I've been thinking a lot about you and me and how hard it is for us to keep our factory competitive and growing so we can make enough money. To keep the business going the way I want it to go, making big profit off of little capital so I can keep you on the job, I have to keep my wages low, you can see that. It's good for me and essential for you too, for any job is better than no job at all. And whatever is causing the troubles with our economy isn't my fault or your fault, but the fault This parable is adapted from Lillian Smith's "Mr Rich White and Mr Poor White strike a bargain" in her book Killers of the Dream (1949). ## Understanding Intersectionality Through Classism Of those coming here and taking your jobs and acting all uppity like they've been here all along. The thing we can't forget is that whatever our differences the color of our skin makes us kin. We are made in God's image and He intends us to lead. We are the chosen and we can’t let others, like the Black man, push us out of our place. And when I say 'Black man' I'm not discriminating because I also mean the Latino man, whose job is to pick our crops, and the Asian man, who builds our railroads, and the Indigenous man, whose land we will take and use properly (he just wastes the land, lettin' it sit there). As for the woman, everybody already knows that the Bible ordained her place as secondary to ours, that's just nature. Men must always rule over and take care of the women. "The way I see it, there are 2 jobs that need doing. Somebody has got to tend to making the money, to jobs, credit, prices, hours, the politicians, and so on (and you are too low class to do that or else you'd be rich like I am), and somebody has got to tend to the Black man-keep him in his place. So how about I boss the money and you boss the Black man. Don't worry about what I do, but here's what you do: Anything to show you are the boss you can do (as long as you don't touch my business). You can decide where he will live, what schools he will go to and what books his children will read. If science scares you, remember that you don't have to accept it-this is God's country and a free one at that. If you get restless when you don't have a job or your children are sick, just remember your lot is a damn sight better than the Black man's. If you need to let off some steam and rough some up now and then, go right ahead. I will make sure the law overlooks it (but don't expect to see me in the crowd). "Now, if some other Mr. Poor Whites are fool enough to forget that they are White men, I'm willing to put up plenty of money to keep the politicians talking, and I don't mind supporting a demagogue or two. Of course I'll ensure the media keeps everyone distracted. Long as you keep the Black man out of your unions, we'll give you the pick of whatever jobs there are and if things get too tight you can take over his jobs too, 'cause remember any job is better than no job at all. If you keep your end of the bargain, I will make sure that you're always better off, even if only slightly, than the Black man." And Mr. Rich White and Mr. Poor White thought they'd made a good bargain. Of course Mr. Poor White didn't really have much choice, but no matter how hard things got for him, at least he would always be better off than the Black man. It was hard at first for Mr. Poor White’s labor to keep being exploited by Mr. Rich White, but gettin’ to be the boss of someone else started to feel good and helped him hold up his end. Because the Black man reminded Mr. Poor White about what he'd done, he hated and feared him. And that hatred and fear helped Mr. Poor White continue with the bargain. It never occurred to Mr. Poor White that the Black man could help him raise his wages and make the business work fairly for both of them. As time passed, Mr. and Ms. Middle Class White also had a role in the bargain. They became the lawyers, social workers, teachers, professors, doctors, judges, managers, advertisers, journalists, and celebrities-the mediators of the agreement. They settled disputes, administered policies, taught the children, and tended to the social services Mr. Poor White and the Black man would need, all while keeping everyone entertained. But sometimes Mr. and Ms. Middle Class White felt bad about their role in the bargain. "This can't go on," they'd say. They were worried about freedom and democracy, which many of them still believed in. They called their worry "multiculturalism" or "diversity" or "the achievement gap" or "social justice." They wore t-shirts and safety pins to show their worries. But in truth they were more worried about getting the best for their children, securing their property values, and maintaining their position between Mr. Rich White and Mr. Poor White. They feared what integration would mean for that position. And it was certainly better to be Mr. and Ms. Middle Class White than Mr. Poor White or the Black man. In the end, despite their worries, they always decided that segregation was best. After all, wasn't it just human nature to prefer to live near your own? Segregation enabled them not to see the methods used to keep the Black man away from their neighborhoods and their jobs; and not to feel as badly about the bargain. But they knew not to say aloud what they didn’t want to see or feel. Mr. Rich White knew what was in their hearts, and smiled. ## What Is Class? As with all forms of social division, social class is a human construct. The division of labor that characterizes class did not emerge until the Neolithic era, approximately 8,000-10,000 years ago (Little, 2016; Rueschemeyer, 1986). This period of human history was marked by agricultural advancement and land settlements by human population, prior to which many human communities were nomadic hunter-gatherers. This era is sometimes described as the agricultural revolution, and resulted not only in settlements of land, but in the organized, systematic production of crops that could be harvested, shared, traded, and sold to others. Where once resources might have been scarce or difficult to gather, they were now more plentiful, and the outcome of increasingly managed processes. According to the foundational social class theorist Karl Marx, this era of collective agricultural output created the initial divisions of labor that form the basis of class division: those who own the land (whom he called the bourgeoisie) and those who owned their labor (whom he called the proletariat). Class division today might arguably be drawn back to these same binary groups: those who own the resources of a society and create the rules of exchange and ownership, and those who trade their bodies (their minds and hands) to work, and whose opportunity for work depends on the increase of capital, which the bourgeois control. An example of owner control is the fight for minimum wage. When workers organize to raise the minimum wage, they are told by the owners that the prices of goods must then be increased, hours cut, or people laid off. What is rarely questioned is why the owners cannot tolerate making slightly less profit. For example, in 2012 the average CEO in the United States was paid 354 times what the average worker in their corporation earned (354:1), and 774 times what full-time minimum wage workers made (AFL-CIO, 2013). Chief executives took home, on average $11.7 million annually in 2012, while the average employee earned $35,293. In Canada the gap is 206 times wider (206:1). These are the highest gaps between workers and owners in human history. Illustrating how astronomically this gap has widened, in 1968 the gap between workers and CEOs was 20:1. When workers ask for a living wage and owners threaten to take their jobs away or lament how raising wages will "hurt the economy," the effect is to shift our focus away from the owners and back onto the workers, who are essentially being blamed for income inequality, as Figure 10.1 satirizes. When owners threaten to take away workers' livelihoods, workers back off, for as Mr. Rich White warns, any job is better than no job at all. Sometimes owners pacify workers by insisting on "trickle-down economics," which is the claim that cutting taxes and increasing benefits for the richest will improve the standard of living for everyone else. The basic idea is that the more money those at the very top make, the more money will trickle down to the bottom. The claim is that in order to ensure that owners make more money, they need to be less regulated and less taxed than workers are, and this will result in more jobs being created, higher wages for the average worker, and an overall upturn in the economy. However, data from the past 50 years strongly refutes the argument that cutting taxes for the richest will improve the economic standing of the lower and middle classes (OXFAM, 2017; United for a Fair Economy, 2003). Data compiled by the American Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO, 2012) from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows the ratio between average workers' and their CEO's annual pay (in U.S. dollars) (see Figure 10.2). Until the mid-1990s, income polarization in Canada and the United States remained relatively stable (Hulchanski & Murdie, 2013). However since then, the gap between the richest and poorest has widened immensely. In other words, the rich got richer, the poor got poorer. Here are some examples: - Since 2015, the richest 1% has owned more wealth than the rest of the planet (OXFAM, 2017). - Eight men own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world (OXFAM, 2017). - Over the next 20 years, 500 people will hand over $2.1 trillion to their heirs-a sum larger than the GDP of India, a county of 1.3 billion people (OXFAM, 2017). - The incomes of the poorest 10% of people increased by less than $3 a year between 1988 and 2011, while the incomes of the richest 1% increased 182 times as much (OXFAM, 2017). - In Bloomberg’s daily ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, the world’s wealthiest 3 people (Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jeff Bezos), all White American men, have total net worths of 85, 79, and 73 billion U.S. dollars, respectively (Bloomberg, 2017). By comparison the 2015 GDP of Sri Lanka was $82 billion, Luxembourg was $58 billion, and Iceland $16 billion (World Bank, 2017). - The world’s 10 richest people are all men. Nine of ten are White men (Bloomberg, 2017). - Had growth been good for the poor between 1990 and 2010, 700 million more people, most of them women, would not be living in poverty today (OXFAM, 2017). - In 2015/16, the world’s 10 biggest corporations together had revenue greater than that of the government revenues of 180 countries combined (OXFAM, 2017). - Estimates are that 21 million people (mostly women and girls of Color) are forced laborers, generating an estimated $150 billion in annual profits for corporations (OXFAM, 2017). ## Class Socialization Class is about money and power, but it is also about culture. Different class groups have different cultural norms and patterns associated with them. So how do we each learn our class positions as well as the class positions of others? Or, because class is also a form of our cultural identity, we might ask how we learn to perform our class and to read and understand the class performance of others? There are two key sites where a majority of this learning occurs: school and media. ### School and Class Messages Scholars have explained how mass public schooling is about more than subject-matter education; it is also about ideological socialization (Apple, 1993). In Chapter 2, we reviewed Jean Anyon's study comparing schoolchildren from working-, middle-, and affluent-class schools, and learned how children are schooled to conceptualize knowledge and their relationship to it, based in part on the school curriculum they receive. As the histories of both Canada and the United States show, the requirement for mass schooling has always been about more than education. Through both required attendance (e.g., via a system of residential schooling) as well as denied attendance (e.g., females, and racialized children), mass schooling has been in large part a project of mass socialization. In fact, compulsory mass schooling is a relatively new social idea in Western nation states (Ballantine & Spade, 2008). The architects of the compulsory mass schooling that started in the mid-19th century wanted to educate children into a common curricula (a common language, national history, and set of values) in order to become productive citizens of the nation state (Tyack, 1976). Thus we may rightly ask, whose language, history, and values were the framework into which all children were required to fit? Those who created, implemented, and monitored compulsory attendance in mass public schooling, or those who were forced to attend them? ### Media and Class Messages Media is another primary institution socializing us about what it means to be owning class, middle class, and working class (Leistyna, 2009). Two key elements of this institution in relation to class messaging are the consolidation of media ownership (control by fewer and fewer entities and therefore more homogeneous messaging) and the class representations that circulate through media. In other words, who is in the position to control the messages, what are those messages, and how do they serve the interests of those who control them? Media consolidation is an issue around the globe. As multinational corporations have bought up other companies, there are fewer and fewer corporations owning more and more of the news and entertainment that we consume. As of 2012, 90% of media outlets (print, radio, TV, Internet) were owned by six corporations (Van Esler, 2016). These are: * Comcast (NBC, MSNBC, Universal Pictures, Dreamworks, Hulu) * Walt Disney (Disney theme parks, Disney Channels, ESPN, Marvel, Touchstone) * NewsCorp (Fox News, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Harper-Collins) * Viacom (BET, MTV, CMT, Spike, Paramount Pictures, Ratemyprofessors.com) * Time Warner (CNN, HBO, DC Comics) * CBS (MTV, Simon & Schuster, VH1) Once we understand that media consolidation necessarily limits the range of perspectives available to us, we need to examine how media represents class. To do so, try a brief thought experiment: As you read your favorite magazines and gossip blogs, read reviews of films you plan to see, watch videos of your favorite pop songs, concerts, and endorsements from superstars, consider how those forms of representation are classed. For example, consider work. What work is presented? Who is doing what kinds of work (paid work as well as unpaid work) and how do they seem to feel about it? How are speech and accents classed? Which accents and speech patterns are considered "low class"? Which are “sophisticated” or “romantic" or "threatening"? Who wears business suits and who wears other uniforms? How do people move? How are various movements classed? How do race and gender inform how we understand class embodiment? How is food classed? Who eats organic? What does farm-to-table mean? What about alcohol? Which beers are “high class” and which are associated with "low class"? What kind of leisure activities do the various classes engage in? Who goes to the symphony? Who sky dives? Who goes to monster truck shows and watches the WWE? All of these cues are telling us what it means to be working, middle, or owning class. Now consider what class the people who generate these images-the writers and directors-most likely occupy. In other words, who is in the position to represent class? While media messages may not deliberately set out to teach about class, how the various class groups are represented (or absent altogether) is a critical part of our class socialization. ## Common Misconceptions About Class * "**We live in a classless society where anyone can make it.**" From very early on in school we are taught that anyone can make it if they try, and that the West is the land of opportunity. We are told Rags to Riches stories (from Cinderella to Sam Walton) and that we live in a classless society. The myth of the American Dream is so powerful that research shows the vast majority of Americans (over 70%) overestimate class mobility and believe that personal motivation is more important to mobility than the state of the economy or the economic circumstances they are born into (Kraus & Tan, 2015; Wyatt-Nichol, 2016). In addition to strictly economic reasons for class immobility such as net worth, class immobility is also influenced by class culture. The cultural norms we are socialized into relate to the class we are born into, and this ensures that we will be most comfortable in and surround ourselves with people who share our class culture. The schools we go to, the neighborhoods we live in, the jobs we aspire to, all reinforce our class positions and who surrounds us. While some people will change class, they will be the exception rather than the rule. The Rags to Riches story so beloved and repeated in Hollywood is unlikely in real life. Only 6% of children born to parents with income at the very bottom rise to the very top (Isaacs, 2007). Consider the 10 richest people in the United States in 2016 (Forbes, 2016), most if not all of whom were already born into the upper classes (also notice that they are all White men). Now imagine their children. What schools will they go to? Whose children will they be surrounded by? What opportunities will they have? Are they likely to mingle with your children? It is highly unlikely that we will interact across these vast class differences. * "**A rich person can become poor as easily as a poor person can become rich.**" Because we tend to think of class strictly in terms of how much money we have, we assume that a rich person who loses everything will end up in the same boat as a poor person. But in reality, a rich person does not lose everything when they lose their money. They will still have an internalized sense of entitlement, contacts with other wealthy people they can call upon and network with, knowledge of systems and how to navigate them, and the language and norms of the upper class that will open doors for them. In other words, they do not lose their cultural capital. Further, they have much more time before they use up all of their material capital-real estate, antiques, artwork, cars, boats, jewelry-known as net worth. * "**Education is the key to getting ahead.**" While certainly there are more opportunities open to people with more education, education itself is also stratified. As discussed in Chapter 2, the kind of education we receive is based on the kind of school we go to (public or private), where it is located, and how it is funded. Within the school are different tracks that offer different kinds of knowledge intended to prepare us for different kinds of careers. If we graduate from K-12 public schools and go on to college, we again enter a system that is stratified. Consider the difference between a 2-year college with a focus on the trades and a student population from the local community, and an Ivy League university with wealthy students from all over the world, many of them legacy (i.e., students whose parents also attended and therefore were automatically accepted). Whether you have to work while in college and still graduate with a massive amount of debt or have everything paid for by your family will also impact the outcome of your education. Which doors your education opens is greatly impacted by the status of the school you go to. So while education clearly makes a difference in terms of life opportunities, schooling is a stratified political structure that very predictably and efficiently reproduces rather than eliminates class hierarchies. * "**Sports and sports scholarships offer minorities a way out.**" The idea that sports are a way out of poverty for poor youth of Color is deeply cherished and continually reinforced in films and televison. Yet this is an extremely rare possibility. Consider the following: How many openings on professional teams are actually available? Take basketball as an example. There are 5 positions on a team, with 7 extra players, for a total of 12 players. There are 11 players on a football team. Baseball is played with 9 players. The degree of exceptionality required to make it onto the field for these teams is very high. The possibility of women making it through sports is even more limited, given that their teams do not have the visibility or bring in the kind of wealth that men’s teams do. It is also relevant that for the few who do succeed through sports, their run is limited. The average age of retirement for a football player is 35, and they often suffer from lifelong debilitating injuries. The people who really get rich from sports are the owners. In 2016, 28 of 30 U.S. men's professional basketball team owners were White; 31 of 32 men's pro football team owners were White, 32 of 33 men's pro baseball team owners were White. Of the 95 people who owned these teams, 4 were White women (New York Times, 2016). Of the 30 National Hockey League owners, only one is not White. While a poor boy from the projects or his small town making it big in sports is a romantic idea reinforced through countless movies, that dream comes true for an extremely rare number of men of Color. It is important to notice how the physical bodies of men of Color are seen as potentially valuable and thus worthy of scholarship supports (in this case in the service of our entertainment) but not their minds. This is a key signifier of class position. The lower your class status, the more your body is seen as exploitable. Think about who decides to go to war and who actually does the fighting, who owns the coal mines and who does the mining, who writes the laws and who is on the street enforcing them. Most of the latter are not the upper class. Manual labor literally means working with your hands. We also have to ask ourselves what it means to see sports as a way out of poverty for young men of Color but not other fields such as law, medicine, or teaching. * "**Class is the true oppression. If we eliminate classism we will eliminate racism.**" The point of the opening parable is that class and race are deeply intertwined. Even if Mr. Rich White stopped exploiting Mr. Poor White we would still be left with racism. Peoples of Color who occupy the same class position as White people are still experiencing racism. DiAngelo (2006) speaks to this in her personal narrative of growing up poor and White: "From an early age I had the sense of being an outsider; I was acutely aware that I was poor, that I was dirty, that I was not normal and that there was something "wrong" with me. But I also knew that I was not black. We were at the lower rungs of society but there was always someone on the periphery, just below us. I knew that “colored” people existed and that they should be avoided. I can remember many occasions when I reached for candy or uneaten food laying on the street and was admonished by my grandmother not to touch it because a “colored person” may have touched it. The message was clear to me; if a colored person touched something it became dirty. The irony here is that the marks of poverty were clearly visible on me: poor hygiene, torn clothes, homelessness, hunger. Yet through comments such as my grandmother's, a racial Other was formed in my consciousness; an Other through whom I became clean. Race was the one identity which aligned me with the middle class girls in my school. As I reflect back on the early messages I received about being poor and being white, I now realize that my grandmother and I needed people of color to cleanse and realign us with the dominant white culture that our poverty had separated us from (pp. 51-53)." Poor Whites are most often in closest proximity to people of Color because they tend to share poverty (hooks, 2000). Consider the term white trash. It is not without significance that this is one of the few expressions in which race is named for Whites. This may be because poor urban Whites are more likely to live in proximity to peoples of Color. Thus race is named for poor Whites because of their closeness to peoples of Color. In a racist society, this closeness both highlights—and pollutes-whiteness. Owning-class people also have peoples of Color near them because the latter are often their domestics and gardeners-in other words, their servants. But they do not interact with them socially in the same way that poor Whites do. Middle-class Whites are generally the furthest away from peoples of Color. They are the most likely to say that, "there were no people of Color in my neighborhood or school. I didn't meet a Black person until I went to college" (often adding, "so I was lucky because I didn’t learn anything about racism"). Focusing attention solely on class oppression-rather than ameliorating racism-simply serves to deny the realities of racism in the lives of peoples of Color, and the privileges of whiteness for White people. * "**Anyone who wants a job can get one.**" While it is likely true that anyone-no matter their level of ability-can get some kind of work, it is not likely that anyone can find work that pays a living wage. In fact, the majority of workers in the United States (59%) work for hourly wages (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Of these, 2.6 million workers earn at or below the minimum wage. As an example of classist ideology, the media most often represents the middle class as the majority and politicians speak to the concerns of the middle class. Yet the majority of the United States is better defined as working class or poor. The U.S. federal minimum wage in 2017 is $7.25 per hour, or $15,080 per year. The federal poverty level for a two-person household is $15,930. Further, federal minimum wage standards are not guaranteed because states can set their own minimum wages. For example, Georgia’s minimum wage is $5.15 per hour, while Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi have no minimum wage at all and employers can pay workers whatever they choose. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been raised since 2010 (U.S. Department of Labor, 2017). Between the years 1999 and 2009, it remained at $5.15 per hour. The minimum wage does not include health insurance or retirement benefits, nor does it guarantee full-time work. Further, under section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), employers are able to pay a wage below the federal minimum wage to workers whose work is affected by a mental or physical disability (the ADA dies not change this provision). This means that some workers with disabilities can make significantly less than the minimum wage, in some cases even less than a dollar per hour. Congress sets the federal minimum wage, and efforts to raise it are regularly defeated by congressional representatives. It’s worthy of note that the House of Representatives is 81% male and 80% White and the Senate is 80% male and 94% White (while White men are 34% of the U.S. population). Members of Congress earn $174,000 annually in base salaries. Their salaries include access to a comprehensive health insurance and retirement package. Fifty-one percent of congressional representatives are millionaires (Manning, 2010). Comparatively, in Canada the minimum wage is set provincially and as of 2014 ranges from 10-11 Canadian dollars (approximately $7.50 USD). Some provinces (such as Saskatchewan and Manitoba) allow persons with disabilities to be paid lower than the minimum wage (Canadian Labour Congress, 2015). In 2013, 6.7% of Canadian workers worked for minimum wage (Statistics Canada, 2014), a higher percentage of workers than in the United States, where 3.3% of hourly wage workers worked for minimum wage (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016). Women as a group make up 60% of minimum wage workers in Canada-mostly in retail, food, and accommodation industries (Canadian Labour Congress, 2015). Further, while the minimum wage number seems high, its buying power determines whether it is a living wage. The low income measure, LICO, is a common way that poverty is measured in Canada. It determines how much income a household must earn to meet its basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter, based on the size of the household and the size of the community it lives in. The LICO in 2012 for a two-person family living in a metropolitan area of about 500,000 people was $29,440 before taxes. Taking $10/hour as the average minimum wage for 2012, a worker working a 40-hour week without any sick or vacation days would have earned $20,000 for a 50-week working year-putting them below the income threshold if only one member of the family is working (Canadian Labour Congress, 2015). * "**People just need to work hard and not expect handouts.**" Most people understand that minimum wage work is among the hardest. It tends to be physical, of lower status, and exceptionally grueling (e.g., fast food, retail, factory, and agricultural work). Further, a person working at minimum wage to support a family will likely need to work more than one job. To say that these people do not work hard is grossly unfair. Yet their hard work will not typically pay off in the sense of "making it." These workers are more likely to come from families with very little net worth to begin with, and without resources such as college degrees, they are less likely to advance. When middle-class people proclaim that they have achieved with they have because they were taught the value of hard work, we need to ask ourselves whom we believe wasn't taught that value. Further, how are we defining hard work? Is studying for exams in college (which you will graduate from debt free because your family is paying for you) harder work than working in your college’s cafeteria? Another form of hard work that is often not acknowledged is prison labor. The linkages between the exploitation of prison labor and the profits made by private corporations from the prison system-and the ability of corporations to influence how prisons are built, filled, and maintained in ways that benefit them is called The Prison Industrial Complex (Davis, 2008). According to a study on corporate profiteering and the U.S. prison system (Cooper, Heldman, Ackerman, & Farrar-Meyers, 2016), ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council, a powerful, conservative lobby group) has over the past 40 years created a highly organized and sophisticated system of lobbying state and federal policy makers on behalf of the interests of its member corporations. Its influence is organized around (1) the drafting of bills such as the "stand your ground" and voter ID laws, (2) the training of legislators, and (3) media campaign supports. In their review of leaked documents that included 800+ ALEC model bills, the study's authors found that ALEC lobbied to expand the private prison industry in the following ways: by expanding the use of private prisons and their goods and services (such as food services, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals), by promoting the use of prison labor (which had been illegal until the ALEC-supported Prison Industries Act of 1995), and by increasing the size of the prison population by expanding definitions of crime and increasing likelihood of incarceration and recidivism. At a time when state-level incarceration rates are somewhat decreasing, ALEC has begun to turn its attention to immigration and detention centers as a new stream of income for its corporate members (Cooper et al., 2016). It is important to note that as we write this second edition, the incoming White House administration campaigned on a law and order and anti-immigration platform that is likely to reverse decreasing incarceration rates and create the need for more prisons and detention centers. Since policy changes in the 1970s, the U.S. prison population has exploded into the largest in the world (see Figure 10.4; Wagner & Walsh, 2016; World Prison Brief, 2017). The U.S. represents just 5% of the world’s population, yet holds 25% of the world’s incarcerated population (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017). The United States incarcerates 693 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country in the world. When the incarceration rates of individual U.S. states are considered separately, 32 states (and Washington, DC) have incarceration rates higher than that of Turkmenistan, which at 583 per 100,000 residents is the nation with the second-highest incarceration rate in the world (Wagner & Walsh, 2016). Prison labor has been used in the United States since the late 18th century, with the most popular usage being agricultural labor. The labor of Black prisoners has replaced the labor of Black slaves, and in many cases to target unionized White workers and break strikes. This has resulted in violent clashes between organized labor and prison labor, and many Black prisoners (who have no protections, including no union protections) have died. Until the 20th century, the strength of trade unions was closely related to restrictions on the private use of prison labor (Kang, 2009; Thompson, 2012). Between 1970 and 2005, the U.S. prison population grew by 700%, mostly due to policy changes, such as Three-Strikes, Mandatory Minimum, and Truth in Sentencing laws (American Civil Liberties Union, 2011). Twenty to twenty-five percent of incarcerated people are locked up for non-violent drug offenses, despite no change in drug use rates, with Blacks incarcerated for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites, despite the same rates of drug use (American Civil Liberties Union, 2017); further, many hundreds of youth are behind bars for technical violations that are not adult crimes (such as truancy) (Wagner & Rabuy, 2017). In addition to having the largest incarcerated population in the world (1.6 million people in federal and state prisons, with another 3.8 million on probation), there are close to 700,000 people held in pretrial jails-these are people who have not yet been convicted of any crime and thus are legally presumed innocent (Rabuy & Kopf, 2016). This translates to 70% of local jail population consisting of people who are unable to come up with the bail money needed (typically $10,000) to release them until their case is resolved. The Bureau of Justice Statistics data shows that in 2015 people in jail had median annual incomes of $15,109 prior to incarceration (with White men having the highest incomes and Black women having the lowest). Thus the detention of the legally innocent translates into greater housing of the poor in public jails, creating increased profits for corporations servicing jails, while simultaneously criminalizing the poor (Rabuy & Kopf, 2016). In addition to government contracts and the use