Mass incarceration and consumer financial harm: Critique of rent-seeking by the carceral state

Abstract

Mass incarceration is an approach to managing public safety that emphasizes detention over other means. It is also neoliberalism's quintessential political and economic project because it mobilizes a prison industrial complex to generate revenue. We highlight rent-seeking, the pursuit of extra-budgetary revenues by carceral agencies, because it inflicts financial harm on incarcerated consumers and their supporters. Carceral agencies leverage government's authority to set the conditions of detention. However, when they also leverage government's market-making authority to seek rents from incarcerated persons we characterize that as a government failure. To understand it, we depart from a focus on corruption by specific actors to highlight features of institutions that enable unethical behavior. We join activists and elected officials who call for an end to mass incarceration, but we also highlight more immediate reforms that can help restrain rent-seeking and enable greater public scrutiny of the carceral state.