From Black Bodies to Brown Borders: The Profit Pivot of Mass Incarceration
Years ago, I found myself submerged in books and research about mass incarceration. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow ignited my curiosity, but what kept me reading, what shook me, was the pattern that kept revealing itself. Incarceration in America is not just a tool of control. It is big business. A billion dollar business. Like any business, when one market becomes saturated, the industry shifts.
What I didn’t realize then, but now see clearly, is that several authors had already warned us that the next wave would not stop with Black men. They predicted it. Now we are living it.
From Chain Gangs to Detention Centers
Christian Parenti wrote Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis in 1999, but his words could easily be mistaken for today’s headlines. Parenti warned that a de facto apartheid was forming in the Southwest (Parenti, 1999). “There is a de facto apartheid emerging in the Southwest; working-class Latinos live under a fundamentally different set of laws than Anglos” (Parenti, 1999, p. 160). Said differently, working-class Latinos lived under a fundamentally different set of laws than white Americans. He tied that warning to private prison lobbyists who were already building relationships with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (Parenti, 1999).
Now, more than two decades later, immigrant detention centers are springing up across the country like fast food chains. One particularly abhorrent and grotesque example is a facility in Florida known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” The purposeful cruelty is palpable! This facility is not designed for justice, but for spectacle. Its conditions are being designed to be intentionally cruel.
The purpose of this facility is not to discourage migration. It is to dehumanize.
For those who know this obscure and lesser known American history, the decision to place a detention center beside an alligator habitat is even more than disturbing. It is revolting. It calls back one of the most grotesque and racist chapters in this country’s past. Historical records from the Jim Crow era and earlier document how enslaved Black children, often referred to by white supremacists as “alligator bait,” were brutally exploited—used to lure alligators for sport and profit. This was not folklore or exaggeration. It was real. It was barbaric. It was dehumanization in one of its most literal forms.
This is why there are those so determined to whitewash the past, to blur the lines of memory and fact. The truth, when spoken plainly, scorches too deeply—even for those most committed to its denial.
Whether through ignorance or indifference, choosing such a location and name for a detention site reveals a staggering lack of historical awareness or compassion. The image of caged human beings, many of them Brown and immigrant, housed near alligators is not simply offensive. It is a chilling echo of a past that should shame us, not be replicated in any form.
This is not just cruelty. It is historical repetition wrapped in modern policy. It reminds us that when we fail to confront and understand our past, we risk repeating its most shameful truths.
Punishment as Profit, the Business Model
Donna Selman and Paul Leighton’s Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons, Big Business, and the Incarceration Binge offers another chilling follow-up. They explained how the prison industry, once it saw incarceration rates for Black Americans begin to level off, turned to immigration enforcement as its new market. Selman and Leighton (2010) pointed out that private prison corporations such as CoreCivic and GEO Group explicitly identified immigrant detention as a strategic area for future growth within their business models.
Think about that. The trauma of immigrant families was repackaged as a revenue stream. But it’s always been about the money, cruelty is just a tasty side dish to some of these cretins.
What is even more disturbing is how easily this transition happened. The infrastructure, the lobbying techniques, and the policy strategies were already in place. All that changed were the people filling the beds. First it was Black communities. Now it is Brown ones. Tomorrow, it could be anyone.
A System That Changes Faces but Never Purpose
This is not a shift in strategy. It is a continuation of the same pattern. Slavery became Black Codes. Black Codes became Jim Crow. Jim Crow became redlining and mass incarceration. Now, mass incarceration is being rebranded as mass detention. The tools evolve, but the system remains. And they are developing new laws to ensnare people into the justice system.
We should stop calling this a justice system. It is an economy. When justice becomes a product for sale, humanity is reduced to inventory.
The money trail is well documented. States and federal agencies pay private prison companies for each person detained. Some contracts even include incentives for keeping beds full. These companies do not care if the person detained is a citizen, an asylum seeker, or a child brought here by their parents. They only care about occupancy.
Watch This If You’re New to The Topic
If you’re unfamiliar with how America evolved from slavery to today’s incarceration economy, I strongly recommend the PBS documentary Slavery By Another Name. I read the book and watched the documentary, def worth the time spent. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon, the film exposes how slavery didn’t end in 1865 but was repackaged through convict leasing, chain gangs, and laws that criminalized Black life.
This documentary lays bare the foundation of the system we’re discussing here. And that’s precisely why some of today’s authoritarian leaders want to erase this kind of education. Attacks on school curricula, book bans, and defunding public broadcasting are not just about “values” or “parental rights.” They are strategic efforts to suppress the truth. Because if people really understood how deep the roots of racial control go, they would see today’s prison and detention systems for what they truly are—continuations, not accidents.
We need more education like Slavery By Another Name, not less. It is the kind of programming that informs and empowers, which is exactly what makes it dangerous to those who profit from ignorance.
Why This Moment Matters
The spread of detention centers was not an accident. It was a strategy. Parenti warned us in 1999. Selman and Leighton confirmed it in 2010. Today in 2025, we are watching those predictions unfold.
We need to stop pretending that this is about enforcing immigration law. It is not. It is about capitalizing on fear. It is about continuing a legacy of racialized control while disguising it in new language.
The cruelty we are seeing is not a side effect. It is the goal. The profits make that clear.
Conclusion
If you want to understand what drives incarceration in America, follow the money. It leads not to justice, but to contracts, cages, and corporate interests. This is not reform. It is reinvention. The targets may change, but the goal remains the same.
So, I leave you with two questions:
- Who benefits when a system reinvents itself instead of ending?
- What does real justice look like in a country where human suffering is a business model?
References
Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor Books.
Parenti, C. (1999). Lockdown America: Police and prisons in the age of crisis. Verso.
Selman, D., & Leighton, P. (2010). Punishment for sale: Private prisons, big business, and the incarceration binge. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
PBS. (2012). Slavery by another name [Documentary]. Public Broadcasting Service. https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/
