Caged by Design: Prisons and the Political Economy of Incarceral Policy in the United States

The United States incarcerates more people than any country on earth, and nearly half the federal prison population serves time for drug offenses under mandatory minimum sentences. Conventional accounts attribute this to the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s, but electoral pressure cannot explain why reform remained blocked long after those conditions shifted. This paper argues that the persistence of mandatory minimum drug sentencing is best explained by the lobbying infrastructure of the for-profit carceral industry. Through campaign spending, model legislation, revolving-door hiring, and contractual occupancy guarantees, companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic have preserved the sentencing architecture that sustains their revenue while absorbing cosmetic reforms that relieve political pressure without threatening incarceration rates. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the clearest test: when thousands were released ahead of mandatory minimums under emergency authority, fewer than one percent reoffended. The gap between what the public health literature recommends and what sentencing policy prescribes is the deliberate product of a political economy built to sustain it.