Crime Pays for the Capitalists

You ever heard that saying “crime doesn’t pay”? I’m gonna keep it real with you: that’s a bold face lie, or at the very least a misrepresentation of the truth. I guess it can be argued that crime doesn’t pay for the person who does the crime, gets caught, and has to serve a lengthy sentence.

I don’t necessarily accept that premise because for one, a person can go undetected for a long time, all the while blowing through millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains; ask Bernie Madoff. Is it reasonable to conclude that crime didn’t pay ol’ Bernie-Bern? And the U.$. government is running a Madoff-like ponzi scheme with some of its entitlement programs; Uncle Sam knows that crime pays.

Another dimension to this is the guy who does the crime, gets caught, gets the court punishment, but has friends in high places who sees that he gets a pardon. Such as the case with “Scooter” Libby or that California state politician’s son who Arnold Schwarzenegger granted partial clemency to. Arnold basically admitted that he did it as a favor for his politician friend. Ask “Scooter” if crime pays.

Then there’s the people who commit crimes, yet due to their status and position in U.S. society, never get prosecuted. Anybody remember the Iran-Contra affair? Plenty of evidence has surfaced that implicates the CIA with drug smuggling and trafficking during this era. There were reports from agents with un-compromised integrity filed within the CIA during this time and bringing this criminal activity to light within the Agency. Ironically George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and the upper level intelligence/justice officials, claiming ignorance of the crimes, avoided legal accountability for this criminal activity. Ask the Bush politicians if their crimes pay.

The government of Columbia sued the Phillip Morris tobacco company for smuggling Marlboro cigarettes in to that country, readily accepting large amounts of cash from traffickers, then smuggling the cash back into the U.S.(1)

Ironically this criminality didn’t receive much focus in the United States, nor did the Phillip Morris decision-makers have to defend their criminal conduct in the U.S. criminal court system. Also RJ Reynolds (Nabisco) has been sued by the entire European Union for large scale smuggling and money laundering.(1) Ask the elite Wall Street collective if crime pays.

We see politicians and government bureaucrats on TV all the time speaking of their commitment to eliminating crime and their sincere desire “to see a crime-free America.” I say that they’re the grossest liars and flatterers, devoid of integrity and a healthy sense of shame for intentional deception. At best they tell half truths on the issue. Consider this brief excerpt from Crossing the Rubicon:

“Allegations that the CIA and Department of Justice were complicit in the flow of cocaine into South Central LA; that the Clintons were partnered with George H.W. Bush and Oliver North through the offices of the National Security Council in a little Iran-Contra arms and cocaine trafficking operation in Mena, Arkansas; and that Hillary Clinton’s law firm was helping launder the local share of the profits through state housing agency securities and investments were never addressed, objectively by the corporate media.”

Notice that this flow of cocaine wasn’t into Beverly Hills or Orange County. Nevertheless people can speak any number of untrue things with conviction but the proof is always in the pudding, the pudding being the person’s actions. The Clintons surely know that their pudding in crime makes for part of a financially filling pie.

Think of crime and how it relates to your local, state, and national economies. And of course in a capitalistic nation, one of the main obligations of a politician is to facilitate the maintenance of a strong and growing economy. I mean there’s city, county, state, and federal police; jail and prison staff (guards, probation and parole agents, medical workers, education workers, maintenance workers, food service workers, etc.); court staff (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, professional witnesses, investigators, clerks, transcribers, bailiffs, legal analysts, etc.); and surely some peripheral elements that I haven’t mentioned, such as the various telephone companies who grossly overcharge prisoners for collect calls.

To eliminate crime and create this “crime-free America” would be to eliminate all of these (and more) jobs/money that crime creates. That would be catastrophic to the U.S. economy. In this crime-free environment a very slim minority of the displaced workers could be absorbed into other professions but the vast majority would remain jobless.

That many jobless citizens is unsustainable in this nation, which has a consumption based economy. Also the absence of their tax dollars would certainly diminish, very drastically, government consumption. Which in turn would cause job and service cuts in other areas, and that trend would continue on throughout the entire economy. Now, do you think these politicians really want to eliminate crime, synonymous with destroying the economy? Of course not! And I can assure you that even if everyone stopped committing acts that are currently established as criminal, then acts which are not currently crimes would suddenly be deemed as criminal. The politicians know, probably better than anyone else, that crime pays.

As for the bureaucrats, the lie is much closer to the surface with them. Many of them are employed directly in the criminal justice sector, so basically their livelihoods is directly dependent on the existence of crime. So for us to believe their professing that they want to see crime cease; we are to believe that they want to lose their hundred-thousand-dollar-plus (in many instances) annual salaries, their Cadillac benefit packages, and other job-related perks. This absurdity is almost laughable to any rational being. Even the ones who aren’t employed in the criminal justice sector are well aware of the negative effects that an absence of crime would place on the economy. Like politicians, the bureaucrats know the deal: crime pays.

Here’s another relevant excerpt from Crossing the Rubicon

“A certain percentage of the prisons in this country are run by private corporations which trade their stock based on how many human beings they ‘house.’ In pure economic terms, inmates have become inventory. The two largest of these corporations are Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America. Both of these corporations, through their boards of directors and executive management have direct ties to U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

“All of this means that the corrupt economy makes money by first selling drugs to people and then putting them in prison for using drugs.”

The parallels between private, for profit prisons and slave plantations are numerous. Big business are in on the secret, crime pays. So whether we like to admit it or not, this nation generally realizes a benefit from crime. It’s always about the dollar here in the United States and crime-related professions combined makes up a substantial portion of the Gross Domestic Economy, largely aiding the efforts to maintain a strong dollar. You can believe those who chant “crime doesn’t pay” if you want to. As for me, I know crime may not pay for those who are ground to dust in its machinations (prisoners, parolees, probationers, and drug addicts) but for many others, crime does in fact pay.

MIM(Prisons) responds: This author makes a good point about the economic value of the criminal injustice system to capitalists as a way to employ many labor aristocrats. As we expanded on in our review of the book The New Jim Crow, the system serves primarily as a tool of social control. While there would be economic consequences to dismantling or significantly reducing the reach of the criminal injustice system in Amerika, we can look around the world and see examples of capitalist countries with much smaller injustice systems which manage to keep their population employed and living happily off the super-exploitation of Third World peoples. While in the United $tates a change of this magnitude is unlikely given how entrenched the injustice system is in the economic and social fabric of society, it is the social control aspect that we see as the dominant driving force behind the growth and maintenance of this system.