How to fight unemployment Put 182 million US citizens in prison

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument¶

The article argues that the official US unemployment rate of 4.3% (in 2005) is a systematically misleading statistic that conceals the true crisis of working-class livelihoods. Two mechanisms produce this distortion. First, the quality of employment has degraded so severely that holding a job no longer guarantees a decent standard of living — the proliferation of precarious, benefit-free "McJobs" means that official employment figures mask widespread underemployment and multi-job survival strategies. Second, and more structurally significant, the US state has incarcerated 1.82 million people, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, thereby removing them from the official labour pool entirely. The prison system functions as a hidden labour-market regulator, artificially suppressing unemployment statistics while simultaneously providing a captive, super-exploitable workforce for private capital. The central claim is that mass incarceration is not merely a criminal justice issue but a structural feature of US capitalism's management of surplus labour.

Theoretical Grounding¶

The analysis is grounded in the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule — specifically, the formulation that the state can be reduced to "armed bodies of men" (Engels). This positions the prison system, alongside the military and police, as a coercive apparatus that manages the contradictions of capitalist accumulation. The article implicitly draws on the concept of the reserve army of labour: by removing over a million people from the labour market, incarceration reduces the officially counted surplus population, thereby dampening the unemployment rate that would otherwise register the system's inability to absorb all available workers. This connects to broader Marxist debates about how the state intervenes to manage the tendency of the rate of profit to fall — not through economic policy alone, but through direct coercion that reshapes labour markets. The critique of prison labour as super-exploitation (wages of $2/hour versus $20/hour for unionised workers) extends Marx's analysis of how capital seeks to drive wages below the value of labour-power. The article's rejection of reformist solutions and insistence that only socialism can eliminate the conditions breeding crime situates it firmly within the revolutionary Marxist tradition.

Conjunctural Relevance¶

Although written in 2005, the article's argument has only intensified. The US incarceration rate peaked at around 2.3 million in the late 2000s and remains the highest in the world. The racial composition the article identifies — 49 percent Black prisoners, one-third of young Black men under correctional control — has persisted, with the War on Drugs continuing to function as a mechanism of racialised labour-force management. The privatisation of prisons and the expansion of prison labour have accelerated: private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group now lobby extensively for harsher sentencing laws. The degradation of job quality the article describes has become the norm across the OECD, with the gig economy, zero-hour contracts, and platform work representing the generalisation of the "McJob" model. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of incarcerated populations and briefly reduced prison populations, but the underlying dynamic of carceral labour-market management remains intact. The article's observation that temporary employment agency Manpower was the fastest-growing employer prefigured the dominance of precarious labour that now characterises large swathes of the US and UK economies.

Where the Argument Continues¶

The article leaves several threads for further development. It does not provide a detailed class analysis of who is incarcerated — the precise relationship between unemployment rates, poverty, and incarceration rates at the local level could be explored through more recent data. The connection between mass incarceration and the broader political economy of racialised accumulation — what later Marxist theorists would call the "prison-industrial complex" — is gestured at but not fully theorised. The article's claim that drugs are "introduced by the police themselves" is stated without evidence and would benefit from a more systematic treatment of the state's role in the drug economy. Readers should consult later IDOM articles on the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, which develop the analysis of how the state manages surplus populations through expanded policing and incarceration during periods of overaccumulation. Against the Stream episodes on the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 uprisings provide conjunctural updates. The broader Marxist tradition on the state — Lenin's State and Revolution, Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — provides the theoretical foundation for the argument.

Connections¶

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? — A Marxist-feminist analysis of the prison-industrial complex that develops the argument about prisons as a response to social problems capitalism cannot solve.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag — A rigorous Marxist geography of California's prison expansion, demonstrating how overaccumulation in the state's agricultural and manufacturing sectors drove prison construction as a spatial fix.
Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 25 — The theory of the reserve army of labour and the general law of capitalist accumulation, which provides the theoretical framework for understanding incarceration as a mechanism of labour-force management.
Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State — The source of the "armed bodies of men" formulation the article cites.
IDOM articles on the 2008 crisis and austerity — These develop the analysis of how states manage surplus populations through welfare cuts, policing, and incarceration during periods of fiscal crisis.
Against the Stream episodes on prison abolition and the 2020 uprisings — Conjunctural updates on the struggle against the carceral state.

Key Quotes¶

"In Marxist terms, the state is a tool of class repression, and in the final analysis can be reduced to 'armed bodies of men'. This includes the military, police, prisons, and bureaucracy, etc., which run and maintain it."
"The bottom line is that these men and women, were they on the 'outside', would be part of the 'official' labor force. They would be in need of employment, searching for work, or would have to be added to the unemployment rolls if there was no work available. By keeping this astonishing number of people out of the official labor pool, the unemployment figures are artificially lowered."
"The impressive unemployment figures conceal the reality of the situation - the fact that many of these 'jobs' are not even worth having."
"The 'war on drugs' has really done nothing to stop the influx of drugs to this country, but it has done wonders for the police in their efforts to put more minorities and youth behind bars - minor offences often carry sentences of up to ten years!"
"There is simply no solution to this problem under capitalism. Only when the resources, technology, and knowledge of humanity are put to use for the common good will the conditions which breed crime be eliminated. And this can only come about under socialism."
"This would help reduce the number of 'criminals' by changing the conditions which lead to crime - poverty, ignorance, discrimination, etc. Of course in the corrupt, bureaucratic, repressive, and shortsighted system of government we now live under, their solution is to throw more people in the slammer (even if there is no more room) instead of addressing the causes of the people's desperation."