Russell Mokhiber of the Corporate Crime Reporter contrasts tw o
statistics: 24,000 Americans are murdered each year, w hile 56,000
Americans die from job-related accidents and diseases.
T hat’s another example of unpunished corporate crime. In the
1980s, the Reagan administration essentially informed the business
w orld that it w as not going to prosecute violations of OSHA [the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration] regulations. As a
result, the number of industrial accidents w ent up rather
dramatic ally. Business Week reported that w orking days lost to
injury almost doubled from 1983 to 1986, in part because “under
Reagan and [Vice-President] Bush, [OSHA] w as a hands-off agency.”
T he same is true of the environmental issues—toxic w aste
disposal, say. Sure, they’re killing people, but is it criminal? Well, it
should be.
How ard Zinn and I visited a brand-new maximum-security federal
prison in Florence, Colorado. T he lobby has high ceilings, tile floors,
glass everyw here. Around the same time, I read that New York City
schools are so overcrow ded that students are meeting in cafeterias,
gyms and locker rooms. I found that quite a juxtaposition.
T hey’re certainly related. Both prisons and inner-city schools
target a kind of superfluous population that there’s no point
educating because there’s nothing for them to do. Because w e’re a
civilized people, w e put them in prison, rather than sending death
squads out to murder them.
Drug-related crimes, usually pretty trivial ones, are mostly
w hat’s filling up the prisons. I haven’t seen many bankers or
executives of chemical corporations in prison. People in the rich
suburbs commit plenty of crimes, but they’re not going to prison at
anything like the rate of the poor.
T here’s another factor too. Prison construction is by now a
fairly substantial part of the economy. It’s not yet on the scale of
the Pentagon, but for some years now it’s been grow ing fast enough
to get the attention of big financial institutions like Merrill Lynch,
w ho have been floating bonds for prison construction.
High-tech industry, w hich has been feeding off the Pentagon for