In 2006, Pearce told an interviewer on a video that emerged last year that he also considered Ready to be a “true patriot, to the real purpose, the limited purpose, to the Republican platform that we have.”

According to news reports, Wednesday’s victims included Ready’s apparent girlfriend, two others adults and a child, along with Ready’s apparent suicide, and was most likely connected to a domestic dispute.

While Ready, a neo-Nazi activist, might have made more headlines for his “U.S. Border Guard” and defiantly white supremacist tirades against immigrants from Mexico, his shadowy connections to Pearce and others in Arizona’s extremist political circles remain troubling.  Earlier this spring, Ready had announced his intention to run for sheriff of Pinal County, on the outskirts of Phoenix.

Ready possessed an undeniable showmanship and proclivity for attracting media attention to Arizona’s immigration crisis.  He had been court-martialed twice from the military, yet still managed to invoke the veteran tag until he was stripped of his role as master of ceremonies for a Veteran’s Day parade in Mesa. That didn’t stop Ready from making a failed bid for the Mesa City Council, or gaining a spot as a precinct committeeman for the Republican Party in 2008.

Thanks to Phoenix New Times’ Stephen Lemons’ indefatigable muckraking over several years, we know how Ready involved himself with the National Socialist Movement and nativist border groups while maintaining a relationship with Pearce. In fact, Pearce had taken part in Ready’s baptism in the Mormon Church and ordained him as an elder in the Melchizedek priesthood.

Despite the mounting evidence, Pearce denied association with Ready and emailed Lemons in response to the “true patriot” video in the winter of 2011: “No one could have known or guessed he would later become involved with radical hate groups.”

However, the Anti-Defamation League in Phoenix had already warned Pearce about Ready’s Nazi activities in 2006. A year later, local media began to report on Ready’s white supremacist affiliations after a legislative hearing. At an anti-immigrant rally in Phoenix in the summer of 2007, Pearce had watched admiringly as Ready wooed the crowd.

In the end, it was Ready who felt betrayed by Pearce’s political maneuvers.  “He’s supposed to be a lawman,” Ready charged in a taped interview with Phoenix videographer Dennis Gilman, after Pearce closed the door on their relationship due to all of the media attention, “but he has a pattern of criminality.”

“He is the worst kind of racist,” Ready referred to Pearce in a New Times interview in the fall of 2010. “One who will do anything to achieve power, then trample on our rights like a tyrant when he gets that power.

Ready added, “I christen him Grand Wizard of the AZ Senate!”

Ready’s connections are not just limited to Pearce. State legislator Sylvia Allen introduced a bill this spring for Arizona to fund and arm its own border militia, which was arguably modeled on Ready’s controversial militia antics that won national media-coverage.

As national debate raged over SB 1070 in the summer of 2010, Ready announced his militia initiative on his “white supremacist New Saxon site, inviting participants to “bring plenty of firearms and ammo.” Ready admonished: “Camouflage or earth tone clothing [is] preferred…Bandanas, balaclavas, or other identity concealing items are permissible and encouraged.” He declared: “This is the Minuteman Project on steroids! THE INVASION STOPS HERE!”

Two weeks ago, armed apparent militia activists in camouflage ambushed and killed two undocumented migrants in an incident that remains unsolved.

Regardless of any connection he may have had to that attack, Ready has brought another bitter chapter of death to the border state’s headlines.

Update: Russell Pearce has released a statement regarding his relationship with Ready. “I knew JT Ready, I did, as did many of us who have been involved in Mesa politics for a long time. When we first met JT he was fresh out of the Marine Corp and seemed like a decent person,” it reads, in part. “ At some point in time darkness took his life over, his heart changed, and he began to associate with the more despicable groups in society. They were intolerant and hateful and like so many who knew him from before, I was upset and disappointed at the choices he was making. I worked with others to have him removed from his local position within our Republican Party because there has never been and will never be any room in our Party or our lives for those preaching hatred.”

According to U.S. code, domestic terrorism occurs when the act is “dangerous to human life” and is “a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State” and “appear[s] to be intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” When discussing Grady in a press release, FBI Special Agent in Charge Teresa Carson’s comments suggest Grady’s alleged actions were indeed terrorism: “The FBI will always investigate and bring to justice anyone who resorts to violence as a means to harm, intimidate or prevent the public’s right to access reproductive health services.” The key word there is “intimidate,” which is one of the core characteristics of any terrorist act. Yet Grady has only been charged with arson and “intentionally damaging the property of a facility that provides reproductive health services.”

Erin Miller, project manager of the Global Terrorism Database, tells Salon that Grady’s attempted arson of the Planned Parenthood, especially in light of his comments to the investigating FBI agent, was clearly an act of domestic terrorism. According to the criminal complaint issued by the FBI, Grady told the agent he “lit up the clinic,” while making clear “he is pro-life, believes in God and disapproves of the activities taking place at the clinic.”

Assistant United States Attorney William Roach, whose office is prosecuting the case, says Grady’s alleged attack did not rise to the level of domestic terrorism, primarily because Grady torched an unoccupied room in an empty building. Also, he says it’s not his responsibility to determine Grady’s motivation for the alleged attack, which he says will come out in front of the jury. “Domestic terrorism is a term of art,” he explains. And regardless of whether you consider Grady’s alleged actions domestic terrorism, according to Roach, he is facing serious charges that could lead to five to 20 years behind bars.

The choice not to charge Grady as a terrorist, however, shows a clear double-standard, according to critics — one that suggests terrorist crimes only occur when they are the product of alien ideologies that make mainstream Americans uncomfortable. This in turn provides public support, or at least indifference, for using controversial counterterrorism techniques — such as agent provocateurs, limitless surveillance without a criminal predicate, and harsh sentences — to launch fishing expeditions and to win lengthy prison sentences for individuals who never harmed or killed anyone and never intended too.

“Ultimately the facts will emerge in the court of public law, not public opinion,” says Alejandro Beutel, government and policy analyst for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. “Nevertheless, as a community that is frequently under the public microscope and subject to broad-brushed surveillance over national security issues, we continue to be closely monitoring this incident and how it is treated by public officials and reporting outlets.”

Journalist Will Potter, the author of “Green Is the New Red,” which explores how the war on terrorism has been used to stifle dissent and label nonviolent civil disobedience as terrorism, says the perfect illustration of this double standard is the case of Eric McDavid. McDavid was labeled an “eco-terrorist” by the FBI and sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison in May 2008 after the judge applied a terrorism enhancement to his sentence. McDavid was convicted of conspiring to destroy the Nimbus Dam and other targets with two co-conspirators. His defense attorney, however, argues he was entrapped by an FBI informant that he had developed a crush on.

During the trial, jurors were told that “Anna,” the ringleader of the group McDavid belonged to, was not a government agent, thereby precluding them from considering entrapment a legitimate defense for McDavid. After the trial, two jurors wrote letters to the judge expressing outrage when they learned Anna was indeed a government agent.

“My opinion of the case is that the FBI agents were an ‘embarrassment’ by their lack of knowledge of FBI procedures and the way they handled the investigation, specifically by allowing this case to develop the way it did using Anna and providing all of the essential tools for the group; the cabin, the money, the idea, the books, everything, and by letting Anna ‘string Eric along’ when she should have terminated the relationship clearly with him; that the main witness ‘Anna’ was not a credible witness at all,” wrote juror Diane Bennett. Later on in the same letter, Bennett added, “we would have found that he was entrapped” if the jurors knew Anna was a government agent.

Mike German, a former undercover FBI agent and now senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that there is no way the FBI would use such aggressive tactics to catch antiabortion extremists, even though they present a violent domestic terrorism threat. Usually, tactics such as these are used almost exclusively against Muslim-Americans. “[The ACLU has] evidence that the FBI has sent informants with criminal records into Muslim religious communities, not with a specific focus on particular suspects but rather to spy broadly on the community,” German explains. “If the government was doing the same thing in Christian churches, I think there would be a broader concern about that tactic.” (German was clear to note that this doesn’t mean such FBI tactics need to be used against right-wing groups and antiabortion groups out of some misplaced sense of fairness. Rather, these counterterrorism techniques need to be used selectively and only when the FBI has a specific target and a reasonable basis for suspicion.)

Outside of a notion of equal protection under the law, there are legitimate public safety concerns raised by misdiagnosing where the real domestic terrorism threat lies, says German. Often times, the FBI categorizes instances of vandalism, such as activists breaking windows and spray-painting “Animal Liberation Front” or “Earth Liberation Front” on things, as terrorist acts when more violent instances of right-wing or antiabortion terrorism do not get reflected in the official statistics.

“Within the last 10 years, the FBI has repeatedly said that the environmental terrorism is the No. 1 domestic threat,” he says.  “If you look at the numbers they count, it excludes similar conduct that wasn’t charged to terrorism on the right-wing side.”

German also notes that the FBI has been criticized in the past by its own inspector general for not keeping accurate terrorism-related statistics. “Congress and the Department management also use terrorism-related statistics to make operational and funding decisions for Department counterterrorism activities, and to support the Department’s annual budget requests,” the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General stated in a February 2007 report. “For these and other reasons, it is essential that the Department report accurate terrorism-related statistics.”

That, however, isn’t happening. And by misrepresenting where the true terrorist threat resides in the United States, warns German, the FBI is putting its thumb on the scale and raising legitimate questions as to whether the FBI invests its counterterrorism resources properly. The Grady case only amplifies these concerns.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside.  All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses or manufacturing textiles, shoes and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the 19th century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide.  Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system.  More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.

A Yankee Invention

What some historians call “the long Depression” of the 19th century, which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation and self-destructive competition among businesses designed to depress costs, especially labor costs.  So, too, we are living through a 21st century age of panics and austerity with similar pressures to shrink the social wage.

Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas.  Penal servitude now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in that we’re wrong.  From its first appearance in this country, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture.

And that is only the first of many misconceptions about this peculiar institution.  Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images of the black chain gang in the American South, it is usually assumed to be a Southern invention.  So apparently atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system and its desperate attachment to the “lost cause.”

As it happens, penal servitude — the leasing out of prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison walls or in outside workshops, factories and fields — was originally known as a “Yankee invention.”

First used at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the Midwest and later the West.  It developed alongside state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the public sector and sometimes the open market.

A few Southern states also used it.  Prisoners there, as elsewhere, however, were mainly white men, since slave masters, with a free hand to deal with the “infractions” of their chattel, had little need for prison.  The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery would, in fact, make an exception for penal servitude precisely because it had become the dominant form of punishment throughout the free states.

Nor were those sentenced to “confinement at hard labor” restricted to digging ditches or other unskilled work; nor were they only men.  Prisoners were employed at an enormous range of tasks from rope- and wagon-making to carpet, hat and clothing manufacturing (where women prisoners were sometimes put to work), as well coal mining, carpentry, barrel-making, shoe production, house-building and even the manufacture of rifles.  The range of petty and larger workshops into which the felons were integrated made up the heart of the new American economy.

Observing a free-labor textile mill and a convict-labor one on a visit to the United States, novelist Charles Dickens couldn’t tell the difference.  State governments used the rental revenue garnered from their prisoners to meet budget needs, while entrepreneurs made outsized profits either by working the prisoners themselves or subleasing them to other businessmen.

Convict Labor in the “New South”

After the Civil War, the convict-lease system metamorphosed.  In the South, it became ubiquitous, one of several grim methods — including the black codes, debt peonage, the crop-lien system, lifetime labor contracts and vigilante terror — used to control and fix in place the newly emancipated slave.  Those “freedmen” were eager to pursue their new liberty either by setting up as small farmers or by exercising the right to move out of the region at will or from job to job as “free wage labor” was supposed to be able to do.

If you assumed, however, that the convict-lease system was solely the brainchild of the apartheid all-white “Redeemer” governments that overthrew the Radical Republican regimes (which first ran the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction) and used their power to introduce Jim Crow to Dixie, you would be wrong again.  In Georgia, for instance, the Radical Republican state government took the initiative soon after the war ended.  And this was because the convict-lease system was tied to the modernizing sectors of the post-war economy, no matter where in Dixie it was introduced or by whom.

So convicts were leased to coal-mining, iron-forging, steel-making and railroad companies, including Tennessee Coal and Iron (TC&I), a major producer across the South, especially in the booming region around Birmingham, Alabama.  More than a quarter of the coal coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners.  By the turn of the century, TC&I had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers.

All the main extractive industries of the South were, in fact, wedded to the system.  Turpentine and lumber camps deep in the fetid swamps and forest vastnesses of Georgia, Florida and Louisiana commonly worked their convicts until they dropped dead from overwork or disease.  The region’s plantation monocultures in cotton and sugar made regular use of imprisoned former slaves, including women.  Among the leading families of Atlanta, Birmingham and other “New South” metropolises were businessmen whose fortunes originated in the dank coal pits, malarial marshes, isolated forests and squalid barracks in which their unfree peons worked, lived and died.

Because it tended to grant absolute authority to private commercial interests and because its racial make-up in the post-slavery era was overwhelmingly African-American, the South’s convict-lease system was distinctive.  Its caste nature is not only impossible to forget, but should remind us of the unbalanced racial profile of America’s bloated prison population today.

Moreover, this totalitarian-style control invited appalling brutalities in response to any sign of resistance: whippings, water torture, isolation in “dark cells,” dehydration, starvation, ice-baths, shackling with metal spurs riveted to the feet, and “tricing” (an excruciatingly painful process in which recalcitrant prisoners were strung up by the thumbs with fishing line attached to overhead pulleys).  Even women in a hosiery mill in Tennessee were flogged, hung by the wrists and placed in solitary confinement.

Living quarters for prisoner-workers were usually rat-infested and disease-ridden.  Work lasted at least from sunup to sundown and well past the point of exhaustion.  Death came often enough and bodies were cast off in unmarked graves by the side of the road or by incineration in coke ovens.  Injury rates averaged one per worker per month, including respiratory failure, burnings, disfigurement and the loss of limbs.  Prison mines were called “nurseries of death.”  Among Southern convict laborers, the mortality rate (not even including high levels of suicides) was eight times that among similar workers in the North — and it was extraordinarily high there.

The Southern system also stood out for the intimate collusion among industrial, commercial and agricultural enterprises and every level of Southern law enforcement as well as the judicial system.  Sheriffs, local justices of the peace, state police, judges and state governments conspired to keep the convict-lease business humming.  Indeed, local law officers depended on the leasing system for a substantial part of their income.  (They pocketed the fines and fees associated with the “convictions,” a repayable sum that would be added on to the amount of time at “hard labor” demanded of the prisoner.)

The arrest cycle was synchronized with the business cycle, timed to the rise and fall of the demand for fresh labor.  County and state treasuries similarly counted on such revenues, since the post-war South was so capital-starved that only renting out convicts assured that prisons could be built and maintained.

There was, then, every incentive to concoct charges or send people to jail for the most trivial offenses: vagrancy, gambling, drinking, partying, hopping a freight car, tarrying too long in town.  A “pig law” in Mississippi assured you of five years as a prison laborer if you stole a farm animal worth more than $10. Theft of a fence rail could result in the same.

Penal Servitude in the Gilded Age North

All of this was only different in degree from prevailing practices everywhere else: the sale of prison labor power to private interests, corporal punishment and the absence of all rights including civil liberties, the vote and the right to protest or organize against terrible conditions.

In the North, where 80 percent of all U.S. prison labor was employed after the Civil War and which accounted for over $35 billion in output (in current dollars), the system was reconfigured to meet the needs of modern industry and the pressures of “the long Depression.”  Convict labor was increasingly leased out only to a handful of major manufacturers in each state.  These textile mills, oven makers, mining operations, hat and shoe factories — one in Wisconsin leased that state’s entire population of convicted felons — were then installing the kind of mass production methods becoming standard in much of American industry.  As organized markets for prison labor grew increasingly oligopolistic (like the rest of the economy), the Depression of 1873 and subsequent depressions in the following decades wiped out many smaller businesses that had once gone trawling for convicts.

Today, we talk about a newly “flexible economy,” often a euphemism for the geometric growth of a precariously positioned, insecure workforce.  The convict labor system of the 19th century offered an original specimen of perfect flexibility.

Companies leasing convicts enjoyed authority to dispose of their rented labor power as they saw fit.  Workers were compelled to labor in total silence.  Even hand gestures and eye contact were prohibited for the purpose of creating “silent and insulated working machines.”

Supervision of prison labor was ostensibly shared by employers and the prison authorities.  In fact, many businesses did continue to conduct their operations within prison walls where they supplied the materials, power and machinery, while the state provided guards, workshops, food, clothing and what passed for medical care.  As a matter of practice though, the foremen of the businesses called the shots.  And there were certain states, including Nebraska, Washington and New Mexico, that, like their Southern counterparts, ceded complete control to the lessee.  As one observer put it, “Felons are mere machines held to labor by the dark cell and the scourge.”

Free market industrial capitalism, then and now, invariably draws on the aid of the state.  In that system’s formative phases, the state has regularly used its coercive powers of taxation, expropriation and in this case incarceration to free up natural and human resources lying outside the orbit of capitalism proper.

In both the North and the South, the contracting out of convict labor was one way in which that state-assisted mechanism of capital accumulation arose.  Contracts with the government assured employers that their labor force would be replenished anytime a worker got sick, was disabled, died or simply became too worn out to continue.

The Kansas Wagon Company, for example, signed a five-year contract in 1877 that prevented the state from raising the rental price of labor or renting to other employers.  The company also got an option to renew the lease for 10 more years, while the government was obliged to pay for new machinery, larger workshops, a power supply and even the building of a switching track that connected to the trunk line of the Pacific Railway and so ensured that the product could be moved effectively to market.

Penal institutions all over the country became auxiliary arms of capitalist industry and commerce.  Two-thirds of all prisoners worked for private enterprise.

Today, strikingly enough, government is again providing subsidies and tax incentives as well as facilities, utilities and free space for corporations making use of this same category of abjectly dependent labor.

The New Abolitionism

Dependency and flexibility naturally assumed no resistance, but there was plenty of that all through the 19th century from workers, farmers and even prisoners.  Indeed, a principal objective in using prison labor was to undermine efforts to unionize, but from the standpoint of mobilized working people far more was at stake.

Opposition to convict labor arose from workingmen’s associations, labor-oriented political parties, journeymen unions and other groups which considered the system an insult to the moral codes of egalitarian republicanism nurtured by the American Revolution.  The specter of proletarian dependency haunted the lives of the country’s self-reliant handicraftsmen who watched apprehensively as shops employing wage labor began popping up across the country.  Much of the earliest of this agitation was aimed at the use of prisoners to replace skilled workers (while unskilled prison labor was initially largely ignored).

It was bad enough for craftsmen to see their own livelihoods and standards of living put in jeopardy by “free” wage labor.  Worse still was to watch unfree labor do the same thing.  At the time, employers were turning to that captive prison population to combat attempts by aggrieved workers to organize and defend themselves.  On the eve of the Civil War, for example, an iron-molding contractor in Spuyten Duyvil, north of Manhattan in the Bronx, locked out his unionized workers and then moved his operation to Sing Sing penitentiary, where a laborer cost 40 cents, $2.60 less than the going day rate.  It worked, and Local 11 of the Union of Iron Workers quickly died away.

Worst of all was to imagine this debased form of work as a model for the proletarian future to come.  The workingman’s movement of the Jacksonian era was deeply alarmed by the prospect of “wage slavery,” a condition inimical to their sense of themselves as citizens of a republic of independent producers.  Prison labor was a sub-species of that dreaded “slavery,” a caricature of it perhaps, and intolerable to a movement often as much about emancipation as unionization.

All the way through the Gilded Age of the 1890s, convict labor continued to serve as a magnet for emancipatory desires.  In addition, prisoners’ rebellions became ever more common — in the North particularly, where many prisoners turned out to be Civil War veterans and dispossessed working people who already knew something about fighting for freedom and fighting back.  Major penitentiaries like Sing Sing became sites of repeated strikes and riots; a strike in 1877 even took on the transplanted Spuyten Duyvil iron-molding company.

Above and below the Mason Dixon line, political platforms, protest rallies, petition campaigns, legislative investigations, union strikes and boycotts by farm organizations like the Farmers Alliance and Grange cried out for the abolition of the convict-lease system, or at least for its rigorous regulation.  Over the century’s last two decades, more than 20 coal-mine strikes broke out because of the use of convict miners.

The Knights of Labor, that era’s most audacious labor movement, was particularly exercised.  During the Coal Creek Wars in eastern Tennessee in the early 1890s, for instance, TC&I tried to use prisoners to break a miners’ strike.  The company’s vice president noted that it was “an effective club to hold over the heads of free laborers.”

Strikers and their allies affiliated with the Knights, the United Mine Workers and the Farmers Alliance launched guerilla attacks on the prisoner stockade, sending the convicts they freed to Knoxville.  When the governor insisted on shipping them back, the workers released them into the surrounding hills and countryside.  Gun battles followed.

The Death of Convict Leasing

In the North, the prison abolition movement went viral, embracing not only workers’ organizations, sympathetic rural insurgents and prisoners, but also widening circles of middle-class reformers.  The newly created American Federation of Labor denounced the system as “contract slavery.”  It also demanded the banning of any imports from abroad made with convict labor and the exclusion from the open market of goods produced domestically by prisoners, whether in state-run or private workshops.  In Chicago, the construction unions refused to work with materials made by prisoners.

By the latter part of the century, in state after state penal servitude was on its way to extinction.  New York, where the “industry” was born and was largest, killed it by the late 1880s.  The tariff of 1890 prohibited the sale of convict-made wares from abroad.  Private leasing continued in the North, but under increasingly restrictive conditions, including Federal legislation passed during the New Deal.  By World War II, it was virtually extinct (although government-run prison workshops continued as they always had).

At least officially, even in the South it was at an end by the turn of the century in Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi.  Higher political calculations were at work in these states.  Established elites were eager to break the inter-racial alliances that had formed over abolishing convict leasing by abolishing the hated system itself.  Often enough, however, it ended in name only.

What replaced it was the state-run chain gang (although some Southern states like Alabama and Florida continued private leasing well into the 1920s). Inmates were set to work building roads and other infrastructure projects vital to the flourishing of a mature market economy and so to the continuing process of capital accumulation.  In the North, the system of “hard labor” was replaced by a system of “hard time,” that numbing, brutalizing idleness where masses of people extruded from the mainstream economy are pooled into mass penal colonies.  The historic link between labor, punishment and economic development was severed, and remained so… until now.

Convict Leasing Rises Again

“Now,” means our second Gilded Age and its aftermath.  In these years, the system of leasing out convicts to private enterprise was reborn.  This was a perverse triumph for the law of supply and demand in an era infatuated with the charms of the free market.  On the supply side, the U.S. holds captive 25 percent of all the prisoners on the planet: 2.3 million people.  It has the highest incarceration rate in the world as well, a figure that began skyrocketing in 1980 as Ronald Reagan became president.  As for the demand for labor, since the 1970s American industrial corporations have found it increasingly unprofitable to invest in domestic production.  Instead, they have sought out the hundreds of millions of people abroad who are willing to, or can be pressed into, working for far less than American workers.

As a consequence, those back home — disproportionately African-American workers — who found themselves living in economic exile, scrabbling to get by,  began showing up in similarly disproportionate numbers in the country’s rapidly expanding prison archipelago. It didn’t take long for corporate America to come to view this as another potential foreign country, full of cheap and subservient labor — and better yet, close by.

What began in the 1970s as an end run around the laws prohibiting convict leasing by private interests has now become an industrial sector in its own right, employing more people than any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in 37 states.  And here’s the ultimate irony: Our ancestors found convict labor obnoxious in part because it seemed to prefigure a new and more universal form of enslavement.  Could its rebirth foreshadow a future ever more unnervingly like those past nightmares?

Today, we are being reassured by the president, the mainstream media and economic experts that the Great Recession is over, that we are in “recovery” even though most of the recovering patients haven’t actually noticed significant improvement in their condition.  For those announcing its arrival, “recovery” means that the mega-banks are no longer on the brink of bankruptcy, the stock market has made up lost ground, corporate profits are improving, and notoriously unreliable employment numbers have improved by several tenths of a percent.

What accounts for that peculiarly narrow view of recovery, however, is that the general costs of doing business are falling off a cliff as the economy eats itself alive.  The recovery being celebrated owes thanks to local, state and federal austerity budgets, the starving of the social welfare system and public services, rampant anti-union campaigns in the public and private sector, the spread of sweatshop labor, the coercion of desperate unemployed or underemployed workers to accept lower wages, part-time work and temporary work, as well as the relinquishing of healthcare benefits and a financially secure retirement — in short, to surrender the hope that is supposed to come with the American franchise.

Such a recovery, resting on the stripping away of the hard won material and cultural achievements of the past century, suggests a new world in which the prison-labor archipelago could indeed become a vast gulag of the downwardly mobile.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Before Opheim’s scheduled release in March, according to news reports, concerned residents of the town packed a community meeting hall to hear the terms of Opheim’s release, meet his social worker, and express their fears of living alongside a convicted sex offender.

Although Opheim will live in a halfway house, be accompanied by a social worker in public at all times, be forced to consent to regular polygraph testing, and wear a GPS tracking device, residents were still uneasy.

“Why wasn’t he left in the St. Peter community?” asked one. “I don’t understand why he had to move.”

Others at the town hall meeting asked officials why it had been  decided to release an  accused predator into a community with so many children.

“We think it’s time,” Assistant Hennepin County Attorney George Widseth answered. “Is there a way [that we] can take a dipstick and run it down his throat…for a certain measurement? No.”

But he didn’t reveal the state’s own uncertainties about whether to continue the kind of post-custodial oversight that is required to ensure that Opheim never molests a child again.

Minnesota is one of 20 states that have civil commitment programs, which allow for the indefinite detention of sexual offenders after their criminal sentences are completed.

In order for offenders to be held under the program, a court must determine whether they are sexually violent predators, incapable of controlling their impulses, and too dangerous to be allowed back into communities.

In 1997 the U.S. Supreme Court in Kansas v. Hendricks held that civil commitment programs are constitutional if the commitment is non-punitive.

Expansion of Programs

In the early 1990s, states with flush budgets began expanding their civil commitment programs to include sex offenders, as part of a tough-on-crime approach to high-profile, brutal sex crimes.

At the time, civil commitment once seemed the best solution to protect communities from released offenders who may once again commit brutal crimes.

Under what are usually called “Sexually Violent Predator” laws, prosecutors could file petitions to commit offenders if they believed those offenders were likely to re-commit.

Offenders are evaluated by court psychologists who must prove that they are unable to control their impulses.

Since there is no accepted or scientifically valid way to predict whether an offender will commit another crime, psychologists usually use an assessment tool called the Static 99 to evaluate risk, which rates sex offenders on standard criteria, including the sex of their victim(s) and number of crimes.

The Static 99 was created by psychologists R. Karl Hanson, Ph.D. and David Thorton, Ph.D.

Scores are then compared to recidivism rates of similar sex offenders. Once an offender is committed, the laws stipulate they must have access to treatment.

But ballooning costs and new court challenges are forcing state leaders to rethink.

States like Minnesota are finding that, while there’s no easy way to “measure” whether a sex offender is ready to be reintegrated into a community, budget concerns and court challenges have made detaining them indeterminately no longer an option.

“At the beginning, there was a genuine thought that these were going to bonafide treatment programs,” said Eric Janus, Dean of the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul.

“The idea was that people might be committed for several years, and they’d work their  way through a real treatment program and a majority of them would be released. But it did not develop in that way.”

Facilities differ.

Washington, the first state to pass a civil commitment law, holds nearly 300 sex offenders on an island in Puget Sound. The offenders are “Level 3,” the most dangerous category of sexual predators.

The imposing facility is bordered by concertina wire, but residents are allowed to roam the inside of the facility relatively freely. They participate voluntarily in group therapy sessions.

Others are more state-of-the-art. A $388 million, 1,500-bed facility in Coalinga, California has stores, a library and a barbershop.

Both states, and many others, are struggling with runaway costs of the programs, totaling into the millions—especially at a time of budget restraints..

Offenders typically remain committed for years, sometimes decades. The number of offenders released differs from state to state—Wisconsin has released nearly 70 offenders, while Pennsylvania has released only one—but generally it is difficult to be released from commitment.

$180,000 a Year

On average, civil commitment programs cost taxpayers more than four times what it costs to imprison someone for a year. The most expensive programs can cost up to $180,000 a year, per sex offender.

Lengthy civil commitment cases can cost states thousands, or millions, in legal expenses.

“Civil commitment is like a roach motel,” said Al O’Connor, an attorney with the New York State Defenders Association. “They go in, but they don’t come out.”

New York State’s program costs over $170,000 per year.

“Every year,” added O’Connor. “it becomes a greater and greater drain on the mental health budget.”

Toward the end of the 1990’s state budgets began to tighten, but the civilly committed population continued to rise.

In Minnesota, according to Janus, “the buildings were filling up. The bureaucrats were coming to the legislators and saying, ‘We need millions to build more buildings. That was contradictory to the nation that these programs were stop gap measures.”

“They wound up this machine and they can’t politically stop it,” O’Connor said of New York’s law. “Once you have the law, you can’t stop putting people in the facility, because God forbid, one gets out and they go and do something. It becomes a scandal.”

Political pressure, both in state legislatures and judicial districts, often makes it exceedingly difficult to release offenders.  It’s a common aphorism that the only way to leave St. Peter’s, and other civil commitment facilities across the country, is in a body bag.

In 2003, just as officials were crafting plans to begin releasing low-level offenders back into communities, a Minnesota sex offender named Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. abducted and murdered a 22-year-old North Dakota college student after he completed a 23-year sentence for attempted abduction.

After then-Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty pledged not to release any sex offenders, Minnesota’s committed population exploded. Current attempts to reform Minnesota’s program—and increase opportunities for release—have fallen short after a 2011 legislative audit pointed out it was becoming financially untenable.

“Almost all the legislation that exists now is based on the exception, rather than the rule,” said Dr. Fred Berlin, director of the Sexual Behavior Consultation Unit at Johns Hopkins. “It’s legislation enacted when a horrible crime with lots of publicity occurs. It begs the question of whether we’re really going to have the most effective public policy.”

“It’s a radical concept,” Berlin added. “What we’re basically saying is we’re going to deprive someone of their liberty, based on a future crime we fear they’re going to commit.”

Court Challenges

The slim likelihood of release from commitment has been the basis for many lawsuits against states’ sexually violent predator laws.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld state and federal sexually violent predator laws partly because the programs purport to treat sex offenders with the goal of releasing them back into the community.

However, the Supreme Court also ruled in Kansas v. Hendricks, that mental health treatment is “merely an ancillary, rather than an overriding, state concern,” and programs do not necessarily become punitive if they fail to offer adequate treatment.

But problems within the system go beyond a failure to provide mental health treatment. The Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peters, from which Clarence Opheim was released, has recently been rocked by scandal. In late March, CEO David Proffitt was fired after reports of rampant mismanagement. The state’s Office of the Legislative Auditor is now investigating the facility as well as the hiring practices of the Department of Human Services.

Meanwhile, the committed continue to challenge the laws.

Sex offenders have filed reams of pro se filings over the years. A handful have moved into higher courts, and some states have been ordered to improve conditions or treatment programs at their facilities.

Early this year, before judges approved the release of Clarence Opheim, a Minneapolis-based law firm took up two suits against Minnesota’s program—including a class action suit on behalf of 14 plaintiffs currently housed in Minnesota’s Moose Lake facility.

David Goodwin, part of the team that’s litigating the case, said the plaintiffs allege they are not receiving adequate mental health treatment, and are being housed in a criminal facility without criminal protections of due process.

Goodwin said detainees at Moose Lake are subject to unannounced search and seizures and are locked in their cell-like rooms for ten hours a day.

“As a person off the street you walk in and think, my goodness, this is certainly a prison,” Goodwin said. “There’s double razor wire, and cameras, and guards in every room. It’d be hard to argue that it’s not a prison.”

Moose Lake did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Minnesota officials’ fear that the suits could successfully challenge its civil commitment law precipitated Opheim’s release into Golden Valley.

Lawmakers in Minnesota and other states have suggested extending sentences for sex offenders.  Prison, where states don’t have the burden of providing mental health treatment, costs less than civil commitment facilities.

“Many of these people do need treatment,” Berlin said. “If people say, let’s just give them all tougher sentences, put them in prison and do nothing else, there’s nothing in prison that will erase these attractions or successfully help them resist acting upon them.”

Berlin said he advocates for inclusion of outpatient treatment, and structured transition programs into communities, into civil commitment programs.

“We need a criminal justice component,” he added. “But we also need a public health component.”

“Political Space” Needed

Last January, William Mitchell held a symposium on Minnesota’s civil commitment program. A number of key legislators and officials attended, Janus said, and agreed that “there needed to be political space to make changes both in the admissions side, as well as the discharge side.”

It was a positive step, Janus said, adding, “What political leaders have hoped for in the past is that they could take care of the problem by tweaking the criminal sentencing rules.”

“But even if you increase the length of sentences there will always be sex offenders getting out of prison,” he continued. “Inevitably, there’s always the potential that someone will commit a recidivist crime. Prosecutors know that they could be held responsible for those crimes if they fail to use the available tools.”

Some states, however, have experienced successful release of sex offenders.

Arizona has released the most sex offenders out of any state, with 69 in provisional release and 81 fully discharged, as of 2006.

Daniel Montaldi, who served as the former director of Arizona’s civil commitment facility until 2010, recalled that the state began  accepting residents into its facility, located on the grounds of the state hospital in South Phoenix, in 1999.

The facility was built to hold 300 people, said Montaldi, who now works in Florida’s civil commitment program. “It was meant to be a mostly full confinement program, and people weren’t meant to get out.”

Less Restrictive Alternative

But Arizona’s sexually violent predator law allows for the committed to participate in a Less Restrictive Alternative, or LRA.

Around 2003, Montaldi said, “we took half of our administration building and made it a halfway house for offenders who had done really well in treatment. They could start off by having one outing a week, or month, where they could go out into the community with a staff member present.

“They would have GPS monitoring. Then you could progress gradually, where the guy could go out into the community by himself, and he could go to work, and our surveillance team would monitor him.”

Offenders who had progressed that far in the program would eventually be given a sponsor, be forced to submit to polygraph tests and physical surveillance.

“The advantage in Arizona was we could base our LRA program in the facility itself, but he would gradually pick up some freedoms, where the last step was living in the community after he’d already proven himself with the freedoms he already had,” said Montaldi.

“You didn’t have this dilemma where, ‘I’ve either got to lock him up completely or have him living in a neighborhood.’ ”

“The legislature,” he added, “also didn’t pay a lot of attention to the program,” he added. “It was the idea that if you stay out of the newspapers and you don’t have re-offenses or escapes, we’re not going to interfere a lot. That gave us the room to innovate.”

But when the facility suffered an escape in 2010, officials were forced to rein in its LRA program.

“An extensively developed community reintegration program is a fragile flower,” Montaldi said. “It’s very vulnerable, because suppose the guy is in the community and he escapes. You may catch him the next day, but if it makes the news, you’re going to get a strong reaction.”

With the Arizona model, he said, “you’re taking some risks that you wouldn’t be taking if you just put them behind walls and left them there forever. But our view was [that,] eventually, these guys are going to get out.

“At some point, a federal judge could shut this all down. At some point, the whole thing could go away, and you’ll have a whole lot of guys who have had no experience in the community, and suddenly, they’re out there.”

“The other part of what’s going to happen is that these guys are getting old,” Montaldi added, “You’re going to have the problem of needing nursing homes for sex offenders.”

The McNeils weren’t the only ones who felt threatened by Epp. David Samson and Libby Jones, a white couple who hired Epp to build their home in 2004, testified that they carried a gun as a “precaution” around Epp because of his threatening behavior. According to Jones, Epp nearly hit her when she expressed dissatisfaction with his work at a weekly meeting. The couple even had a lawyer write a letter warning Epp to stay away from their property. Samson testified that after they fired him, Epp would park his car across the street and watch their house, saying “it got to the point where my wife and I were in total fear of this man.”

McNeil’s attorney Mark Yurachek told Salon that “DAs throughout the country enjoy that kind of flexibility of deciding who to prosecute, but it’s curious that he took a year to do it.” While he said there’s no way to know what swayed the DA to prosecute, Yurachek revealed that letters, which he obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, were written to the DA’s office demanding that McNeil be charged. “They were mostly emails from people cajoling prosecutors to investigate,” says Yurachek. “One was from Epp’s widow. Others were written anonymously.”

Barber was clear that the NAACP remains firmly against stand your ground laws because “they give cover to those who may engage in racial profiling and racialized violence,” adding that “There is a history and legacy of discriminatory application of the law” that continues to this day. “African-Americans are caught in curious position. On one hand, we fight against stand your ground laws, but once the laws are on the books they aren’t applied to us.”

Meanwhile, Barber argues that McNeil’s treatment stands in stark contrast to that of George Zimmerman, who has been afforded the benefit of the doubt despite his victim being unarmed. “America’s always had a difficult issue dealing with race, so rather than face it when it’s exposed, the tendency by some is to try and dismiss it. But the reality is you do not see this kind of miscarriage of justice when it comes to whites.” He adds,  “John’s whole life has been taken away from him. His wife is very ill with cancer and she has lost a husband, his sons have lost a father and society has lost a man that was contributing to his community.”