Parenti says over 1.7 million US citizens now live in prison, a 300 per cent increase since Reaganomics of the 1980. Parenti states that in some US cities, a third of the Black men are in jail, and the spending on prisons is more important than higher education in California. Parenti's book “Lockdown America” analysis the connection capitalism, the rise of neo-liberalism which precipitated the prison industrial complex in what he calls an “economic counter-offensive that began in the early 1980s.” In Chapter two of his book Parenti connects the damage cause to minorities by the economic losses of the working class by capitalist the Federal government in the US and Britain during the early 1980s and the effects Regan and thatcher policies have consequently devastated working-class communities.…show more content… He shows that Reagan's reactionary social engineering, in the form of ' defunding social programs ' and a 'deregulation of labor markets led to “Interest rates shooting up from 7.9 per cent in 1979 to 16.4 in 1981” plunging the US economy into the worst recession since 1929. Parenti says d to the actions of Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volker's participation in the recession' “10 million by U.S. Citizens found themselves unemployed by 1982”, which reduced wages as it was designed to. Parenti quotes Thatcher's chief economic adviser Alan Budd, who caused the same economic recession Britain as saying “'rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes.” Parenti says “What was engineered in Marxist terms was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor that allowed the capitalists accumulate high profits ever since.”' As the US, weekly wage averages fell more than 8 per cent between 1979 and 1982. Overall,' Parenti writes, ''Reaganomics class hierarchies and polarized races and destroyed inner
