Prisons - Prison Industries: Excellent Idea Or Exploitation?

"Whereas the people of the state of Oregon find and declare that inmates who are confined in corrections institutions should work as hard as the taxpayers who provide for their upkeep … now, therefore, the people declare … All inmates of state corrections institutions shall be actively engaged fulltime in work or on-the-job training." — 1994 amendment to Oregon's constitution

Who would argue with the logic of Oregon's constitutional amendment? This is the trend of the 1980s and 1990s: States mandating that all prisoners work. The rationale behind the mandate? There is no reason why prisoners should be allowed to sit idly by, at taxpayers' expense, when they can learn a useful trade that will (1) offset the cost of their incarceration, (2) pay court-ordered fines, (3) give something back to their victims, (4) help support the estimated 2.2 million children and the 1 million mostly low-income women they left on the outside, and (5) set them on the straight and narrow path once they get out. Considering that the prison population is made up mostly of "poorly educated and low skilled men who experienced high unemployment before incarceration" (Pigeon and Wray), is society not doing them a favor by forcing prisoners to work?

The concept is not new and it's not illegal: The 13th Amendment states: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States…" (emphasis added). At the end of the 19th century, an estimated 90% of prisoners worked. But labor unions opposed prison industries, laws were passed forbidding the use of prison labor for interstate commerce, a 1928 report to Congress decried the "ruinous and unfair competition between prison-made products and free industry and labor," and the practice fell out of favor.

The pendulum began to swing the other way in the 1980s. We got tough on criminals, the prison population started to grow, at least 30 states passed laws allowing the use of convict labor by private companies, and prison industries expanded. The term actually describes several types of working arrangements. Federal and state prisons put inmates to work producing goods for sale to government and on the open market. Private companies (like those shown on the chart above) contract with prisons to use convict labor, and private prisons employ their own inmates for private profit, either for themselves or for outside companies. Prisoners who work may have time subtracted from their sentences. Prisoners who refuse get longer sentences and lose privileges (Erlich).

Of the total 160,193 inmates in federal prisons in 2002, about 25% worked for the factories of Federal Prison Industries (FPI), earning 23 cents to $1.15 per hour making furniture, electronics, textiles, metal objects, or graphic arts. FPI (better known as UNICOR) is a government corporation created in 1934 to provide workplace experience to federal inmates. In fiscal year 2000, FPI produced nearly $600 million in goods and services for the federal government in accordance with 1950s-era agreements that prisoner-produced goods would not compete with private businesses or labor.⁸

In 2000 an estimated 6% of state prison inmates worked in prison industry programs. What do other prisoners do? In 1999 about 600,000 prisoners in all types of penal institutions did some type of prison support work (food service, plumbing, painting, and so on). Federal prisoners are paid 12 to 40 cents per hour. State rates vary and may be zero (as was voted in Oregon). Too many prisoners remain idle, according to analysts, for reasons that include the fact that prisons were not designed to be factories. Some prisoners work on chain gangs, a solution reintroduced in the 1990s in a few states.

Proponents of prison industries say that by using prison labor, companies are keeping jobs at home that might otherwise have been sent overseas. Prison industries of all kinds employed an estimated.00056% of the national civilian work force in 1996 (Smith), but the complaints against them are loud. Critics charge that working prisoners are paid Third-World wages, do not get the same kind of benefits that workers on the outside enjoy, and are putting some small businesses out of business. The loudest complaints come from the apparel and furniture industries, which claim to be disproportionately harmed by prison industries.

As for the prisoners involved, some are glad of the work, while some liken the conditions to sweatshops. There could be more jobs on the horizon. The Prison Industries Reform Act, introduced in Congress several times in the 1990s and still awaiting action by the Subcommittee on Crime at the time of writing (November 2002), is designed to encourage the use of low-wage prison labor as a way of competing with imports from low-wage countries. Some goods produced by prisoners are now being exported, a tactic we call a human rights violation when used by China.

James A. Gondles Jr. sums up the contradictions inherent in our expectations of prisons: "During the past half century, we have been faced with seemingly incompatible goals. Prisons were urged to keep inmates as busy as possible in meaningful work while, at the same time, not competing with outside industries and displacing jobs." Does prison work reduce recidivism? Data are sketchy, but estimates range from a 3% to 20% reduction in recidivism among prisoners who worked. We look at recidivism next.

Sources: Chart: "Slavery With a New Name," Oregon's Inmate Work Crews, http://www.doc.state.or.us/publicaffairs/pubs/. Gondles, James A. Jr., "Prison Industries: A New Look at an Old Idea, Corrections Today, Oct 1999 v61 i6 p6. Pigeon, Marc-Andre, and L. Randall Wray, "Can Penal Keynesianism Replace Military Keynesianism? An Analysis of Society's Newest 'Solution' for the Hard to Employ and a Proposal for a More Humane Alternative," Social Justice, V27, No.2 (2000). Reese Erlich, "Prison Labor: Workin' for the Man," http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~kastor/private/prison-labor.html. Ingley, Gwyn Smith, and Maureen E. Cochran, "Ruinous or Fair Competition?" Corrections Today, Oct 1999 v61 i6 p82 "Slavery With a New Name," http://www.prisonactivist.org/prison-labor/. Information retrieved November 25, 2002.