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A Brief History of the Prison Industry
by insideprison.com, April 2006
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| Workshop at Mcneil Island
Penitentiary |
The concept of prison labour was popularized in the early 19th century
following the introduction of New York's now famous "get-tough"
state prison, Auburn, where inmates worked together in workshops,
ate together in dining halls, and slept separately at night. It was
a prison system based on the untreatable moral resistance of criminals,
and was designed to forsake rehabilitation efforts in favour of confinement,
punishment and discipline (Roberts 1985).
Since that time, the prison "industry" has flourished.
Like the 1950s military establishment and all its propaganda growing
parallel to the complimentary need for military employment and profit,
the penal system has encouraged policy makers to "get tougher,"
creating a lucrative niche market for criminal justice stakeholders
profiting from increased convictions. Highlighting the intimacy
between correctional interest groups and policy-makers, Nils Christie
described the strategies of the California prison guards' association
in giving millions of dollars to government leaders responsible
for expanding the prison industry, resulting in the lobbying tactics
that paved the way for the now famous "three strikes and you're
out" law. The advance of prison privatization and so-called
"warehousing" remerging from its Civil-war-era past in
the 1980s follows from the profound increases in offender populations,
and the subsequent increases in prison maintenance costs coupled
with increased budgetary constraints.
Currently, the largest employer of convicts in the United States
is Federal Prison Industries (Unicor), with 18,000 prisoners making
some 150 products, including safety goggles, air force jet wiring,
body armour and road signs. Combined with the nation's entire fleet
of private prison industries, the number of convict labourers across
the country reaches 72,000. Unicor's products are considered poor
quality, and consistently inferior to the private sector's products.
They cost more to make, have higher defaults, and take longer to
procure (Parenti 1999), even in Texas, where prisoners do not even
get paid to work. Part of this is because Correctional Officers
often feel in danger and unable to control inmate labour, fearing
homemade tools will be fashioned into weapons and used against them.
As a result, resource-heavy frisks, searchers, supervision, and
pat-downs become commonplace. There is also, of course, the lawsuits,
which can deter private businesses from investing in prison labour.
One historic instance of prisoners running a mutiny occurred in
February of 1924. License-plate production at the state prison backfired
on the state government when convicts inside Ohio State Penitentiary
began secretly conducting a license-plate manufacturing and distribution
scheme, smuggling duplicate plates out of prison to recently paroled
accomplices. The practice lasted two weeks. Such incidents today
are rare occurrences, if not unheard of, much to the satisfaction
of correctional departments. For prison labour to function properly,
it must gain majority consent from the public, and with the otherwise
state-stigmatizing media reports such as these failing to threaten
the infrastructure upon which the Auburn ideology rests, we can
say that prison labour has gained that majority consent.
Concurrent with this need to gain consent for prison labour today,
state-sponsored public promotion of convict-made license plates,
(as touted by Utah Correctional Industries: http://uci.utah.gov/licenseplates)
attempts to legitimize the seemingly oppressive character of prison
employment. Instead of concealing the underbelly of prison labour
from the public eye, as has been the trend for decades following
the criticism by human rights groups, state authorities instead
flaunt it, declaring that the license plates citizens use everyday
are made by the hardworking men of this state's fine industrial-prison
system. Instead of portraying the prison system as an object of
shame, the state portrays it as an object of pride. The state does
not simply hole up prisoners in the murky confines of archaic forms
of incapacitation, but makes them "productive," not just
for the improvement of themselves (which would backfire in a contradiction
of "get-tough" ideals), but the improvement of the state.
In fact, the very product of prison labour can even "moralize"
convicts, turning them into "real" people with real ambitions
and work schedules, real salaries, and by implication in a capitalist-driven
economy, real motivation. It is in a sense an affront to the pathologizing
of prisoners indigenous to the asylum-era, where inmates were zoological
specimens, captured from their natural habitat and confined in a
laboratory to be studied by those morally superior and committed
to the public good.
Perhaps
this moralization of the prison labour industry has contributed
to the growth of the prison product marketplace, where "novelties"
like Prison Blues, denim shirts, and jackets sewn by inmates are
sold for their eclectic yet appealingly economic value. One store
in Denver, Colorado, called the Denver Blues Co., sells all varieties
of such items, from stone-washed jackets, to pinstriped yard shirts,
all in the range of $30 to $50. One variety even includes prisoner
slogans, reading "Made on the Inside to be Worn on the Outside."
Prison labour has moralized the prisoner in more ways than just
the wholesomely American "hard work" ethic. In London,
the annual Koestler award provides cash prizes of hundreds of pounds
to artistic creations such as literature, music, and handicrafts
designed by prisoners. In the past, awards have been granted to
pieces such as coffins, hearses, and and haycarts made of matchsticks,
as well as numerous paintings worth hundreds, even thousands, of
pounds. This is not to say that there have not been any misgivings
surrounding the encouragement of prison entrepreneurial spirit.
In 2002 an Albany art show was canceled because it was learned that
serial killer Arthur Shawcross, who killed eleven Rochester women,
had made money from the sale's previous year. However, it is generally
agreed that promoting the artistic expression of inmates, some of
whom are serving life sentences and will never see the outside world
again, is a positive development for the future of rehabilitation.
To some, however, prison labour has extended its view of remuneration
as one of a luxury to one of a right. In 1982, the California Department
of Corrections stated that it "can't tolerate convicts taking
on staff members in an era of unionism" (NYT August 28 1982),
and decided, unsuccessfully, to shut down the state's prison newspapers.
In 2003, PC giant Dell also pulled the plug on its prisoner-employed
PC recycling operation to help quell protests from environmental
agencies that it was paying prisoners substandard wages and that
prisoners were not adequately protected by the Fair Labor Standards
Act. Another group contended that the prison labour threatened the
profit-making ability of the recycling industry. Similarly, the
AFL-CIO has argued against the expansion of prison labour because
it takes jobs away from non-convicts.
Ironically, the largest stumbling block for prison-labour advocates
does not come from civil-rights advocates, but private corporations.
Many companies cite the lack of Constitutional protection to smaller-sized
businesses, who are going bankrupt because larger-sized businesses
are "unfairly" able to utilize the cost-saving potential
of prison employment, including free rent, subsidized housing, state-covered
medical costs, low wages, and, of course, freedom from providing
vacation days. During the 1920s and 1930s, labour unions protested
that inmate-workers owned by the state prison system constituted
unfair competition, highlighting cheap labour costs and low wages
(Culp 2005).
While prisoners are supposed to get paid wages comparable to those
of similar nature outside prison, inmates only receive 20 to 30
percent of the money they earn (with the rest going to victims and
state-related costs) and employers can often end up paying them
only $.20 to $1.15 per hour in the form of "gratuities."
While profitability may be hampered by mandatory security measures,
pat downs, head counts, and security-related transportation delays
of goods, the economic advantage still outweighs the prison-associated
costs. Prisoners, by virtue of their position in a disciplinary
environment, have often been reported to work harder, more efficiently,
and more obediently than anyone else employers hire. Perhaps a buffer
to the criticisms of sweatshop conditions is the sobering fact that
prisoners, especially those serving the rest of their life behind
bars, are eager to free themselves from the monotonous routine of
prison and spend their time being active.
There may be equally powerful arguments attesting to the fact that
the prison-industrial complex diverts true rehabilitative efforts
to economic motives. Correctional Services Canada, in contrast to
many prison-industrial trends, for instance, will disallow a prisoner
entry into a paid-word program if there is an available rehabilitative
treatment program matching that prisoner's needs, and will pay that
prisoner in full for attending the program. When prison-industry
proponents point to reduced recidivism rates for prisoners engaged
in prison labour, they are ignoring the fact that nearly all differences
in recidivism rates between working inmates and non-working inmates
can be accounted for by the positive personal characteristics of
prisoners who volunteer for such programs in the first place (Maguire,
Flanagan and Thornberry 1988).
Another insidious thread of ideological thought that runs through
the prison industry concerns the historical acceptance of African-American
slavery. The racialized reality of the prison population, segregated
into ethnic gangs and overpopulated by African-Americans and Latinos,
operates parallel to the ideology of the capitalist market, similarly
racialized and underpopulated by minorities.
While prison labour may have progressed a long way from the crude
character of 19th Centruy prison "treadmills," technology
has advanced enough to enslave prisoners in less explicit methods
of domination. In the 1950s there existed "post-Fordist"
assembly-line operations, and today there exist airport travel-booking
call-centres like those popularized in Michael Moore's documentary
"Roger and Me."
It would appear then that as long as vested interests, and more
explicitly, economic profits are at stake, the prison-industry should
continue. However, researchers have noted that the prison-industry
may be on the decline, largely due to the leveling off of prison
population growth numbers, and the regular stumbling blocks encountered
in Correctional Officer safety concerns, employee motivation, and
investor-fear. In addition, increased discretionary release rates
combined with anitprivatization and prison-condition protesters
have diverted focus away from the prison and instead onto the faith-based
community (Culp 2005).
references
Culp, RF. 2005. "The rise and stall of prison privatization:
An integration of policy analysis perspectives." Criminal Justice
Policy Review, vol. 16, no. 4
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