 |
 |
TPLU COMMENTARY
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul:
Prison Labor in America as the Dubious Answer to Corporate Flight
By Allison Sheedy
More than 80,000 prisoners are employed in some variety of inmate work program, but the typical image of chain gangs at work along the edges of the highway is changing. Inmates are just as likely to be engaged in apparel manufacturing, at computer terminals, or in telemarketing consumer services.
All states employ some of their prisoners in labor situations, but the details of these programs vary from state-to-state. Some prisoners work in government industries or assemble products for the state; others manufacture goods that are sold on the open market. Private sector manufacturers subcontract through inmate work programs in 38 states, with companies such as Victoria's Secret, CMT Blues, and Target Corporation using prison labor to manufacture their retail products. In at least three states, labor is mandatory for everyone in jail.
Although prisoners have always been used as a form of cheap labor in this country, some recent trends are troublesome to both those concerned with human rights, and those concerned with the labor movement. But neither group seems able to distinguish a clearly articulated oppositional stance from the mired arena of economics and politics that surround the issue. In this space of diacritical absence, industry in prison, and the prison industry, grows larger by the day. As the United States recently surpassed China to have the largest percent of its population behind bars, the moment is now for an analysis of the facts and philosophies.
The increasingly close relationship between private corporations and public correctional facilities has spawned the term "prison industrial complex." Currently, around 5% of the 1.8 million behind bars are contained in private prisons. While, along with charter schools, this fits into a larger trend of privatization used as a measure when public institutions get "out of control," all such transformations are merely examples of corporations making a national crisis into a profit-making opportunity. Investors such as Allstate, Merrill Lynch, General Electric and American Express have purchased stock in private prisons. By no means a philanthropic gesture, these investments are made with the intention of financial profit.
In areas where the economy has collapsed in the last few decades, private prisons are viewed as a growth industry. For example, rural areas use new prisons as sources of construction, administrative and security guard jobs for the community. As a result, criminals from cities on the East Coast often end up incarcerated in Indiana, which can be problematic for prisoners who wish to maintain relationships with their families. The purpose of the correctional system in America should be to reduce crime, increase safety, and reform individuals. However, prisons can only make a continuous profit if more people are incarcerated, even if crime rates drop. Privatization, with its necessary drive towards profit, therefore transforms the function of the correctional system in drastic ways, and begins to answer to its investors rather than to the needs of society at large.
The production of goods for private manufacturers manifests another problem of the prison industrial complex. A federal ban on the interstate transport and sale of prison-made goods was enacted in the 1930s, effectively preventing products manufactured in prisons from being sold on the open market. But the 1979 Prison Industries Enhancement Act (PIE) exempts state prisons from this federal regulation provided that inmates are paid prevailing (minimum) wages, and that jobs from free workers are not moved behind bars. However, inmates get paid only a fraction of this wage (under $1 an hour), while the rest goes back to the state to subsidize the cost of their incarceration or pay into victim reparation banks, which provide money to the victims and families of violent or non-violent crimes. Whether the advent of corporate jobs in prisons poses a threat to free market labor despite the PIE regulations in still unclear.
The majority of labor in prisons is not actually done for private corporations. In California, there is a semi-autonomous agency called the Prison Industry Association that regulates prison work programs in state-funded prisons. These programs, which manufacture everything from furniture to eyeglasses and clothing, are intended to be self-sufficient, requiring no tax subsidy to operate. The industries must make a profit from the goods they sell in order to cover the cost of operating the programs. To ensure this, a law in California requires all state agencies, including government offices and state university classrooms, to purchase goods exclusively from the Prison Industry Authority. The prisoners employed by the Authority, some 7,000 in number, earn an average of 55 cents an hour. While this would seemingly create a situation economically advantageous for state agencies buying the products, those who are forced to purchase these items claim that they are more expensive than goods which could be purchased on the free market, and of inferior quality. A quick look at the California Prison Industry Authority website, which hosts a catalog of goods available for public purchase, hints that this claim is probably valid. Why is this the case when the prison workers are paid so little? Necessary security measures, as it turns out, in the "office-like environments" of California's prison industries, are quite expensive. This prevents this labor from being cheaper than free labor, but still dominates the market by holding a monopoly on manufacturing for the state.
Questions of quality, profitability, and security hit virtually every inmate work program in some way, and even when prison labor is not for private corporations, it falls prey to a set of problems regarding free labor. Oregon is one of the states with a law requiring all prisoners to work more than 40 hours a week. Because of this state initiative, which was approved by voters in 1994, a variety of unique practices occur. Prison Blues, a company that manufactures blue jeans, employs prisoners to make its goods, and self-consciously markets them as "made in prison." And Prison Blues is the only blue-jeans manufacturer left in the Pacific Northwest-the others have moved their production to cheaper labor markets overseas. Convicts also perform thousands of public-sector jobs (for example, answering phones at the Oregon DMV), which, despite regulations preventing the displacement of jobs from free workers, resonates as potentially dubious in the minds of the labor movement. Critics ask whether those public-sector, white-collar jobs should be given to free workers in the community. Perhaps the strangest thing in Oregon, however, is that private companies can "lease" prisoners from the state for $3 a day. In this way, prisoners here have become the ultimate flexible, inexpensive work force.
But voters in the states where prison labor is mandatory, not corporate interests, passed this legislation. There are two schools of thought which govern the ideology behind prison labor, allowing it, through legislation, to grow as an industry inside of the prison industry itself, despite the fact that it threatens labor rights. First, there exists the notion that prisoners should not live on the taxpayer's dime without doing something to defray the cost of their incarceration. Since prison populations have tripled over the past two decades, placing burden on taxpayers, the idea that inmates should "earn their keep" has a good degree of popular resonance. Second, there is the viewpoint that labor programs in prison can provide those willing to learn valuable skills that will re-incorporate them into society once their tenure behind bars is complete. The standpoint that labor is a therapeutic palliative for the exceptional boredom of prison life falls under this category as well.
This ideology functions as a legerdemain to promote the identification of a particular (increasingly corporate) interest with the general interest. The vast increase of prisoners since the 1980s is comprised mostly of non-violent, drug-offenders. But these offenders are obviously constructed to be very threatening. In other words, the ideology both of "public safety," (the reason prison populations continue to increase), and "retribution for crimes" (that allows legislation for mandatory inmate labor to get passed) which is the rhetoric of prison policy allows for some to profit at the expense of both incarcerated and free workers. Incarcerated workers become virtual slave labor in states that require all prisoners to work, and free laborers lose out, if not in the fact of their actual jobs being threatened, than through the development of an economy which sees its growth potential both in the lowest common denominator (industry in prison) and in keeping that denominator expanding (prison industry).
Prison labor is indeed most alarming in the states that require all of the inmates to work more than forty hours a week: Texas, Oregon, and Missouri. In these places, prison labor carries with it the additional problem of human rights abuses. The rhetoric of prison labor is a perfect example of the functionalization of language in modern society that Herbert Marcuse identifies, where in strictly Orwellian terms, "slave labor" happens again and is called (positively) a "prison work program." Couched in these terms, it is easier to forget that slave labor was an issue many once fought very hard to abolish. As Adorno once said, "The specter of man without memory…is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois society."
Labor inside of prisons is not fundamentally a bad idea. Skills, the potential for prisoners who will someday return to society to save money, and an escape from boredom can not be underestimated in their value as components of life behind bars. I do not believe that recompense for victims of crimes, or repaying the cost of incarceration are fundamentally wrong ideals from a societal standpoint either. What is problematic from a human rights standpoint is forced labor. Prisoners are not currently protected by the 14th Amendment, which prohibits slavery.
What is problematic from a labor standpoint is displacement of industries to the world behind bars. The positive aspects of prison labor are contingent on the form it takes, and the larger economic implications of such practice. I think most people would rather see convicts employed in a local recycling plant, than forced to make blue jeans for export to Japan.
Labor leaders are unsurprisingly concerned about what the practices of prison labor mean in the future for laborers who are not behind bars. Private companies find prison labor attractive despite PIE regulations because state governments offer tax-breaks and other incentives to foster these relationships. CMT Blues, a garment manufacturer that operates in California prisons, gets a 10 percent state tax break for operating behind bars, and does not have to pay overtime, worker's compensation, vacation or sick leave to its employees. It is a win-win situation for both corporations, who get incentives from the states, and for states, who reap the wages that the private corporations pay to the inmates. Fewer tax dollars too are thereby spent on prisons. States are willing to subsidize corporate business because they often see it as a final option for encouraging manufacturing to stay in the United States. This is the most compelling argument in favor of private industry using prison labor-and it is a shame that such an argument can have any resonance in this country.
The taxpayers are also the free laborers in America. The AFL-CIO has stated its opposition to prison labor, both as a violation to human rights, and as a threat to workers in the real world. However, there is some difference in opinion between the AFL-CIO and organized labor, and the burgeoning movement of prisoner activists who are attempting to set up their own viable and recognized prisoner labor unions. These prisoner activists are not fundamentally opposed to prison labor. Although they contend that compulsory prison labor is akin to slave labor, most inmates involved in these new types of labor activist movements do not view the opportunity to work in a negative light. They simply wish for more dignity, and hope for solidarity with unions in the outside world-a compelling new interpretation of the familiar locution "Workers of the world unite!" In Texas, inmates involved in mandatory work programs organized to form the Texas Prison Labor Union in 1995. Similarly a Missouri Prisoners Labor Union has been formed, and subsequently was refused recognition by the Missouri Department of Corrections. The founder of that union, Jerome White-Bey, has been in solitary confinement since officials became aware of his organizing activities. The difficulty of organizing labor inside of prisons is precisely that prisoners have no rights. How should the labor movement proceed with this issue?
Advocating an outright ban on prison labor is a weak strategy for the labor movement, either with any hope of triumph, or even from a theoretical standpoint. Prison labor has always existed, and because of its potentially positive aspects, it makes more sense to impose regulations than to oppose it outright. That the option is now between corporations moving to the third world, or opening up shop behind bars points to the fact that the real problem lies in labor legislation. This is the first thing that needs to be reformed in America. Regulations regarding free labor and unions should be put on the agenda of any organization fighting for greater justice in prisons, as part of the larger picture of why the corporate-correctional relationship is flourishing. I believe that the AFL-CIO and organized labor should also take the perspective that one thing is contingent on the other. And remember, too, that prison labor is not to blame for the decline of jobs; it is organized labor's own weakness during the past few decades in allowing such a situation of economic imperatives to occur.
Since the wave of 1980's drug sentencing laws increased the incarcerated population by 80 percent, the accelerated velocity of prison growth has served to focus public attention on the very function of prisons in capitalist society. This is to say that the relationship between prisons and the political economy must be called into question. Not only should the profitability of operating private correctional facilities be examined (the Prison Industrial Complex), but the larger picture of how the global economy and the movement of labor to increasingly cheap markets makes prison labor profitable.
IN SOLIDARITY,
T.P.L.U.
DWIGHT RAWLINSON
National Secretary
C/O: Dwight Rawlinson
2121 So. 4th
Waco, Texas 76706
Copyright © 2007-2009 TPNS
