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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Jul 26 2011 - 00:23:33 EDT
21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor By Rania Khalek,
AlterNet
Posted on July 21, 2011, Printed on July 25, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor
131 COMMENTS<http://www.alternet.org/world/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor/?page=1#disqus_thread>
There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations
are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world
sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political,
economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class
citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking
out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders
them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no
available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.
They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we
cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century.
*Incarceration Nation*
It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other
nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US
currently holds 25 percent of the world's
prisoners<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html>
. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of
every 48 working-age men behind bars. That doesn’t include the tens of
thousands of detained undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners
awaiting sentencing, or juveniles caught up in the school-to-prison
pipeline. Perhaps it’s reassuring to some that the US still holds the number
one title in at least one arena, but needless to say the hyper-incarceration
plaguing America has had a damaging effect on society at large.
According to a study<http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/incarceration-2010-06.pdf>
by
the Center for Economic and Policy Research <http://www.cepr.net/> (CEPR),
US prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the rest of the
world, they are also substantially higher than our own longstanding history.
The study finds that incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from
about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, the inmate
population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population and
the rate climbed from about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753
in 2008.
The costs of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed,
with the impact of excessive incarceration falling predominantly on
African-American communities. Although black people make up just 13 percent
of the overall population, they account for 40
percent<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#cite_note-prisoners2009-36>
of
US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice
Statistics<http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/12/10/us-world-s-leading-jailer-new-numbers-show>
(BJS),
black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white
males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at
approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of
Hispanic females.
Michelle Alexander points out in her book *The New Jim
Crow<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595581030/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>
* that more black
men<http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/03/prison_system_holds_more_black_men_than_slavery_did.html>
are
in jail, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850. Higher rates
of black drug arrests do not reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In
fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at
roughly comparable rates.
*Incentivizing Incarceration*
Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it
gets worse. As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor
market, and it isn’t in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico. It’s right here
in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ
prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the
eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool,
companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily
controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health
insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They
don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate
workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems.
If they refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose
canteen privileges along with "good time" credit that reduces their
sentences. To top it off, the federal government subsidizes the use of
inmate labor by private companies through lucrative tax write-offs. Under
the Work Opportunity Tax
Credit<http://www.thenation.com/article/37828/bp-hires-prison-labor-clean-spill-while-coastal-residents-struggle>
(WOTC),
private-sector employers earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release
inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can
earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group
workers."
Study<http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/dp_25yearquagmire.pdf>
after study<http://www.justicepolicy.org/images/upload/99-03_REP_OneMillionNonviolentPrisoners_AC.pdf>
demonstrates
the wastefulness of America's prison-industrial complex, in both taxpayer
dollars and innocent lives, yet rolling back imprisonment rates is proving
to be more challenging than ever. Meanwhile, the use of private prisons and
now privately contracted inmate labor has created a system that does not
exactly incentivize leaner sentencing.
The disturbing implications of such a system mean that skyrocketing
imprisonment for the possession of miniscule amounts of marijuana and the t
he expansion of severe mandatory sentencing laws regardless of the
conviction, are policies that have to potential to increase corporate
profits. As are the“three strikes laws” that require courts to hand down
mandatory and extended sentences to people who have been convicted of
felonies on three or more separate occasions. People have literally
been sentenced
to life for minor crimes like
shoplifting<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23strikes-t.html>
.
*The Reinvention of Slavery*
The exploitation of prison labor is by no means a new phenomenon. Jaron
Browne, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER),
* *maps out how the exploitation of prison labor in America is rooted in
slavery <http://www.urbanhabitat.org/node/856>. The abolition of slavery
dealt a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss of free
labor after the Civil War. So in the late 19th century, an extensive prison
system was created in the South in order to maintain the racial and economic
relationship of slavery, a mechanism responsible for re-enslaving black
workers. Browne describes Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison to illustrate the
intentional transformation from slave to inmate:
“In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of
Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now
expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners
working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.”
The abolition of slavery quickly gave rise to the Black Codes and Convict
Leasing, which together worked wonders at perpetuating African American
servitude by exploiting a loophole in the 13th
Amendment<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution>
to
the US Constitution, which reads:
“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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The Black Codes were a set of laws that criminalized legal activity for
African Americans and provided a pretext for the arrest and mass
imprisonment of newly freed blacks, which caused the percentage of African
Americans in prison to surpass whites for the first
time<http://www.blackcommentator.com/142/142_slavery_2.html>
. Convict leasing involved leasing out prisoners to private companies that
paid the state a certain fee in return. Convicts worked for the companies
during the day outside the prison and returned to their cells at night. The
system provided revenue for the state and profits for plantation owners and
wasn’t abolished until the 1930s.
Unfortunately, convict leasing was quickly replaced with equally despicable
state-run chain gangs. Once again, stories of vicious abuse created enough
public anger to abolish chain gangs by the 1950s. Nevertheless, the systems
of prisoner exploitation never actually disappeared.
Today’s corporations can lease factories in prisons, as well as lease
prisoners out to their factories. In many cases, private corporations are
running prisons-for-profit, further incentivizing their stake in locking
people up. The government is profiting as well, by running prison factories
that operate as multibillion-dollar industries in every state, and
throughout the federal prison system, where prisoners are contracted out to
major corporations<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25376>
by
the state.
In the most extreme cases, we are even witnessing the reemergence of the
chain gang. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,”
Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa County inmates to enroll in chain
gangs<http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/Southwest/10/29/chain.gang.reut/> to
perform various community services or face lockdown with three other inmates
in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this year,
Arpaio started
a female-only chain
gang<http://www.kpho.com/story/14998982/arpaio-is-dui-chain-gang-message>
made
up of women convicted of driving under the influence. In a press release he
boasted that the inmates would be wearing pink T-shirts emblazoned with
messages about drinking and driving.
The modern-day version of convict leasing was recently spotted in Georgia,
where Governor Nathan Deal
proposed<http://clatl.com/atlanta/gov-deals-farm-labor-plan-recalls-convict-leasing/Content?oid=3402272>
sending
unemployed probationers to work in Georgia's fields as a solution to a
perceived labor shortage following the passage of the country’s most
draconian anti-immigrant law. But his plan
backfired<http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57551.html> when
some of the probationers began walking off their jobs because the fieldwork
was too strenuous.
There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which
should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to
manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street
Journal<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704396504576204553811636610.html?KEYWORDS=prison>
more
than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be
jailed. They found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants
since the start of 2010 in nine counties. It appears that any act that can
be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will
certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive
workforce.
*Who Profits?*
Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison
labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in
1979, Congress began a process of
deregulation<https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/workampr.pdf> to
restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former
status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met. Over the
last 30 years, at least 37
states<http://www.tombender.org/columns/PRISON%20BAIT.pdf> have
enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with
an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per
day<http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html>
.
Federal prisoners receive more generous
wages<http://www.urbanhabitat.org/node/857> that
range from $0.23 to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by
Unicor<http://www.unicor.gov/>,
a wholly owned government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its
principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which Unicor derives
approximately 53 percent <http://www.bop.gov/inmate_programs/unicor.jsp> of
its sales. Some 21,836
inmates<http://www.unicor.gov/information/publications/pdfs/corporate/CATMC1101_C.pdf>
work
in Unicor programs. Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison
labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies
or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500
company <http://www.alternet.org/wiretap/41481/> (besides General Motors),
and generates about $2.4
billion<http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=108&subid=900003&contentid=255055>
in
revenue annually. Noah Zatz of UCLA law
school<http://ssrn.com/abstract=1075842> estimates
that:
“Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working
full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of
them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state
universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product.
Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body
armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion
accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”
Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the
expansion of the prison labor market, including but not limited to IBM,
Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq,
Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel,
Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target
Stores, and many more. Between 1980 and 1994 alone,
profits<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289>
went
up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the prison labor force has
likely grown since then, it is safe to assume that the profits accrued from
the use of prison labor have reached even higher levels.
In an article<http://motherjones.com/politics/2008/07/what-do-prisoners-make-victorias-secret>
for
*Mother Jones*, Caroline Winter details a number of mega-corporations that
have profited off of inmates:
“In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina
inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney.
In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling
journalists they were ordered to replace 'Made in Honduras' labels on
garments with 'Made in the USA.'"
According to Winter, the defense industry is a large part of the equation as
well:
“Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers' uniforms, bedding, shoes,
helmets, and flak vests, inmates have 'produced missile cables (including
those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)' and 'wiring
harnesses for jets and tanks.' In 1997, according to Prison Legal News,
Boeing subcontractorMicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components,
paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.”
Oil companies have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following the
explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and
irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected
to hire<http://www.thenation.com/article/37828/bp-hires-prison-labor-clean-spill-while-coastal-residents-struggle?page=0,0>
Louisiana
prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration
rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American
men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods had been
destroyed by BP’s negligence, were outraged at BP’s use of free prison
labor.
In the *Nation* article that exposed BP’s hiring of inmates, Abe Louise
Young details how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners by changing the
inmates' clothing to give the illusion of civilian workers. But nine out of
10 residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana are white, while the cleanup workers
were almost exclusively black, so BP’s ruse fooled very few people.
Private companies have long understood that prison labor can be as
profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with the added
benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod
Industries<http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/99lab/Prison_Labor:_A_Facelift_for_Slavery>,
which in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and
instead moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners
undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers. The move was
fueled by the state, which gave a $250,000 "equipment subsidy" to Escod
along with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples
include<http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=captive_labor> Ohio's
Honda supplier, which pays its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work
for which the UAW has fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour;
Konica, which has hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50
cents an hour; and Oregon, where private companies can “lease” prisoners at
a bargain price of $3 a day.
Even politicians have been known to tap into prison labor for their own
personal use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate Jack
Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was
pro-death penalty. He won his campaign claiming he had no knowledge of the
scandal. Perhaps this is why Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a
bill<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2>
earlier
this year to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week.
After all, creating a national prison labor force has been a goal of his
since he went to Congress in 1995.
In an unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public
employees in favor of free prison labor. The *New York Times* recently
reported that states are enlisting prison labor to close budget
gaps<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/us/25inmates.html?_r=2> to
offset cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue. At a time of
record unemployment, inmates are being hired to paint vehicles, clean
courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the
recession by private contractors or government employees. In
Wisconsin<http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/07/06/261319/scott-walker-prison-labor/>,
prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers,
as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law.
*Why You Should Care*
Those who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool for
rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment. But this has only
been shown to be true in cases where prisoners are exposed to meaningful
employment, where they learn new skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and
often dangerous work they are being tasked with. While little if any
evidence exists to suggests that the current prison labor system decreases
recidivism or leads to better employment prospects outside of prison, there
are a number of solutions that have been proven to be useful.
According to a study by the Pew Charitable
Trusts<http://www.pewtrusts.org/news_room_detail.aspx?id=60964>,
having a history of incarceration itself impedes subsequent economic
success. Pew found<http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Economic_Mobility/Collateral%20Costs%20FINAL.pdf>
that
past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual
employment by nine weeks and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. The
study suggests that the best approach is for state and federal authorities
to invest in programs that reconnect inmates to the labor market, as well as
provide training and job placement services around the time of release. Most
importantly, Pew says that in the long term, America must move toward
alternative sentencing programs for low-level and nonviolent offenders, and
issuing penalties that are actually proportionate with real public safety
concerns.
The exploitation of any workforce is detrimental to all workers. Cheap and
free labor pushes down wages for everyone. Just as American workers cannot
compete with sweatshop labor, the same goes for prison labor. Many jobs that
come into prison are taken from free citizens. The American labor movement
must demand that prison labor be allowed the right to unionize, the right to
a fair and living wage, and the right to a safe and healthy work
environment. That is what prisoners are demanding, but they can only do so
much from inside a prison cell.
As unemployment on the outside increases, so too will crime and
incarceration rates, and our 21st-century version of corporate slavery will
continue to expand unless we do something about it.
*Rania Khalek is a progressive activist. Check out her blog Missing
Pieces<http://raniakhalek.com/> or
follow her on Twitter @Rania_ak <http://twitter.com/#!/Rania_ak>. You can
contact her at raniakhalek@gmail.com. *
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151732/
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