[Gozer]

The Prison-Industrial Complex: Slavery For The 21st Century

Spoiler!

This isn't surprising since America has been using black prison labour as a substitute for slavery since the Reconstruction Era. Black prisoners would be hired out to plantations for a pittance to work in the same fields that they or their ancestors did as slaves. This situation was actually favorable to bondage from the perspective of the plantation owners since the plantations no longer had to pay the high cost of owning a person, were no longer obligated in feeding or housing their workers and had a virtually unlimited source of cheap labour to be worked to death.

Nowadays over 37 US States use prison labour in both the private and public sectors for as little as 21 cents an hour. In 1994 Oregon voters even mandated that all prisoners are to work 40 hours a week. The prisoners have even less rights than un-unionized American employees with no health or unemployment insurance, vacation time, sick leave or overtime. If a prisoner complains about their conditions or refuses, they are deemed "uncooperative" and are stripped of their good behaviour rewards and are probably placed in solitary confinement for good measure. Realizing what a good racket this is, private companies and the federal government are firing thousands of their employees and replacing them with prison labour.

Example:
http://www.utwatch.org/archives/work...o2_prison.html


How pervasive is this 'enslavement' ?

Spoiler!

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: 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. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.

[Former] Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won't be any transportation costs; we're offering you competitive prison labor (here)."

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Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state's governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.

After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 - ending court supervision and decisions - caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering "rent-a-cell" services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.