Ezekiel Edwards
Ten Cent Toil (also known as Prison Labor)
J. Tony Serra, a well-known California attorney, has brought a suit in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of inmates against a federal prison camp in Santa Barbara County challenging its prison pay system which compensates inmates for their labor at between 5 cents and $1.65 an hour. Serra knows what its like to labor for so little: he just spent 10 months in the prison for tax evasion and made 19 cents an hour.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Serra described a "nationwide network of prison camps churning out products made by low-paid inmates for contractors and federal agencies that might ... otherwise buy the same goods from unionized private plants".
As I have written about before (see my two-part blog, The Proliferation of Prison Labor and The Proliferation of Prison Labor, Part 2, one of the many destructive results of the globally unmatched size of our prison population is that the prison industry, one of the fastest-growing industries in the nation over the past few decades, has become a huge business. An offshoot of this expansion has been a sizeable growth in prison labor, and the subsequent exploitation of it by our government and private companies. The federal government's prison industries program (FPI), also known as UNICOR, by 2003 operated 100 factories generating over $665 million in sales using 20,274 prisoners. The prisoners are paid far below minimum wage and often work in unsafe environments, since FPI is not bound by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
In addition to taking advantage of cheap labor, both government-run and private prisons also provide employment for thousands of people outside the prisons, from wardens to guards to construction workers to businessmen. Corrections Corporation of America, the world's largest private prison corporation, operates 59 facilities in 20 states, Puerto Rico, the United Kingdom and Australia, despite being plagued by mismanagement and scandals, including inadequate health care and mental, emotional, and physical abuse of inmates within its prison walls (some of which resulted in death).
American corporations have not ignored this investment "opportunity". Investment broker Smith Barney is part owner of a prison in Florida, American Express and General Electric have invested in private prison construction in Oklahoma and Tennessee, and many more companies have sought to cash in on our ever-abundant prison population through investment and the use of cheap labor.
As Grassroots Leadership has observed, "the existence of an industry based on incarceration for profit creates a commercial incentive in favor of government policies that keep more people behind bars for longer periods of time."
Any discussion about reducing our prison population, pulling out of the war on drugs, or otherwise reforming the criminal justice system, faces a huge obstacle: the prison industry. From politicians who rely on prisons for their senate seats to counties that rely on federal funds because of the inflated size of its unemployed "residents", from correction guards and their powerful unions to entire towns employed by prisons, from the police narcotics units to narcotics prosecutors, all have a keen financial interest in keeping the prison industry alive and kicking, if not constantly growing, even if at the expense of the liberty of fellow citizens.
It seems that, after money itself, prisons have become this country's primary domestic drug of choice, a drug which is destroying this nation from within and a habit we need desperately to kick.
Against the backdrop of this prison addiction, attorney Serra's lawsuit is unlikely to succeed, as it pits prisoners on one side against corporate America, state and federal government bureaucracies, and municipalities whose economies depend heavily on their prisons on the other side. But chances of success aside, Serra's complaint about prison wages highlights one of many pressing criminal justice and human rights concerns raised by our gargantuan prison system.
And for that, (hard) hats off to Mr. Serra for taking up this lopsided fight on behalf of prison labor.
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Posted at 7:00 AM, Mar 27, 2007 in
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