The discussion today in class on prison labor really intrigued me. I came home to research it a little more and found some astonishing statistics:
(This article is from 2008)
- In 2008 there were 80,000 inmates in the US employed in commercial activity, some earning as little as 21 cents an hour
- FPI (Federal Prison Industries) sales are $600 million annually and rising, with over $37 million in profits.
-During the last 20 years more than 30 states have passed laws permitting the use of convict labor by commercial enterprises
-Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do.
These statistics were very shocking to me. I had never really heard of Prison Labor before today so it is all so new and fascinating. I own a Honda and now knowing how my car was made greatly changes my opinion about the company. I was also surprised about the amount of profits. Especially since these numbers are from years ago, I'm sure the number is now significantly higher.
http://francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/stunning-statistics-on-prison-labour/
i personally feel that there is nothing wrong with prison labor. sorry if that sounds rude, but these people are in prison for a reason and should be doing things like this.
ReplyDeleteRebecca,
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting the statistics on prison labor. The numbers really are more shocking than most people even imagine.
Julie,
ReplyDeleteI totally understand your sentiment and opinion regarding prison labor. To think that if someone is a criminal and did a major disservice to someone or our society, that they should pay for it. And rather than have them simply sit in prison doing nothing, why not have them work?
However this logic misses several key points regarding the justice system and the prison industrial complex.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/US_incarceration_rate_timeline.gif
The first is the means by which people come to be incarcerated. Since the 1970s and the beginning of the War Against Drugs, the prison incarceration rate has skyrocketed, as you can see in the attached image. As we discussed in class, Americans are not more “criminal” or more likely to do drugs in the last 40 years. What has changed rather is the way that we are as a society defining crime. By aggressively criminalizing certain types of drug users the American prison population has become larger than any nation in the world. The vast majority of these prisoners are not hard criminals as we traditionally define them, they are often not violent violent, not committing the crimes that make us unsafe or do the most societal damage. Rather they are non-violent low-level drug offenders.
Julie continued...
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, because of racial profiling by law enforcement, racial bias in the courts (all of which the Alexander article makes clear) the vast majority of the people who make up this spike in the prison population have been African American or Latino, who have been convicted of non-violent drug related offenses. People of color are not more likely to commit crimes or do drugs, rather as the articles have shown us, police are more likely to pursue people of color and the legal system is more likely to incarcerate them for drug use. All of this results in a prison population that is primarily African American and Latino who are in prison for non-violent “crimes”.
Once in prison, these inmates are given very little access to the rehabilitation and counseling that they need. Rather they are literally forced into labor through the fear of having their sentence extended. And its exactly the type of labor that is so problematic. Prison labor is often not for the good of the country or our society. The labor is not always just cleaning highways or making liscence plates. Rather these inmates are paid very little to work for major American corporations who profit greatly off of their cheap and forced labor. Rather than employing from the general population, thus creating jobs and lowering our countries seemingly ever increasing unemployment rate, the companies exploit a captive labor population. Prisoners are forced to work for companies like IBM, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret etc for upwards of 72 hours a week or more for as little as a few cents an hour. And the private companies profit increases because they don’t have to pay their labor a living wage.
And As we mentioned in class the growth of the number of prisons in the United States is driven by for profit prison management companies. These companies are paid by the government based on how many prisoners they have. So as a result they have an incentive to keep the prison population high. So these companies work in conjunction with politicians (who they lobby and often pay) to write laws and sentencing to keep prison populations high. Private prison management compnaies can than profit in two ways, 1 – they make money by the number of people in their prison, and 2 – they can sell the labor of these prisoners to the highest corporate bidder. And what better way to keep the prison population high than to arrest and put in prison huge portions of the population that as a Americans have positioned time and time again at the bottom of our social ladder, people of color.
So……….
ReplyDeleteWhat is so troubling about prison labor is essentially this – the justice system that operates using a racist logic to incarcerate larger numbers of people of color, who are primarily arrested for non-violent offenses (the vast majority of these people are not murders or rapists). They are than forced into work not as a means of rehabilitation, but rather all for the financial gain of prison management companies and select major corporations.
The equation than becomes pretty clear.
Through the War on Drugs we have changed the legal structure to create a primarily Black and Latino prison population and than we force them into low paid labor for the benefit of a few select companies.
Can anyone else think of a system of labor where people of color were forced to work for little to no pay at the profit of few individuals? At this point the striking similarities to slavery should be pretty clear.
So, like I mentioned at the beginning of this long comment, the logic that says – prisoners who broke the law and should be forced to work - seems pretty sound on the surface. However it’s when we dig deeper and really understand the racial and class based logic that drives who is arrested for what crimes and than how they are exploited once arrested and incarcerated that makes prison labor becomes so problematic.
I would love to spend some more time talking about this in class next week. If anyone has any questions or comments please bring them up in class.